On a visit this past February as part of the Bourbon Classic event in Louisville, I had another tour that was completely different and I learned all new stuff. I never mind going to distilleries multiple times as there is always something new to pick up.
Below are just some miscellaneous facts I picked up, rather than the whole picture.
As it has been operating since 1787, Buffalo Trace is the oldest continually operating distillery in the US. They have 100 buildings on a property that stretches 130 acres, with 320,000 barrels aging on-site.
Buffalo Trace makes 17 bourbons at the distillery (plus a few other products), distilling five days a week. Despite this, they use just one strain of yeast for all their products.
In the fermentation process, 2/3 of the mash is 'sweet mash' that has just been fermented, while the remaining third is 'sour mash' that comes as the waste solids of the first distillation.
They use four water sources: spring water, reservoir water, river water, and municipal water. The first waters are filtered through sand and used in fermentation. The river water is also used in cooling after distillation (I'm guessing unfiltered). The municipal water is reverse-osmosis filtered to bring spirits down to bottle strength, as is the norm.
I've been to the Beam distillery three times now. I wrote about my first visit in 2008 here, with an additional post about the bottling line. Then I stopped by for another brief visit in 2012 where I got a preview of some of the outdoor displays as part of the new visitors' center.
In early 2013, I revisited the Jim Beam distillery during my visit for the Bourbon Classic, held in Louisville. In 2014 the Bourbon Classic will be held on January 31 and February 1.
This time, the new visitors' center, called the Jim Beam American Stillhouse, was fully operational and we went on a really cool tour. I'm not sure if this is the same tour offered to everyone or not, but it quite likely was.
As I learned on previous visits, the actual distillery is quite industrial and not super pretty, so they built a new microdistillery where they do small batch versions of bourbon. It makes 1 barrel batches at a time.
They took us through a room where we'd put a scoop of grains into the cooker and saw the small column still, so we were able to see the whole production process though not the actual equipment used to produce Beam for the most part.
But anyway, here are some things I learned:
The mash is 6% ABV after fermentation
They use 41% sour mash. Other distilleries I visited used roughly 33%. I do not know what the difference that makes in the flavor of the final bourbon.
The cooked mash goes through over a mile of pipes before fermentation to chill it without using tons of electricity.
The fermentation process takes 3 days.
Their fermenters are closed-top rather than open
The big column still has 23 plates. It is 5 feet wide and 5 storeys tall.
They distill to 125 proof in the column still, then to 135 proof in the doubler.
They fill 300,000 barrels every year and have 1.8 million barrels in storage.
They give their barrels a #4 char
The whiskey goes into barrels at 125 proof, which is the maximum
There are 72 warehouses where they age whiskey, 28 of them are on-site at the distillery
While this post focuses on production, between the microdistillery, outdoor displays, visitors' center, and new restaurant on site, the Jim Beam distillery has gone from an industrial distillery to a great tourist attraction.
In early 2013 on a trip to the Bourbon Classic event in Louisville I had a chance to visit a second time. These are some notes from that visit.
Four Roses fills 280 barrels per day, a drop in the bucket compared with other bourbon brands.
Their corn currently comes from Indiana and rye from Denmark. The grains are smashed up with a hammer mill before cooking. In the cooking process first they add corn and cook it, then cool it and add rye, then cool it more and add malted barley.
They have 23 fermentation vats and ferment for 75-90 hours depending on the season. About 25 to 30 percent of the fermenting mash is "backset" aka "sour mash" – the solids that come out of the still of the previous batch.
The water they use comes from the local river, and they have to stop production if the river water gets too low or too hot in the summer.
They distill it to 132 proof in the column still, then up to 137-140 proof in the doubler (which is like a continuous pot still – see this post for more info). Unlike other bourbon distilleries I've seen, the doubler at Four Roses looks like a traditional pot still with a lyne arm rather than just an oval container with no swan's neck at all.
The whiskey is then diluted to 120 proof before aging in the barrel. 125 proof is the legal limit for this.
So hopefully with this post, plus the previous ones on blending and brand history, a fuller picture of Four Roses comes to be.
