Bourbon legend

I spent today in Frankfort, touring the Buffalo Trace bourbon distillery with 5 friends. This wasn't just any old distillery tour, however; my friend Sandy won a special behind-the-scenes tour and luncheon at an auction last fall and took us along for the ride.

Throughout the tour, I kept making mental notes of different items of interest to make sure I mentioned here on the blog, but somewhere along the way, my mental notes got splashed with bourbon and the ink ran. I'm probably getting this only half right at best, but I'll see what I can recall.

Our tour guide, Fred, did a wonderful job:



We learned, for example, that Buffalo Trace was one of only 4 distilleries to be allowed to continue production during Prohibition for [wink]medicinal[/wink] purposes. Another interesting bourbon fact: where a barrel rests in the warehouse has an awful lot to do with the final product, with shorter-term bourbons hanging out in the (hotter) upper levels and the finer stuff "aging gracefully" down low:



We got to watch bottles of Blanton's being filled and capped. Blanton's is a single-barrel bourbon (aged in one barrel rather than created from a blend from multiple barrels), and each bottle is topped with the most adorable little racehorse stopper. There are 8 different stoppers, each representing a different moment in the Kentucky Derby, from the horse entering the starting gate at the beginning to the jockey raising a hand in victory at the end. Think of these as Happy Meal toys or Pokemon cards for the more mature collector, the kind of collector who has $50 to drop on less than a liter of booze:



I found this tiny warehouses to be positively charming. It has room for only a single barrel (also note the "barrel crossing" sign):



This shiny surface provided an awesome opportunity for an artsy-fartsy group portrait:



And a more normal one:



I wish I had thought to get a group shot in front of this really cool truck, but by that point all I could think about was lunch:



After the tour, Fred led us up to the historical home that overlooks the distillery grounds where we were treated to a bourbon tasting led by an expert who tastes bourbon all day every day for a living (I'm sure my Fred is wondering how he might break into that line of work):



They had the tasting glasses set up on a sort of graph, with the y-axis representing age and the x-axis representing ingredients:



I'm still not a huge fan of bourbon, but it was interesting to get to experience first-hand the difference that age and ingredients make. After the tasting, we were treated to a delicious lunch of BBQ sandwiches, green beans, and the most amazing potato salad that any of us had ever eaten. Two of the women who work in the offices there joined us for lunch, and over a dessert of luscious cheesecake, they shared ghost stories from the area.

It was such fun to go off the reservation, so to speak, and spend time learning something totally new with good friends! Here are all my photos from the day: