A BOURBON GETAWAY
On the journey back to Bourbon country
Strap in while Susan Reigler plans the ultimate distillery tour
Prior to 2020, Kentucky’s distilleries welcomed more than two million visitors annually. Chances are very good that if you are a Bourbon devotee, you have been dreaming of a whiskey trip to the Bluegrass State once they are ready to open their doors again. Indeed, several have used their time closed to expand visitor facilities.
e best times to visit Kentucky are spring and fall, though you should avoid the week or so before the running of the Kentucky Derby on the rst Saturday in May (prices for hotels skyrocket). Unless you are planning to attend one of the numerous Bourbon festivals held in September, push your fall trip into October.
e number of Bourbon-related attractions is now so large that unless you can commit to a month, it is impossible to visit them all in the course of one vacation. So here is one suggested itinerary for easing back to Bourbon Country. It can be a three day/fournight trip (Louisville and Lawrenceburg), a 48-hour trip (Louisville only), or a 24-hour trip (Lawrenceburg only). Visit during the middle of the week, if you can. e crowds are considerably smaller than on the weekends, and most distilleries allow you to book your tour online ahead of time. Be sure to check opening hours for all places mentioned here.
NIGHT 1 ARRIVE IN LOUISVILLE ON A MONDAY AFTERNOON
Getting ere
A trio of interstate highways – I-64, I-65,
I-71 – converge in Louisville, making it easily accessible by car and an easy few hours’ drive from major cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Nashville. Travellers via plane will arrive at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport. I recommend basing in Louisville for three reasons. e rst is the Urban Bourbon Trail of more than 30 bars and restaurants with outstanding Bourbon lists and Bourbon-friendly menus. e second is the plethora of hotels catering to Bourboninterested guests. Finally, the concentration of distilleries here makes it easy to visit several brands, large and small, within a few blocks of each other along historic Whiskey Row, aka Main Street. Most of the legacy distilleries are within an hour’s drive of the city.
Where to Stay
ere is no shortage of Bourbon-themed hotels and bed-and-breakfasts in and near Louisville. But I recommend two that are very di erent in character from one another. One is the historic Brown Hotel on Broadway. Its wonderful bar is on the Urban Bourbon Trial and it boasts a four-star dining experience at the elegant oak-panelled English Grill decorated with oil paintings of race horses. It is perhaps the most romantic dining room in the city. It’s also home to the iconic Hot Brown, a cross between an open-faced sandwich and a single serving casserole made with turkey, bacon, and bubbling mornay sauce layered on top of toast.
e other is 21c Museum Hotel, on Whiskey Row. Combination contemporary art museum (art changes regularly in exhibit spaces, the restaurant, and even the guest rooms), this is a boutique hotel also on the Urban Bourbon Trail and also equipped with a ne-dining restaurant, Proof on
Main, serving New American cuisine with a Southern accent.
What to Do
Plan to arrive mid-afternoon Monday in order to spend a couple of hours at the Frazier Kentucky History Museum on Main Street. It has a oor devoted to Bourbon history and has been designated the o cial starting point of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. An especially humbling exhibit is a display featuring bottles of every brand of Bourbon made in the state and a tally board where you can record the number of them you have tasted. A Bourbon shop near the entrance features some rare vintage, as well as contemporary, bottles.
Have a Bourbon cocktail after the museum closes at the bar in Michter’s Fort Nelson Distillery next door. e list was created by cocktail expert David Wondrich.
Dinner? Again, an embarrassment of riches. e rst night you might want to hang out in your hotel’s restaurant. If you have gotten an Urban Bourbon Trail Passport from either establishment (ask for that rst thing, by the way) it will serve a good restaurant guide you can peruse during cocktail hour.
DAY 1 – TUESDAY WHISKEY ROW
Here’s where it’s going to be hard to choose. Distilleries along East and West Main
Streets include Angel’s Envy, Rabbit Hole,
Old Forester, the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, and Kentucky Peerless. (Michter’s Fort Nelson is closed on Tuesday.) Material
picked up at the Frazier Museum may help you choose, but you can probably comfortably fit in three. All will, of course, include tastings.
If you tour Old Forester in the morning, you’ll be in the 100 block of W. Main, which has many choices for lunch. The brand observed its 150th anniversary in 2020 and all under one roof you can see Louisville distilling history, the Bourbon-making process, and even a demonstration minicooperage. (Brown-forman, the brand’s parent company, is the only distillery in the world that owns its own barrel-making factories, one in Louisville and one in Huntsville, Alabama.)
After lunch go west back along Main to the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience. You can’t miss the giant Bourbon bottle “pouring” Bourbon into a correspondingly big glass at the entrance. Inside, there’s a small distillery, a warren of rooms recreating pre-prohibition Whiskey Row, and a speakeasy with a hidden entrance in the basement.
Wrap up the day at Kentucky Peerless Distillery, a family-owned and operated craft distillery that makes very small batch and single barrel Bourbon and rye, all by the uncommon sweet mash process. (It will be explained during the tour.)
There are plenty of eateries along Main Street in which to find dinner. For a nightcap, depending on whether you want a cocktail or your whiskey neat, go to either Hell or High Water, a speakeasy marked only by a white globe light over the door on Washington Street just behind Old Forester, or Doc’s Bourbon Room on Whiskey Row, which has a selection of hundreds of American whiskeys.
DAY 2 – WEDNESDAY HEAD EAST
Take I-64 east to Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, about an hour east from downtown Louisville. Whiskey has been distilled on the site on the banks on the Kentucky River with sprawling, beautifully landscaped grounds since the 1780s. Several different tours are offered but for something different from ones offered elsewhere, take the E.H. Taylor tour. It features “Bourbon Pompeii”, the remains of part of the 19thcentury distillery that were accidentally unearthed during renovations.
