Kentucky Bourbon Trail- Day Three: Finishing Up the Trail

It’s been about a month since I traveled to Kentucky for my Bourbon Trail spring-break trip, but as the saying goes “Better late than never”.  Some of my friends and family would disagree with that saying, instead preferring perhaps “Katie, why are you always late”, or “Shocker- Katie’s late”, but I’ll go with the old adage. 

The third day of our Bourbon Trail consisted of:

1) Four Roses Distillery, Lawrenceburg, Ky

2) Woodford Reserve, Versailles, KY

3) Buffalo Trace, Frankfort, KY

4) Alltech Lexington Brewery and Distillery, Lexington, KY

1) The first stop of the day was Four Roses Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky.  This Spanish-style distillery was built in 1910.  The tour cost $5, which also allows visitors to tour the warehouse & bottling factory within 60 days, and of course there’s a tasting after the tour.  I didn’t tour the warehouse, though it was located very close to Jim Beam. 

This tour started with an about 15-film about the bourbon distilling process.  And though, yes we had learned a lot about this process from our previous visits at other, but we still got more information about Bourbon from this quick film- and I still wasn’t bored of it yet.  At Four Roses- which got its name from the owner who supposedly asked a women to marry him four times, and the fourth time if her answer was yes he wanted her to wear a rose to the grand ball that was coming up.  And thus the name and label was born (she probably said no I’m guess- right?)

After the film it was time to tour the factory, climbing up stairs to check out their beer stills and even dip our fingers into their mash for sampling. 

Can you spot JJ?

JJ tastes the mash- I was too short to reach in

And again we check out their heads & tails boxes (or high wine/ low wine as it was referred to at other distilleries)

After our tour we came to the best part- the tasting!  We were allowed to taste three bourbons, and before each one our goofy but great tour guide made a toast- and then we got to keep the glasses- I love those parting gifts.

2) Our second destination was Woodford Reserve Distillery, located in Versailles KY.  This distillery was very unique in it’s location, near dozens of beautiful sprawling horse farms.

And the distillery didn’t disappoint, it was beautiful and felt a bit more “classed-up” than the other distilleries we’d visited.  This is what I mean by saying that you can visit all of them and not get bored, they all had their own flavor. : )

The Woodford Reserve tours are on the hour starting at 10am through 3pm Monday-Saturday and 1-3pm Sundays. The tour costs $10.

For this tour you board a bus to take you not very far into their distilling building where you are told about the distilling process.

Something else different about Woodford is that every year they create a special batch of “bourbon”- though it’s not really bourbon because it varies from the original recipe.  We were their while they were brewing a special batch that involved chocolate- sounds like my kind of bourbon!  They’re lucky I didn’t walk away with one of these bags of cocoa.

The stills at Woodford Reserve Distillery

Freshly labeled barrels from the day we visited

Another very unique fact about Woodford was their lovely stone warehouse.  And the fact that while the other distilleries had dozens of storage warehouses, Woodford just has one.  Which makes it hard to believe that this is the official bourbon of the Kentucky Derby, but I guess they make it work.  And outside, running from the barreling room to the warehouse is a series of tracks that are used to move the barrels.

And no, I also never got sick of a) taking pictures of all the barrels in the warehouses or b) the heavenly smell inside the warehouses- the “angel share”.  They need to create a candle with that smell.  Actually maybe not- everyone who entered my house would think I’m an alcoholic, but I did love it!

And after the tour we were ushered into the tasting room where we were given two samples of bourbon and a delicious bourbon ball.

JJ shows how to sample the bourbon- first put your nose in it!

Cheers!

3) Our third stop of the day was not on the official bourbon trail,  the distillery of Buffalo Trace in Frankfort, KY.
                                               
Buffalo Trace has tours from 9am-4pm, with no charge. They do have a very popular ‘Hard Hat’ tour that goes much more in depth- but you need to reserve this tour in advance (much to the chagrin of many people who came in while we were waiting for our tour to start) and is only offered once a day. Buffalo Trace was the distillery JJ was really looking forward to visiting because it has some of his favorite bourbon.  This distillery is huge, there are dozens of buildings and it is a very sprawling site because there are so many bourbons made here.
                                              
 We didn’t get to visit many of them, the focus of our tour was a short film, a walk into the warehouse and visiting a bottling, labeling and corking room.  We were in that room for a long time, interacting with people working the line.

Some of the many bourbons created at Buffalo Trace

It was a very interesting place to visit- I would love to do the hard hat tour next time because there seemed to be so much to explore.  Something I found super interesting were the pipes that I saw running everywhere, some were for transporting the spring water from one building to another, and you know it- some was for moving the bourbon to be barreled!

And again, this was free tour but it was concluded with a tasting of 3 different bourbon, a bourbon ball and a tasting of non-alcoholic root beer. 

The clubhouse on the grounds of Buffalo Trace- our tour guide was very proud of the company she works for, stating they took awesome care of their employees, still hosting company picnics and parties right here on the grounds.

The house were owners of Buffalo Trace lived- located on the distillery grounds

4) Our last stop of the day led us into Lexington to visit the Alltech Lexington Brewery and Distillery. This is where my favorite beer- Kentucky Bourbon Barrel beer- is made.  While I hate the name of the distillery (way too factory/clinical sounding) it was a nice little tour. 

 They are currently building a bigger brewery so we were not able to visit that, but the tour started with a beer tasting. The tour cost is $8.50, in which you get 4 drink tokens that can used in brewery or distillery with a choice of 6 beers and 4 bourbons. JJ and I had it all planned out nicely at each distillery, splitting our samples so we could taste the all- and this was no exception. 

The beer tasting room The tours at Alltech are from 10-4pm (except on Sunday they start at noon), and this was probably the busiest tour that we encountered- we barely all fit into the beer tasting room. Next was the distillery section. This is a newer company so it is a lot smaller scale- and no warehouses are located in Lexington because it is a too much of a fire hazard in such a densely populated town. But we still got to hear the whole spiel- and this was the moment where JJ and I realized that we had hit our limit- we didn’t want to hear any more about the bourbon process- get us to the tasting!

Again, we had those tokens, so JJ and I got to taste almost all of their offerings.  And as an added bonus, they had a cream liquor that our tour guide had a special recipe for mixing with coffee and cream.  He demonstrated by making a regular size portion, and then asked if anyone was celebrating anything special.  No one was, but we got the special tasting because JJ was wearing an OSU hat and our tour guide was an alum- gotta love those Buckeyes! It made for a nice finale to our Bourbon week 

Well I hope you enjoyed the little summary of my vacation.  And really- I recommend this trip, educational, historical with tastings- what’s not to love?  Enjoy!