In early 2013 I visited the Town Branch Distillery in Lexington, Kentucky. At the time it was the newest addition to the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.
My visit was part of the Bourbon Classic, a great event that is taking place in 2014 on Jan 31 and Feb 1.
The distillery goes by a lot of names, so let me try to clarify as best as I understand it. The Town Branch Distillery is owned by the Lexington Brewing & Distilling Company, which is a division of Alltech.
Alltech is a huge international company dealing with yeast and I believe that yeast is primarily used in animal feed supplements. The company was created by Dr. Pearse Lyons, who studied brewing at Guinness and Harp in his early days. So the yeast connection all makes sense.
Before the distillery part of the operation was created, they began making beer here. The flagship brand is Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale, which is aged for six weeks in ex-bourbon barrels. It's only available in a handful of states, and I recommend trying it if you can get your hands on some.
Model display of brewery/distillery
Distilling
The distillery was added on to the small brewery and is the stills are housed in a glass-walled room with gleaming copper pots.
With the exception of Woodford Reserve, all the major bourbons in the US are made in continuous column stills. At Woodford, they distill three times in copper stills. The first distillation primarily separates the solids in the fermented mash from the liquids (alcohol and water), then the second and third distillation separate most of the water and impurities from the alcohol.
At Town Branch, there are just two pot stills. The reason they don't need a third distillation is that the mash (beer) doesn't contain solids. (Note that in Scotland they also distill twice, but they have a step where they remove the solids from the beer that they don't usually do in the US.) Town Branch uses something called 'gelatinized corn' as a raw ingredient that they don't have to grind up and cook, unlike most distilleries.
The Town Branch Bourbon uses a grain recipe of 72% corn, 15% malted barley, and 13% rye. In the fermentation process they use enzymes and after this is done there are almost no solids left in the mash.
The Pearse Lyons Reserve in a single malt, so it uses all malted barley.
The beer, which is fermented to around 8% alcohol, is distilled to 28-30% on the first distillation and up to 67-68% on second distillation.
After distillation, the Pearse Lyons Reserve ages in new barrels, used barrels, and wine barrels. The cool thing about the used barrels is that they were the ones used for the beer, so in fact they were used once for bourbon, then once for beer, then again for the single-malt.
The Pearse Lyons Reserve single-malt is aged for nearly 4 years, and the Town Branch is aged for 3.5 years at minimum. They also make a coffee-infused bourbon called Bluegrass Sundown. They use this in a version of the Irish Coffee at the on-site tasting room by adding boiling water and cream on top.
This visit was a great chance to see a small-batch distillery making American whiskey a different way along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.
This spring I visited 8 American whiskey distilleries, including Buffalo Trace. Buffalo Trace is owned by the Sazerac company. They make Buffalo Trace, Blanton's, Elmer T. Lee, Eagle Rare, Van Winkle, and other whiskey brands, plus the make/own/import other spirits including Rain vodka, Puebla Viejo tequila, and Glenfarclass scotch.
Unlike most of the other American whiskey distilleries I visited, Buffalo Trace feels like a campus or a mini factory town. Other distilleries have just the central distillery and bottling line, but the aging warehouses are spread further afield. They're closer by at Buffalo Trace.
The name Buffalo Trace comes from the paths that the buffalo took to this area, where they would cross the river. The distillery is located where several paths intersected. Our guide Freddie said that this site is also probably where the first bourbons were ever shipped down the river to New Orleans in the early days of bourbon.
Here at Buffalo Trace, several rickhouses are built of brick on the outside and have many windows, unlike the typical metal-clad warehouses. However, the inside of the brick warehouses are wooden structures that hold the barrels, not connected to the outside framework.
Having all of this close together makes for a good tour- you can walk from building to building (as I did) and see every part of the distilling, aging, and bottling operation.
Buffalo Trace launched the first single-barrel bourbon, Blanton's, in 1984. We saw it being bottled. We also saw the vats for chill filtration, which was helpful as I was about to give a talk about filtration in spirits right after my visit.
We were also treated to seeing the bitters room, where they make Peychaud's and Regan's Orange bitters. I got to try those suckers out of the tap! To make them, they add the ingredients to one of 7 little tanks, age them 2 weeks, filter the solids, let them rest a week, and then bottle them.
