Bourbon Trail 5-7

We took another weekend off to finish up the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and bring you our pictures and other findings.  After our previous efforts we were better versed in what to expect and since we were focused purely on bourbon (and not the Kentucky Derby) we had time to hit five distilleries instead of four and to spend a lot more time at each.  Between that and an itchier camera-finger, we came back with enough pictures to put on Flickr.  That set also includes the pictures from our first Bourbon Trail venture.

We met up again with our friends in Cincinnati and headed out bright and early on a Saturday morning to arrive at Jim Beam for our first tour.

 Their visitor's center is bigger than one whole distilling operation we later saw.

Jim Beam is the largest bourbon producer and they have a very large, very industrial operation to back it and proved not to be without personality.  We had reservations for a tour (you need a bus to get around the plant and it has a finite number of seats) and our perky but professional tour guide got things started right on time.  As someone in graduate school in an education-related field, I noted that the tour here followed a number of education best practices, including stating learning objectives and the motivations for them at the beginning, clearly linking each part of the tour to objectives and the intended take-aways, repetition of key facts throughout the narrative, quizzes to check comprehension and retention as well as to incite engagement with the material (testing in and of itself can focus the student on things they don't know when the test exposes that weakness), honestly encouraging questions and addressing them fully and respectfully, and instructor excitement and engagement with the material.  And yes, I thought it was dorky that I noted all that without trying to.

 Ana smells their un-aged distillate (moonshine)

 A few million gallons of fermenting mash.

 Freaking enormous still (six stories tall I believe)

 They tapped a single barrel bourbon in front of us, but we only got to smell that glass.

 They keep two bottles from each batch they bottle for a couple of years for quality control purposes, and according to our tour guide the employees get it when the time is up.

 Fortunately we're good enough friends that we can share samples, and thus sample almost everything they had to offer.  Our verdict: the Knob Creek Reserve and the Knob Creek Rye were both quite good.  The ladies liked the flavored ones (black cherry, honey, and cinnamon) but they smelled like cough syrup to me and I was there for bourbon, not candy, so I passed.

After finishing the Jim Beam tour and tasting, we felt we needed to build a base for further sampling and retired to a local BBQ place called Down Home Bar-B-Q  that the internet said was good.

 The internet was right!  They started us off with fried cornbread pancakes...

 ...and followed up with very, very tender and flavorful BBQ.  Both the ribs and the pulled pork I tried were more tender than even good BBQ tends to be, and unlike a lot of these types of places, everyone agreed that the sides were of high quality.  I ate a ton.

After lunch we went to Heaven Hill but they didn't have a tour for a while so we went literally a mile down the road to Willet Distillery instead, the smallest operation we visited that weekend (part of the Craft Trail rather than the bigger Bourbon Trail).

As mentioned, their whole operation is about the size of Jim Beam's visitor's center.

 They were obviously putting a lot of money into the place - the name and still had been fully reactivated only in the last year or so, and it is obvious they have big plans.

 Their single sizeable but not overwhelming still.

 Fermentation vats

 Their water source is a natural lake right next to the distillery that comes from a natural limestone spring.  The color seems a little weird but they offered water they said came from it and it tasted just fine.

Willet offers a less polished but perhaps more personal tour, and they don't seem to be shy about telling you things that have been going right or wrong for them as they shift back into gear and add more facilities.  Their signature bourbon is really very good indeed, with an interesting but not overwhelming woody bitterness in the finish.  I wasn't 100% sure I loved it, but it was very unusual and I surely didn't not like it - bourbon people would do well to taste it for themselves given the chance.

After finishing the tour and tasting at Willet, we went to Heaven Hill, the most commercial of the operations we saw.  Smaller than Jim Beam in bourbon production, I believe their overall output is much higher since they make basically every kind of hard liquor under the sun.  Their tour doesn't actually go into a distillery (they don't have one on the tour site) so they basically show a video and take you through a rickhouse before going to the tasting.  The tour was pleasant enough and certainly not bad but of the full tours we went on this was probably the most disposable to my thinking.

 Rickhouses are pretty cool from the standpoint of structural engineering.  They are often six or seven stories high, and given their contents are densely packed barrels, are basically holding a giant cube of bourbon.  They are built almost entirely out of wood because metal can spark if you hit it and bourbon can explode.  Heaven Hill lost a still and some other structures (and 90,000 barrels of bourbon) a few years back to a fire.  The news reports of the time say the flames were 35 stories high and the firefighters couldn't even get close to it.  Apparently if you unload one side of a rickhouse while the other side still has bourbon on it, they tend to tip over.

