Dan's Tour of Kentucky Bourbon Trail, with pictures

[Dan2738]

Went on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail with my dad this week, it was awesome. Took about 4-5 hours to drive from St. Louis. We stayed at the Hampton Inns in Frankfort and Lebanon.

All in all, the trip was amazing and I learned a ton about Bourbon. Here are a ton of great photos from parts of the journey:

http://imgur.com/a/J2wZY

Here's the list of places we hit, then a short synopsis of each one.

Buffalo Trace - Went on the Hard hat tour as recommended. It was awesome. Very in depth and they let you taste the mash at each stage. You get right in amongst all the machinery and noise and heat. Definitely the most thorough tour. Also some cool old structures at this distillery. Incredible that this tour is free.

Woodford Reserve - Beautiful countryside with ridiculously cinema-like horse pastures on the way in. Worth going just for the views really. The tour itself was filled with old people and the tour was slow and we had to wear lame headsets. Very disney-fied and bus-trip-ish. Still cool and a much smaller operation than i would have guessed for such a well-known brand. Worth it, just very different from the first one.

Wild Turkey - Massive, massive place. The tour itself felt amateur but our guide was very knowledgable. The visitors center was crappy. I later learned that they are building a huge new bottling building, doubling their workforce at the distillery, and building a new visitor’s center. So if you’re considering going soon-wait until it is finished.

Limestone Branch - Small craft distiller out of Lebanon. We stopped by at 5:30 and were going to ask when the tours were the next day. The owner was there, working late on paperwork and gave us a personal tour of the small building. Right now he is only making sugarshine and some flavored, but bourbon is on the way. Incredibly nice guy and talked to us for an hour on his own time. Worth going there, this place is cool.

Independent Stave Company - Also in Lebanon, and a must see. While not on the Bourbon Trail, this place makes barrels for nearly all of the major players. You get to watch the barrels being charred, constructed, reviewed. We were the only ones there for the morning tour so we had a personal guide. This factory is incredible. Honestly this place was more interesting than some of the distilleries and should get more acclaim. Free tours, nice people, awesome process.

Maker’s Mark - Didn’t have time to do the full tour, but this place was also beautiful and the tours looked to be very nice. Very, very nice store.

Heaven Hill - Didn’t have time to do the tours. Noticed that they had a 3 hour long tour for those interested enough. wow. Had a nice store.

Jim Beam - Didn’t have time to do the full tour but you can do a self guided walk which is pretty effective. You still get 2 free samples of any product at the end, which is really nice. Their new American Still House is fantastic and huge. The place looks really nice.

[WAINWRIGHT]

Great pictures and thanks for sharing,I myself haven't been to the WR or JB.The visitors center at JB looks to be most impressive.I look forward myself to seeing the rest of the trail this summer.

[smokinjoe]

Sounds like y'all had a great time. Thanks for the pictures. Very nice. Kenktucky is beautiful this time of year, isn't it? Nothing like the smells of a rickhouse, and around a bourbon distillery in general, on a cool Fall day...

:toast:

[MyOldKyDram]

Indeed.

Looks and sounds like you all had a great time.

[Dan2738]

Wainwright - The JB visitor's center was certainly the nicest in terms of size and scope. That being said, the raw, authentic nature of the Buffalo Trace Hard Hat Tour was the most enjoyable part for myself. There is something true and real about that attitude of We don't need to clean up for be fancy for you, this is just how things are done. That is just the impression I got from that tour, which I prefer as opposed to the museum/disney-like stuff from Woodford Reserve and JB. That being said, they were all awesome and unique, and of course, worth seeing.

Smokinjoe - No kidding. Kentucky was gorgeous. I'll be honest in saying that I did not expect it to be such a beautiful part of the state. It really was magnificent with the fall colors. The horse pastures and hills just added to the atmosphere. There is truly nothing like rolling through these roads on a beautiful day, coming around a bend and seeing these looming, monstrous rickhouses rise out of the hills. It's incredible. Then, like you said, the smell within the rickhouses...it has stuck with me. Even my dad (who has even less whiskey experience than me) noted several times when we were back in our hotel rooms that he thought he could still smell the whiskey. It gets in your brain!

[GaryT]

Thanks for sharing the pics! I've only been in the spring and summer, and haven't seen the new JB center yet. You're not kidding about the great colors - or the smell of the rickhouses. I think that is always my favorite part of the tours - standing in the rickhouse on a warm summer day. I've thought I need to get a job when I retire sweeping the floors in the rickhouses just so I can spend more time there!