Visiting Buffalo Trace
Information about visiting the distillery is found at BuffaloTraceDistillery.com. There are regular tours, hard hat tours, tours specializing in the time right after Prohibition, and even a nighttime ghost tour.
This spring I visited 8 American whiskey distilleries, including Heaven Hill.
Heaven Hill makes whisky brands Evan Williams (the second largest bourbon after Jim Beam), Elijah Craig, Bernheim Wheat Whiskey, Old Fitzgerald, Rittenhouse Rye, and Georgia Moon Corn Whiskey, plus they make and/or own Burnett's vodka, Hypnotiq, Lunazul tequila, and many other brands. They are the only company that makes all of bourbon, rye, corn whiskey, and wheat whiskey. They have nearly 1 million barrels in storage.
Though the visitors' center and many rickhouses are here, the distillery is elsewhere – the distillery and many warehouses burned down in a major fire in 1996. After the fire they purchased the Bernheim distillery in Louisville to do the distillation, along with some rickhouses there.
For three generations, master distillers at Heaven Hill have been descendants of Jim Beam.
We visited one of the warehouses – actually the rickhouse in which several "whisky of the year"s have aged. It is seven floors tall and we walked to the top for the view. Most of those "best whiskies" were aged on the top floor here.
Our guide pointed out where the distillery was that burned down.
For all their bourbons, they use a single mashbill. (They didn't give out the specific numbers but said it's about 70% corn and 10% each rye and malted barley. Update: see the comments for specifics.) Between all the brands, age and proof are the only differences; not the recipe. When they distill a spirit and put it into a barrel, it's not designated to be a specific brand – they pull barrels as needed to make specific flavor profiles of their products.
Visiting Heaven Hill
The Bourbon Heritage Center opened in 2004, and still looks shiny and new. Inside, you get the typical displays of bourbon history and the history of the company, plus there is a cool round bar tasting room inside.
There are several tours available – mini tour inside the visitors' center, an 1.5 hour tour that visits a rickhouse as I did, a trolley tour around downtown Bardstown, and a 3 hour "Behind the Scenes" tour. More information about visiting Heaven Hill is here.
This spring I visited the Maker's Mark distillery, along with seven other American whiskey distilleries in Kentucky and Tennessee. I had previously been to Maker's Mark and wrote about my visit here. As you'll read, I learned a lot of different stuff on this trip.
Maker's Mark uses a mashbill of 70% corn, 16% soft red winter wheat, and 14% malted barley. Bourbon must be a minimum of 51% corn but 70+ is normal. Malted barley is always used to aid in fermentation, and the remaining percent is usually made of up rye or wheat, more often rye.
At Maker's they prepare the grains a little differently than at other distilleries. They use a roller mill to crunch up the grains, rather than a hammer mill. This cracks the husk of the wheat but leaves it intact. The husks do go into the boiler with the other grains, but they boil it at a relatively low temperature so it won't break down and become available to the yeast for fermentation. They also cook their grains (to prepare them for fermentation) in an open-topped cookers, rather than pressure cooking them.
The grains are then fermented with yeast for three days.
The fermented grains are then distilled, up to 120 proof in the column still, and then up to 130 in the doubler. We smelled the two distillates: The first was very oily and minerally. After the second distillation it smelled fruity and light, like a typical white dog.
They put the new spirit into barrels at 110 proof. Most of the warehouses for Maker's Mark at six storeys tall. They are the only bourbon distillery that rotates all of their barrels throughout the aging process. Barrels are first racked on the top floors, then moved after two years and then moved lower again after another two.
Maker's 46, a new bourbon from Maker's Mark, begins as the same distillate, aged for the same amount of time. It is then aged an additional 8-11 weeks in barrels with 10 seared French oak staves in the barrels. They do this only in the winter, as that way the liquid sucks flavor out of the staves rather than sucking liquid into the wood of the staves as it would do in the hotter months of summer. I think the final product tastes like wood-spiced Maker's Mark- pretty tasty.
