Kentucky Bourbon Trail
Date Visited: February 10-12, 2023
We made our first trip to the Kentucky Bourbon Trail for my (Michelle) birthday weekend, and it did not disappoint! If you have never been, and you love bourbon, we highly recommend making the trip.
Home | Kentucky Bourbon Trail
I planned this trip, and my mistake was relying solely on the link I just provided for the trail. There are some distilleries that aren't included in their list. We learned that the most popular distillery isn't anywhere on the trail list. Why? Distilleries have to be a part of the KDA - Kentucky Distillers Association - to be on the trail. In 2009, the owner of Buffalo Trace and one of the other popular distilleries not on the trail list Barton 1792 applied for the name change and copyright to add "on the Bourbon Trail" to their name (Buffalo Trace Distillery on the Bourbon Trail). The KDA said they owned the legal rights to "Bourbon Trail" and a legal fight ensued - you can read all the boring details at your leisure but because these weren't on the list, I didn't know anything about them, and we missed out. Everywhere we went people asked, "have you been to Buffalo Trace yet?" I really dropped the ball by not doing independent research of the best places to visit. Okay with that out of the way, let's talk about where we did go!
Our first tour was Four Roses Four Roses Bourbon | Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey
We did the
Distillery Legacy Tour - a little over an hour long and $22/person. Our guide, Grayson, a young guy, wouldn't be the best guide we had over the weekend. He was knowledgeable but not very exciting and didn't give good details. This being our first tour, we didn't know at the time he would be our least favorite guide, but it was still a good tour. The grounds were beautiful, I love the Spanish style architecture! Full disclosure - all of tours ended with tastings 🧉🧉🧉🧉
We did the Path to Flavor Tour - a little over an hour and $32/person. This would be our favorite tour as our tour guide, Cathy, was amazing! She was so knowledgeable and really funny; she made the whole experience extremely enjoyable! There was a lot of walking in the tour, we were cold and tired, but it was still our favorite of the weekend.
We did the From Distillate to Barrel Tour - an hour long and $15/person. Steve was our guide on this tour, he was very knowledgeable and knew all the answers, but he was either tired or just had a dry personality. Very nice and respectful just a little eh. Mark was so excited to be able to taste bourbon straight from the barrel and it was......STRONG stuff - but man alive it was good! We loved the Fusion #8 bourbon here and came home with a bottle ($65). When I made the reservations for the tour, I saw they had an onsite restaurant, and it would be lunch time at the end of the tour, so I also made reservations for lunch (highly, highly recommended making reservations) - this place is gorgeous and very busy. Oh, and the food - bring it all to me! Since I'm a little new to all this blogging stuff, the food pictures are of halfway through consumption 😋
Drinks were a Blackberry Old-Fashioned for Mark and the Queen of Hearts for me - both delicious!
Our entrees - Mark got the Smoked Brisket sandwich w/homemade chips and I got the Fried Chicken Sandwich w/homemade chips. We always try to get something different from each other and then share half with the other 😁
Prices are reasonable as well!
We did the Production Tour - an hour long and $15/person. Our guide was Jennifer and despite her being at this distillery for less than a year, she was great! She divulged a lot of perks for being an employee here so if you're in the market, go apply 😎. This was a really great tour; the facilities were so nice and mostly new.
We did the Magic of the Mashbill - 45 minutes and $18/person. This was a tasting and history lesson at the bar - no distillery tour here as I thought this would be a good way to end the day. When we left, Mark said he wished we would have started with this tour. There was so much information on how the bourbon is stored and why they pull certain barrels from specific floors of the rickhouse depending on the label. Herb, our guide, also taught us the proper way to nose and taste bourbon. It would have been very helpful to have had that knowledge from the beginning, so if you plan on doing this tour, do it first! Grabbed ourselves a bottle of Elijah Craig Small Batch Bourbon since that was the favorite for both of us and most of the room ($36 bottle).
Our day ended with some brick oven pizza at Bourbon Brick Oven in Bardstown which was pretty good - a bar atmosphere and this beautiful sunset!
We can't wait to go back and visit some different places. Let us know what your favorites are!
No comments:
Post a Comment