 Heaven Hill has more than a few of them though, and this isn't their only site.

 They have a fun tasting bar shaped like a barrel.  Ana got the low seat.

 The tour guide gave a fun little talk about the various bourbons to be tasted.  We didn't get to try anything unusual (I've previously purchased everything we tried) but everything we did try was good bourbon.  The Evan Williams single barrel can either be an astonishing value or I'd-rather-not-drink-it depending on the barrel and the one at this tasting was in the middle, solid but not outstanding.

After Heaven Hill, we headed to our hotel (saved having to drive two and a half hours back that night and forward the next morning) and then headed out to dinner at a fairly fancy contemporary restaurant named Circa.  The men in the party apparently knew what to pick because our appetizers and entrees were both very good (Caprese salad, marmalade salmon, coq au vin).  The ladies both felt their different apps were OK and the verdict on their entrees was that one was pretty good but the other one just didn't work (duck breast stuffed with vegetables).  I tested the duck breast and agree - the flavors just didn't work together.  The atmosphere was casual but quiet and dignified and the service was comfortably professional. Overall I think the place is very close to being outstanding; some elements of the menu need to be improved or replaced to eliminate the weak choices we encountered.  We had a good time regardless and their bread pudding dessert was so good and so large that we all got a great dessert out of a single serving.

The next morning we headed down to Maker's Mark, which is far and away the most scenic of all the distilleries we saw, with the most personality in their structures.  They are way out in the countryside, and the whole place feels like it.

 Ana petted their cats, obviously tame and fed, hanging around the house where the tour starts.

 They have a lot of antique buildings, paths, walls, etc and the whole place is very green.

 Field behind the distillery

 Note the porch and fancy trim on their still building

 The Maker's Mark tour tends to focus on what makes Maker's different than other bourbons, which is nice because we've heard how bourbon is made several times at this point.

 Their tasting room is quite stylish.  Maker's Mark only makes one bourbon, so the tasting is their white dog (unaged distillate), their regular bourbon, and a new variation on their main product that uses additional wood in the aging process.  It has been a few years since I last tasted their product, and it was better than I remembered, really very respectable bourbon.  I suspect this change is due to having tried a lot more bourbons since then. Previously I would have been comparing it to the flavors I expected from scotch, not a fair comparison.

From Maker's we headed first to lunch and then to Buffalo Trace, a very large operation that produced a large number of my favorite types of bourbon (I didn't even know they made half of these labels).  According to our guide, they basically only use three basic recipes for their bourbons (these can be very different bourbons) and all remaining differences for the 17 kinds of bourbon they produce are due to differences in aging.

 They have a bronze buffalo and their grounds tend to be pretty well landscaped, lots of different gardens everywhere you go.

Active warehouse on the right side of this picture has been in use since 1881 or something like that, Buffalo Trace got a waiver during Prohibition to produce 'medicinal whiskey' for those who could get a prescription, which they say makes them the oldest continuously active distillery in the US.

 All Blanton's bourbon is aged in a single rickhouse, the red one in the middle there.  All Buffalo Trace rickhouses have different colors, shapes, quantities of windows, etc, to allow for a wide varieties of aging climates and a consequent variety of boubon tastes.  The difference is quite surprisingly profound

 Buffalo Trace also claims to be the most decorated bourbon distiller and I am not aware of any who dispute them.

 Quality control samples in the Blanton's & Eagle Rare bottling line.

 Wouldn't want to forget where you put which whiskey!

 They were selling 1.75L containers for not a whole lot more than a standard 0.75L container would cost (benefits of cutting out the middleman I suppose) so I bought one for each hand.  I don't believe the picture does justice to how big these are - I am not going to have to buy bourbon for quite a while I think. 

Ana got a 'bourbon cream' which is basically Bailey's but with premium bourbon for the alcohol content and with higher overall quality - the tasting demonstrated it with root beer and I'm pretty sure it is just the thing to add to root beer floats. When my enormous new bottles eventually run dry, I will need to find some of the other things they make and try them; they seem to have a preponderance of superlative whiskeys.  Buffalo Trace was the final distillery we visited (technically Maker's was the last one we needed to complete the official Bourbon Trail) and I would definitely recommend it - a very pleasant venue, tour, and tasting.  Just the thing to fortify us for returning to work the following day.

As previously mentioned, more pictures can be found on Flickr.

