Breakfast Bourbon?

We learned quite a bit about bourbon over the last few days but the most interesting to me was the concept of breakfast bourbon. I thought it was a joke but was told very seriously that you can mix bourbon and orange juice to make a great morning pick me up. I will be trying it when we get home. On a couple of tours, we've learned about the laws of bourbon as well. They are:

- must be made in the USA

- must be aged at least two years in new, charred, oak barrels

- at least 51% of the grain used must be corn

- bourbon cannot be higher than 125 proof when put into barrels

- nothing can be added to the bourbon other than water

We've decided to take as many scenic routes and back roads as we can on this trip. Also, we haven't prebooked all our hotels to encourage wandering. Today, we started off in a small town called Frankfort which is also the capital of Kentucky. It was a beautiful place but it was also really hot today so our walking tour was pretty sweaty! We did find a great coffee shop and took a walk along the Kentucky River. 

After leaving Frankfort, we found our first distillery of the day, Wild Turkey. We were able to join a just finished tour in order to do a guided tasting. This seems to be the way that the bourbon people do tastings. It's a little more serious than most of the wine tastings we do. As usual, we tried the premium bottles because they are the ones we can't get at home. And, also as usual, I liked the most expensive one the most. Good taste? 

These are the Wild Turkey rides. Marilyn wasn't interested in getting on one so here they are by themselves.

Here's the tasting room at Wild Turkey. Fancy tasting rooms also seem to be common in the distilleries we visited. Didn't get to keep the glasses.

Next we visited Four Roses Distillery, mainly to get our Bourbon Trail passports stamped. If we get all the stamps we get Bourbon Trail t-shirts. This is an artsy shot of one of the distillery buildings.

We both decided that we didn't quite feel like lunch so we ate some mixed nuts and continued on to Woodford Distillery. They produce my second favourite bourbon so we had to go. And they were on the Bourbon Trail list! On the way there, we passed through some of the prettiest countryside we've seen yet. We were on a narrow winding road that took us past some incredible horse farms or ranches. There were no shoulders to the road, so it was very hard to stop for pictures but we managed a few. Most of the road looked like this.

Marilyn took a few shots out the window when I managed to pull over and there were no trucks coming! It would be great to be able to walk or ride a bike along these roads and stop wherever you wanted.

This is Woodford Reserve Distillery. Our tour there was the best one so far. 

I know not everyone is a bourbon drinker, but I really need to post some pictures from our tour of the distillery. It was very informative and interesting. 

This shows how the taste of bourbon is formed. Interestingly, the rye for this year's batches of bourbon came from Canada because US crops were sub par. 

These are the giant cypress wood tanks that hold the mash as it ferments. We were able to see a batch in action. There is a pleasant smell, heat and a lot of bubbles.

There was an empty tank where we could see the pipes that are used to heat the mash.

These are the giant copper stills where the alcohol is condensed from the mash.

The finished bourbon is placed into new, charred oak barrels which are placed in storage for 6 to 10 years. 

The storage buildings, called rick houses, are not temperature controlled. Apparently, the best bourbon is produced from barrels in the centre of the rick house. They use those barrels to produce the premium, single barrel products.

The bottling area is surprisingly small and not as automated as you would expect. There are still a lot of humans involved in the bourbon making process. 

At the end of the tour, we had our guided tasting in a really nice tasting room. There are only two types of bourbon produced here, the Distiller's Reserve and the Double Oaked. The double oaked is emptied from one barrel into a new one to absorb more flavour. It becomes somewhat sweeter with a more mellow flavour profile. (Stole that line.) We are bringing home a bottle of the double oaked because I don't think we get it in Canada. And if we did it would probably cost $30 more! With our tasting we had another of the famous bourbon balls which were made with Woodford bourbon of course.

For dinner tonight, we went into Lexington to a place called Billy's BBQ. It was featured on the show BBQ Crawl which is on Travel Channel. The host is called Diva Q and she is from Barrie so we thought we'd check it out. We had a couple of things that she tried that were somewhat different.

The deep fried pickles were interesting... Actually, we both liked them and would make them at home. They came with a horse radish sauce. You really have to try them to decide for yourself!

They had some interesting decorations too.

We shared a combo platter that had 4 types of meat and assorted sides. The most interesting side was called burgoo. It's a Kentucky thing. Sort of a stew with beef, chicken, cabbage, okra and other things we couldn't identify. Probably won't make it at home but it was one of those things you had to try! I have no idea how one person could eat a combo platter!!