This spring I visited eight American whiskey distilleries, including Woodford Reserve.
Woodford Reserve's distillery is in a charming setting, nestled down next to a stream in a little valley. The distillery is in a grey stone building dating to 1838, though everything inside it is new. Like most American whiskey distilleries, it changed names and owners many times over the years, changing to the Woodford Reserve distillery in 2004.
Woodford Reserve is made from a mashbill of 72% corn, 18% rye, and 10% malted barley. They use limestone-filtered well water to ferment the grains in Cyprus wood fermentation vats. They ferment for six days – quite a long time. The fermenting grains taste very sour, kind of like sour green beer.
The sour mash process is where you take leftover grains that have been fermented back into the new batch of grains that are going to be fermented. Here at Woodford Reserve, they "sour in the cook" as opposed to souring in the fermenter. That means they add the last batch's spent grains to the new grains when it is being cooked, previous to when yeast is added for fermentation. Sour mash is known for keeping consistency between batches, but also it is acidic and helps reduce bacteria in the new batch.
Woodford Reserve is unique in that they make a portion of their whiskey in pot stills. The stills look much as they do in Scotland, but here there are three of them. In Scotland, after the grains have fermented they separate out the grain solids from the sugary beer and only distill the liquids. In bourbon, solids and liquids are put together into the column still. So at Woodford Reserve, they put solids and liquids into the first pot still and distill it only up to 20 percent alcohol. For the most part they are just separating out the solids in this step, taking care not to burn them into the inside of the still.
The second and third distillations bring the alcohol up to 55 percent and 78 percent (this is just under the legal limit of 80 percent maximum distillation percent for bourbon), and then it is put into barrels. The spirit goes into the barrels at 55 percent alcohol.
The rickhouses for the aging spirits are heated for Woodford Reserve. They put a temperature sensor in a barrel on the ground level. When it reaches 60 degrees Fahrenheit, they heat the warehouse until the spirit reaches 85 degrees and then turn off the heat. This makes for faster cycles of the spirit moving in and out of the barrel wood.
Woodford Reserve is aged for an average of 7.3 years, and when they take it out of the barrel, they've lost about 50% of the whiskey to evaporation.
After aging, the pot distilled spirit is blended with column distilled spirit (distilled elsewhere) to make the final bottling blend. They do not say at which ratio these two spirits are blended for the bottle (and they didn't mention the column spirit at all until it came up in conversation), but say that it changes depending on flavor.
Visiting Woodford Reserve
Tours of the Woodford Reserve distillery cost $7. It is the most visited distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, despite the fact that they only sell 165,000 cases of bourbon annually- a tiny fraction of what Jim Beam sells. For more information, visit the Woodford Reserve website.
This spring I visited eight American whiskey distilleries, including Wild Turkey.
The Wild Turkey brand has been around a while, but the current distillery is just three years old, having moved across the street from the old one. It's clean, modern, and spacious.
Wild Turkey uses all non-GMO grains in their bourbon and rye, but they don't tell us their specific mashbill. Despite having several products (Russell's Reserve, Rare Breed, etc.) there is just one mashbill for their bourbon, and another one for their ryes.
They ferment the grains for three days before distillation.
The bourbon is distilled up to 115 proof in the 48-foot tall column still, and then up to 125 proof in the doubler, which acts like a pot still.
In column distillation, there are actually heads and tails, but they only appear when you first turn on the still (heads) and when you turn it off (tails). However, you can just add these back into the column when you start it up again, so there really is no middle cut from the column still.
The rickhouses for Wild Turkey are 7 storeys tall, and they have a total inventory of about 480,000 barrels. The barrels have a #4 char.
Wild Turkey was recently purchased by Campari. Previously it was owned by Pernod-Ricard, and in the deal of the sale Pernod-Ricard still gets to buy 90% of their used barrels for the next 10 years. I'm guessing all those barrels go to Jameson.
They have just released Wild Turkey 81 Rye. It is 81 proof. They have a 101 proof rye, but it was sold out already for the year back in April.
Visiting Wild Turkey
Free tours are available, and visitors do get tasting samples. Visit WildTukey.com for more information.
