Feb 17 - Bourbon Trail

What a beautiful day in Kentucky! Sunny & mid-60s.

Today we focused on visiting a just few of the distilleries which are part of Kentucky's Bourbon Trail.  We stopped at Woodford Reserve (very briefly as we missed the tour by a few minutes), Wild Turkey, Maker's Mark and Heaven Hill (and the Bourbon Heritage Center there).  We toured & tasted at Wild Turkey and Maker's Mark. Both were really nice tours (the grounds at Maker's Mark were the nicest of the 5 we visited) and both tours ended with a (very small) sampling of about five of their brands.

As you might expect, while the basic process is identical to all the distilleries, they each have a unique taste due to their individual recipes. Which is best? It's really a matter of preference. My favorites are from Buffalo Trace & Wild Turkey - I enjoyed the majority of what I sampled at these two locations best. I included some photos of the Wild Turkey &  Maker's Mark distilleries below.

Factoid: The population of the state of Kentucky is about 5 million but it is estimated that over 6 million barrels of whiskey are held in the aging warehouses of the state's distilleries!


Wild Turkey

Maker's Mark

 The Bourbon Heritage Center at Heaven Hill is very informative and well done.  While there's a lot of emphasis on their brands the exhibits do a really good job of tracing the history of Kentucky Bourbon from the late 1700s.

One series of panels that dealt with Prohibition and the Great Depression seemed to make the case that Prohibition had a big impact on the severity of the Depression. Sort of makes sense. Farmers were already hurting and then lost a significant market for their grains (corn, rye, wheat, and barley). In addition to the farmers, you had all the workers at distilleries and breweries who lost their jobs, along the barrel makers, transportation, and bars/restaurants, bartenders, barmaids, etc. Funny thing was that alcohol consumption decreased in the first year by about 30% but rebounded by the end of Prohibition.

Factoid: During Prohibition, four bourbon distilleries were allowed to remain open (Buffalo Trace was one) to provide spirits for medicinal purposes. The story is that during Prohibition there were about 6 million prescriptions written for "medicinal bourbon" - there were a lot of sick people during that era!

After visiting Heaven Hill, we traveled to Cave City, KY which is just outside Mammoth Cave National Park where we're going tomorrow. For those of you familiar with Breezewood, PA ("Town of Motels"), that's my impression of Cave City - a bunch of hotels and lots of eating places (mostly fast food).

After we take a cave tour tomorrow we're heading to Nashville, TN. That's all for now!