Go into downtown Frankfort for lunch at the Kentucky Coffee Tree Cafe, located next door to a splendid independent bookstore, Poor Richard’s.
After lunch, take US 60 out of Frankfort to Woodford Reserve Distillery near Versailles.
Compared to Buffalo Trace, it’s a youngster, having been founded by farmer-distiller
Elijah Pepper in 1812. Situated in a valley along the banks of Glenn’s Creek, its historic stone buildings are rather unique in Kentucky distillery architecture.
After Woodford Reserve, it’s worth a quick detour along Mccracken Pike to tiny Millville, the location of Castle & Key Distillery. You probably won’t have time for a tour, but you can stroll the enchanting grounds for what was once the E.H. Taylor Distillery, which he conceived in the 19th century as a tourist destination. (A man ahead of his time).
A highly recommended way to end your day is with dinner at the Holly Hill Inn, owned by James Beard-nominated chef Ouita Michel. It is a quintessentially Bluegrass venue for a relaxing meal. To get there from Woodford, cross US 60 to Old Frankfort
Pike and wind your way through horse farm country to Midway. After dinner, you are only five minutes from I-64 and can be back in Louisville in a little more than an hour.
DAY 3 – THURSDAY LAWRENCEBURG/ HARRODSBURG
Getting There
Louisville Kentucky’s largest city. Harrodsburg is Kentucky’s oldest. It was founded in 1774 and you can visit Old
Fort Harrod State Park within the town limits, which is a recreation of the original stockade. If you have chosen a 24-hour jaunt, fly into Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport (which Elizabeth II uses when she visits her Thoroughbred brood mares) or travel from Louisville east on I-64 and south on US Hwy. 127. Either way, I would plan to arrive by mid-morning.
Where to Stay
The Beaumont Inn. This red-brick antebellum mansion, fronted with Corinthian columns, is furnished with antiques, including the Steinway in the parlour dating from the time in the 19th century the building was used as a girls’ school.
The inn is owned and run by Dixon
Dedman and his parents Helen and Chuck, who are fourth and fifth-generation proprietors since the property became a hostelry in 1918. If you notice that proximity to the beginning of Prohibition, it’s not a coincidence. The Dedman Distillery, which produced Kentucky Owl, went out of business in 1916 and hotel ownership became the new enterprise. Dixon Dedman revived the brand with sourced whiskey in 2007 and he
regularly hosts Bourbon tastings at the Inn.
ree restaurants operate on the property: the main dining room in the main hotel mansion serving traditional Southern fare such as fried chicken and corn pudding (it was given a James Beard Foundation American Classic Award in 2015); the Old Owl Tavern, central Kentucky’s answer to a gastropub complete with a great Bourbon list; and the Owl’s Nest Pub, a more intimate space with ditto the Bourbon list.
What to Tour
e Wild Turkey Distillery is about a half hour from the Lexington airport and the perfect place to start your Bourbon day.
e master distillers are, of course, the legendary Jimmy Russell who started here in 1954 sweeping oors, and his son Eddie Russell, both members of the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame. e present distillery opened in 2011 doubling the capacity of the original one. e visitors’ center with tasting room is built to resemble a relic of the Kentucky landscape, a tobacco barn. It o ers spectacular views of the tree-covered Palisades of the Kentucky River which ows at the bottom of the cli on which the distillery is perched.
You’ll get a complete picture of the distilling process on the tour, since all aspects of production, from mashing to ageing, happen on site. If you are really lucky, you can get a glimpse of Eddie or Jimmy Russell, or both, in the glass-fronted quality control lab just o the fermentation room evaluating samples pulled from warehouse barrels.
Lunch
After spending the morning at Wild Turkey, head south into Harrodsburg and past Fort Harrod, to e Beaumont Inn (about a half hour drive) to check in and have lunch at the Old Owl Tavern. If you’ve never tasting authentic Kentucky country ham, order the sandwich made with it. ( e inn ages its own ham.) en strike out for Distillery Visit Number Two after your leisurely lunch.
Four Roses Distillery is a hop, skip, and jump from Wild Turkey but you needed lunch, right? So, drive back up US 127 for about 20 minutes to nd Four Roses. Not only is its Spanish Mission-style architecture unique to Kentucky distilleries, it’s unique to the state, period. Landscaping here takes advantage of the name. Rose bushes are planted everywhere. Inside the visitors’ centre, little vases each containing a quartet of fresh red roses are ubiquitous (the orist who landed this contract really must be supremely happy).
e distillery is also unique in having 10 distinct Bourbon recipes made from two di erent mash bills and ve di erent yeast strains. e history and signi cance of that will be explained on the tour. Master distiller Brent Elliott is often around in the distillery itself or in a warehouse if he isn’t attending a national or international event.
And yet another notable feature of Four Roses is that its warehouses and bottling facility are 50 miles away at Cox’s Creek. So, you may be treated to the sight of a gleaming tanker truck lled with new make whiskey pulling out and headed west.
Dinner and Bourbon Tasting
Treat yourself to the traditional Southern menu in the homey dining room at the Beaumont Inn. en repair to a private tasting with innkeeper Dixon Dedman.
He o ers both a Pro le Tasting to walk you through Bourbon styles, and an Ultrapremium Tasting where you will not only sample Kentucky Owl, but some “unicorns” such as George T. Stagg and Pappy Van Winkle. What a way to end the trip!