The Bourbon Trail 1-4

Following our Kentucky Derby adventure we toured four of the seven distilleries on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail: Town Branch, Four Roses, Wild Turkey, and Woodford Reserve.  The Bourbon Trail is really just a marketing thing that some bourbon producers cooked up rather than a real 'trail' since you can visit them in any order, but there are a large number in a relatively compact area.  They also have a booklet that you can get stamps in - collect all the stamps and get a free T-shirt.  Ana was all over that stuff as my experience suggests she'll go out of her way to get something stamped even when no gratis clothing is involved.

 Fortunately, one member of our party is more of a beer guy than a lover of bourbon and he graciously DD'd the rest of us.  We drove down from Cincinnati to that area, first visiting Town Branch distillery, which I'd never heard of because most of their distribution is local. 

Town Branch is an old name that has recently been re-activated after a long period of disuse, and they have a very shiny new distillery and visitor's center to go with it.  Apparently a business owner originally bought and re-activated it to make beer and hooch for the employees of his other, larger company, but then realized the product was good enough to commercialize and they've met with some success there as well.  All the pictures we have were from Town Branch.

This open fermentation vat's contents actually go into the final product.  They'd prefer you didn't touch it.

At the end of all of these kind of tours the samples come out, and Town Branch's bourbon seemed good but nothing particularly distinctive. They also make a barley-based whiskey (i.e. it would be Scotch if it came from Scotland) but either they were watering the samples of this product or perhaps the sample hadn't been aged fully yet, because it was clearly very wet indeed, well past the point of being smooth into the realm of dilution.  Possibly they'd had ice cubes that had melted into them before we arrived? Finally, they served Bluegrass Sundown, a coffee/bourbon concentrate that Ana would highly recommend for your liquored coffee needs, and she doesn't even like coffee.

After Town Branch we went to Four Roses, which was the best of the bunch all day in both quality and quantity.  Four Roses was bought by a major Japanese company a few decades back and they've shipped almost all of their products exclusively to Japan since that time, only selling in the US again in the last few years.  As recent residents of Japan, we'd encountered their products before, since Four Roses is what you are most likely to find behind a Japanese bar as far as bourbon is concerned. We also found it in a Japanese Burger King. We'd mostly tried their lower end so far.  At the distillery they issues us glasses and bade us sample I believe four different grades, from their standard up through the current single-barrel they had tapped, and I was very impressed with most of them for complexity and pleasing flavor.  I prefer mellower bourbons and Four Roses delivered tasty and complex flavors at all price points; I don't think it was the previous samples talking.

After Four Roses we needed some lunch, so we stopped at a genuine Kentucky fried chicken restaurant (not a KFC) and bought way, way more fried chicken and biscuits and so forth than we needed.  It was cheap, filling, hot (not a warm day) and while not part of the most rarefied realms of epicurean fantasy, pretty good.

After lunch we hit Wild Turkey, which has a big tour but a really small visitor's center (they're building a new one but it isn't done yet), by far the largest distillery we visited.  Their warehouses for aging whiskey are very large and very numerous, and they offered us something like seven products to try but each person could only get two samples - easily fixed by a group of four that doesn't mind sharing.  Their top-end products are good but I'd probably add a little water to them to calm things down a bit. They also made a rye whiskey in the Irish style which is apparently hard to come by and was a pleasant and interesting change from the range of relatively similar and moderately generic bourbons presented.  Not bad at all, but not exemplars of the styles I favor.

Our final distillery of the day was Woodford Reserve, which certainly has the most scenic surroundings (drove past a lot of horse country and horse barns that certainly cost several times as much as our house) and the most scenic distillery proper.  The flip side is they pretty much only make one bourbon so there isn't much new to sample if you've tried it before, but by this point in the day we weren't too disappointed to encounter a dearth of options.  My opinion of their product is right around Town Branch - it is right-down-the-center quality bourbon and not very distinctive.

Based on how the highways are oriented down there, we had a two-plus hour drive back to Cincinnati to pick up our car and return to Lafayette, so by the time we left our DD behind there was no problem getting home.

Of the distilleries visited, I'd recommend the products coming out of Four Roses the most, probably followed by Wild Turkey (at least their high-end stuff).  The other two aren't bad but if you're already paying for quality bourbon you might as well get the best and most interesting, in my book.  We plan to hit the other three on the official Bourbon Trail and maybe the seven on the Craft Bourbon Trail too later this summer, so I may have more input on this topic in the future.

Kentucky Derby and the Bourbon Trail

We finished our first academic year here and did something non-work-related to celebrate before starting up the summer term.  Living in Lafayette we're about two and a half hours to Cincinnati, where some of our friends from college live, and from there it is only a few hours more to areas of Kentucky containing the Kentucky Derby and the Bourbon Trail.  I suspect most readers can see how this could be the germ of an excellent weekend trip.

