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The Kentucky Bourbon Festival

As I've been writing about all week, I went to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival this September. I've talked about the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries, but now it's time to talk about the festival itself.

In advance of the event, people who've gone in previous years made it out to sound a bit... trashy, but I didn't see that at all. I went to several events- a bourbon dinner, a huge country music concert, a guided tasting, and the grand gala event. All were fine, and most of them hugely fun.

The Kentucky Bourbon Festival takes place each year in Bardstown, not far from Louisville. Bardstown is ridiculously adorable, the typical "small town America" you see in the movies.This year there were about 40 events ranging from county craft fair type stuff to the grand ball. On the first night we went to a dinner and cooking-with-bourbon demo. As the only vegetarian in Kentucky, I just had the sides.

The next day, after the Jim Beam distillery tour, we went to Booker Noe's house where his wife still lives for a guided tasting of the Small Batch Bourbon collection and a barbecue. Fred Noe, who lives next door, led us through the tasting. Then we all gathered 'round to watch Fred braise... some piece of meat, I can't remember, with bourbon and light it on fire. As the only vegetarian in Kentucky, I just had the sides.

That night we went to the Barrels of Country music concert, a huge event under a tent. We first had a VIP dinner (I had sides) and a few drinks before heading over. Someone named Kellie Pickler was supposed to perform but was ill, so someone else named Blake Shelton played twice as long instead. After the concert, the group went back to the hotel and had a little sing-a-long with some guys and an acoustic guitar. I haven't had that much irony-free fun in a long time.

The following morning we had lunch at Maker's Mark (I had an actual sandwich!) then some free time before the Great Kentucky Bourbon Tasting & Gala. The gala is a strange event- first everyone enters a room where all the bourbon brands have booths set up giving out tasting samples and cocktails. You get to keep the glass from each station, so people make a point out of getting as many glasses from as many different stations as possible. By the end some people are just dumping out the cocktails to get the glasses (and I hate to see good drinks go to waste) but everyone is pretty well toasted before the grand tented ball room area opens.

In the ball room there is a buffet dinner (I had a roll), an open bar, and a band playing mostly 1950's cover songs. People are dressed mostly in tuxedos and long dresses, and they start getting down on the dancefloor after the buffet is over. By the end of the night, the event goes exactly the way you'd expect it to go with people in tuxedos and an open bar. People grabbed small flags out of the table centerpieces and started dancing with them, waving them around, and generally being hilarious. It was definitely the social highlight of the week.

If you're thinking about making a trip to visit the bourbon distilleries (everyone plans vacations about distillery visits, right?) then the week of the Kentucky Bourbon Festival seems to be the perfect time to go. I *so* want to come back next year. And if I do, I'll bring snacks.

More pictures from the gala event are on my Flickr page here , and some other event pics are here.

Maker's Mark Distillery Visit

As part of a visit to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, I visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries in September. Today I'll talk about visiting Maker's Mark.

The distillery has been around since 1805, but was purchased by Mr. Samuels, founder of Maker's Mark, in the early 1950's. This distillery will receive 70,000 visitors this year, and not just because they're fans of the product- this is one of the most beautiful distilleries I've ever seen. With its little bridges, common color theme, trees, and lawns it's more like a college campus. In fact when I was there in September the tours going through almost looked like summer tours for prospective students.

Maker's is different than other bourbons as it is 70% corn (all non-GMO) plus malted barley and "soft red winter wheat" instead of the rye in most other brands. Also pretty unique is that at this distillery they make only one bourbon- only one product at all.

Also at the distillery, they use an "anaerobic processor" to capture methane biogass from their waste, which allows them to reduce their natural gas use by 15-30 percent. They also sell off their spent grains for animal feed, but I'm not sure at what point that happens.

One thing I learned about Kentucky bourbon is that the products produced here are tied to the distiller who produced them (or popularized them), rather than the company. When people talk about a bourbon, they're talking about a distiller, and not usually the current one. When you talk about Jim Beam and the Small Batch Bourbon collection, people think about Booker Noe, who recently died, not so much Fred Noe who is the current voice of the company. When Fred Noe talks about the line, he talks about his father, not himself.
 
That was also the case at Maker's Mark- Master Distiller Kevin Smith said that his job is to keep Maker's Mark the same as Bill Samuels Sr. created it, and if they created a new product then it wouldn't be a brand extension, it would probably be something new. When they do special editions of Maker's with a different color of wax on the bottle, it's still the same whisky inside.

Anyway, I think it's interesting how different companies with a history are loyal to the company philosophy or the founder or the product itself.

Maker's rotates their barrels in the warehouse, and is the only bourbon distillery to still rotate all of the inventory. The barrels are first put at the top of the warehouse for three years, then spend another three at the bottom.

Beyond its flavor, Maker's is known for its branding- the iconic bottle with the red dripping wax unique to each bottle. The bottle design, wax seal, and the "maker's mark" itself were created by Mrs. Samuels, Bill Samuels' wife. The dripping wax is actually trademarked, which is why you don't see other brands doing it.

Those are all of my fun facts for now. More pictures from my Maker's Mark distillery visit are here.

On the bottling line

As part of a visit to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, I visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries in September. Today I'll talk about the bottling line at Jim Beam.

I've seen a lot of bottling lines in my day, and not one of them has been interesting until this one. At Jim Beam, the huge operation and tons of machines were really cool. And loud.

They bottle something like 300 bottles of Jim Beam per minute on this line, plus other products like Canadian Club and Mount Gay Rum that may be blended and bottled on site. We walked through several rooms of machines bottling regular Jim Beam, minis, and other products. There were machines for wax dipping, ones that build boxes around the bottles, ones that fill the bottles, and labeling machines at the end. Here are a couple of videos I took.

The first video is of the line where boxes are built around the bottles of Jim Beam.

And the second one is just some fast bottling in action.

Bonus videos of a rapidly fermenting vat of what will become Jim Beam is here, and a giant box-wrapping machine here.

A visit to the Jim Beam distillery

In September I visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries as part of the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. For all the distilleries I've been to in 10 different countries, I'd never seen a bourbon distillery.

The Claremont Jim Beam distillery is a huge facility, and one of two where the product is distilled. They receive tons of grain daily, and distill whiskey 24 hours a day, 6 days each week. The annual output is around 6 million cases of bourbon each year. (I believe they also distill the small batch bourbon collection here- Booker's, Baker's, Knob Creek, and Basil Hayden.) Beam uses 70 warehouses to store their 1.7-1.8 million barrels of bourbon that are aging.

Beam is made from corn, rye, and barley. Interestingly, we get GMO corn in the US bourbon, but they distill, age, and bottle non-GMO spirit separately for export to Europe where they have restrictions against GMO products. (I definitely want to learn more about this so if anyone has a non-hysterical GMO book/video they can recommend let me know.)

The bourbon is first column distilled in the "beer still" that's about six stories high. It is then distilled a second time in the "doubler" which they say looks like a pot still but is continuous. (We didn't see it.)

The barrel warehouses are not only enormous, they're very tall- nine stories, with each story holding three tiers of barrels. At the top of the warehouse where it's hot, the barrels gain proof over time  as more water evaporates out of the barrel (through the wood) than spirit. At the bottom of the warehouse, the whiskey loses proof as more alcohol evaporates than water. 

When selecting barrels to use for Beam, they take barrels from each level of the warehouse to make up the final blend. For the Booker's bottling, which is cask-strength and unfiltered, they only take barrels from one middle floor.

After aging, the barrels are emptied, diluted, and bottled. You can find more pictures on my Flickr page here. In tomorrow's post, I'll talk about the bottling facility- with videos!