[Phil T]

Very nice post Dan. I'm jealous, as I have yet to do what you just did..but I will, hopefully in the near future

[macdeffe]

Nice posts Dan and I also enjoy your tasting notes thread :-)

I was just on the bourbon trail myself, doing all the tours. I really liked Woodford Reserve. We had a very good guide, and with the headset if was possible for everyone to hear what he said. And you could actually stand with your back to the guide and look on things and take photos while not missing anything he said

Steffen

[Tony]

Great pictures, thanks for taking the time to put them up and share.

Best regards, Tony

[RVTsteve]

Very cool, Dan. I won't be making it out there any time soon so it's great to see the pictures and get some first hand impressions.

Thanks for sharing!

[HighInTheMtns]

Great post and pics. Kentucky sure is an amazing place.

Something worth noting regarding the size of the Woodford distillery: only a portion of the whiskey in a bottle of WR comes from those pot stills. The rest is distilled at Brown-Forman's other distillery on a column still. They don't give tours there but the operation there is more similar to the other big distilleries.

[VAGentleman]

I was also doing a whiskey tour in Kentucky and Tennessee last week. We may have been on some of the same tours. My take:

Buffalo Trace – Did the hard hat tour. Very well done with tons of information. Tasted the fermenting mash and white Dog right from the doubler after the second distillation. While this tour was definitely good, quite a few other distilleries seem to be doing tours with almost the same amount of depth of information and access.

Four Roses – Beautiful Spanish architecture. Really nice tour with great access once again to all phases of the operation. Got to taste the fermenting mash, no white dog taste though.

Makers Mark – Once again loved the old buildings. Got to see everything and taste the fermenting mash. Beautiful grounds. Really good tour guide.

Willett – This was really cool to see a microdistillery in operation. Super access to everything. They poured us a pretty big glass of their 152 proof white dog. You could really taste the grain in this one as opposed to some of the others. Very cool pot still here. They mentioned that it will be a few years before they have their own juice available in their bottles but it is coming. They are also opening a bed and breakfast with an operating grist mill in 2014 on the site. Great to see how a smaller distillery is doing things. They had the 21 year old bourbon and 25 year old Rye on sale here.

Heavens Hill – Nice visitor center. Ok tour

Jim Beam – The new Stillhouse visitor center is really nice. The tour of the distillery (which they said they just started about a month earlier) was really good. They had a microdistillery to show us as well as the big house distillery. Showed every aspect of the process. Got some white dog during the tour as well. Great tour guide. They actually started up some of the bottling lines for us since it was a weekend and didn’t have bottling operations going. I thought it was very interesting that they keep some of every batch of bottled whiskey at the distillery. They do this to have some to go back and test in the case of any quality issues out in the public. The tastings back in the Stillhouse visitors center were probably the smallest portions of all of them

Wild Turkey – They said this was the second season the new distillery was in operation. Definitely the newest of the bunch. Again great access to all parts of the process during the tour. Got to taste the mash here as well. Much more modern looking than some of the older distilleries.

Woodford Reserver – Easily the prettiest of all the locations. The county side leading up to it was breathtaking. The old stone buildings were incredible. Very cool pot stills. Great tour. I like having the headsets so that you could hear everything the tour guide said even in the louder areas of the distillery. Really good idea some of the other tours should look at. They were also barreling a Rye while we were there. The guide said they are testing it out and could be selling it in a few years.

Jack Daniels – Great grounds, great tour. You can now do a tour with sampling at the end. Everything about this tour was huge. Showed all aspects of the process and was indeed very cool to see. Ate at Mary Bobo’s which has incredible food and atmosphere.

George Dickel – Much smaller than JD obviously , I was surprised there are only 35 employees at the distillery. They ship the juice up to Baltimore for bottling. Still a very enjoyable tour.

Prichards – Small operation but good to see.

A couple of interesting things to me is how pretty much every distillery did things almost exactly the same way. Sure some fermentation tanks were wood while some were stainless steel but for the most part they were all the same. Its just the recipe’s, yeast, barrels and aging that make the difference. The process is the process.

I also noticed that only Jack Daniels and Jim Beam had covers on their fermentation tanks. Jim Beam said they did it to reduce the cost of covering them when they needed to clean them out.

We based our Kentucky stay out of Louisville. Great town. A huge Halloween party on Saturday at the 4^th Street Live. Great bars including Seelbach, Jockey in Silk. Great food at Doc Crow’s and the Bluegrass Brewing Company. And found a great dive Rock n Roll bar in Third St Dive. Also whoever mentioned Rick’s White Line Diner for lunch when visiting Buffalo Trace was right on. Great Place!

In Tennessee we were based out of Nashville. What a great party town that is. Every bar had amazing live music.