We drove to Cincinnati Friday night, hung out, and drove together to Louisville for the Derby on Saturday.  It was looking pretty wet outside and as we were only going for infield tickets (which are much cheaper but roofless) we stopped at a pretty decent barbeque restaurant a few miles from the Derby called Smoketown and ate a big lunch first.  Afterwards as it was still raining we went to downtown Louisville looking for a bourbon bar but being Derby day everything was closed so we headed out to stand in the mud and look at horses.

The parking situation was a little confused but we eventually figured it out and we probably only had to walk about fifteen minutes from where we parked, which is pretty good when you park for free and many tens of thousands of other people are going to the same place you are.  And let me tell you about those tens of thousands of other people: They. Were. Drunk.  While the stands and boxes at the Derby have a dress code (jackets and ties for men, seriously not optional) the infield is basically an enormous fraternity party except the drinks are using good bourbon instead of bad vodka.  As many of these people did dress up a little prior to joining this party, it was a lot like a better-dressed and more inebriated county fair.

It seems that most people with infield tickets are definitely not there for the horses, because 1) you can't hear the loudspeakers saying what is going on, 2) small screens showing the action are few and far between, and most importantly 3) the few people who were there for the racing brought tarps and fastened them to the fencing along the entire length of the infield to create tents, meaning that they blocked the view around the entire infield area except for a few sections of fence kept clear for emergency vehicle access.  If you want to actually see horse racing at the Kentucky Derby in person, I recommend you shell out the big bucks and wear your suit jacket to sit in the stands (or the boxes if you won the lottery).  Everyone else was there for the party and with the mint juleps being cheap, powerful, and good plenty of people were out of it enough to be calling it a day well before the 6:30 main event started.

My understanding is that the box seats over there start at over $1,000 go for up to $32,000 per person.  The stands are only hundreds of dollars each.  It was $66 for the two of us to get into the mud party.

Not above those mint juleps ourselves, either.

We worked our way towards the front of the people watching through the fence near an emergency access area, so we did in fact see about four seconds of the Derby, in person and for ourselves.  I believe we were in agreement that in the future we'd be OK to watch from a bar instead of standing in a field, but for a one-time experience it was fine and we were much drier and better prepared than most people who hadn't checked the weather.

 This is the best view of the racetrack we got.  I'm not sure why they didn't put some stands in the infield or at least stop people with tarps from blocking the view, but it was all standing all the time.

 This is a screen showing the action that is visible from the infield, and it is not very large - this is on maximum zoom with the camera.

 This screen also fuzzed into unintelligibility shortly before the Derby actually started, but they did fix it before the race began.

 Horses go by for a few seconds - yay!

Once the Derby was in the books we headed back to Cincinnati and ate terrific Indian food for dinner.  The next day was looking just as wet or wetter, but the rain matters a lot less when you're inside touring distilleries.  The next entry will be on the Bourbon Trail, of which we did a portion the following day.

Dispatches from Last Fall

This piece of local color brought to you back from the dim and musty archives of at least four months ago.  The laptop that had the pictures on it was on the fritz and then out for service and, well, here they are.

Anyway, we have two mature maples that cover at least half of our lot. They are fantastic during the summer because they shade the house pretty much entirely during summer afternoons, cutting the cooling bill nicely. They also had great color last fall.

The downside is that clearing out those leaves after they fell took us ten man-hours to get the roughly 85% we actually cleared out, me with the rake and Ana with the leaf blower.  The rest wasn't worth going after, being under the ivy, etc.

This pile was better than waist-high on me (Lee) in the middle and probably thirty feet long.  On the plus side, we didn't have to bag it or anything - the street department just comes along on your regular trash day and the pile vanishes, no need to call or extra charges or anything.  We felt both the pictures of the leaves on the trees and off them were worth showing. The trees are great about 364 days of the year, when I am not moving their several million fallen leaves.

Cat Sweater

As part of Ana's ongoing program of transitioning into being a crazy cat lady*, we present the following pictures.

 One suspiciously cat-sized sweater.

  

One unsuspecting cat.

 

 Can't you tell she just loves it?

 Apparently she finds it so soothing that she feels the need to lie down on the ground and not get up until the sweater is removed.**

*The sweater was actually a test knit and was a mini-scale version of one intended for people - neither the pattern nor the product was originally intended for cats.  Didn't stop us.

**No cats were harmed in the preceding process. Physically, at least. No guarantees on possible psychological ramifications.