Category: trips

A Visit to the Fernet-Branca Distillery in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Back in April I visited the Fernet-Branca distillery outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Some of you may remember me tweeting about it. Well, it's about time I gave it the formal write-up.

Fernet-Branca owns two distilleries: the main one in Milan, Italy, and this one in Buenos Aires. In past years there used to be many Branca distilleries in different countries (including the US), but as global shipping has become easier this model makes the most sense.

Production began in Argentina around 1905 or 1908 and has continued ever since. The current distillery was built in 2000 and it already at full capacity.

Surprisingly, the Fernet-Branca we drink in the US is made in Milan. The Fernet-Branca made in Buenos Aires is consumed mostly in Argentina but also South/Latin America.

I didn't directly ask if the Fernet-Branca made in Buenos Aires is made to the exact same recipe, but if you compare them side-by-side you can tell it is not. The stuff made for the local market is less sweet than the international version (makes sense given that they always drink it with Coke, never on its own), and some bitter elements seemed to be different in a way I can't describe. Also, the proof was different than the international version but I believe recently has changed to conform with the Italian one.

They do, however, willingly admit that they use only three different ingredients than in Italy: The base alcohol is a local 95% ABV sugar cane distillate, and the sugar cane is local as well. The water is also local, coming from an underground river in the area. Another local ingredient used is chamomile, but the same flower is exported from here to be used in the Italian production as well.

Unfortunately pictures were not allowed in the distillery, so below is the verbal tour. I should also note that this is not a distillery at all: the base alcohol is distilled elsewhere. This is the blending and aging facility, but to make it easy I'll just call it a distillery.

Herbs and Spices

The first room we passed had the smell of caramel, and in fact that's where they were making the carmel coloring for Fernet, which they appeared to be doing by heating and stirring sugar in big tubs.

Most of the work in making Fernet-Branca is doing tons of separate infusions and macerations to get the flavor from the herbs, barks, roots, and spices into the spirit. Thus, the rooms that we walked through were full of different types of stainless steel tanks of a wide variety of shapes and sizes.

Some were small simple tanks, some were huge vats, some had stirrers and filters on them; some were sideways roller tanks that slowly rotate. Our guide told us that some ingredients are infused into alcohol; others into water. Some infuse separately; other ingredients are combined.

The longest infusion of any ingredient in Fernet-Branca is for 90 days, but our guide couldn't say which ingredient that was. We saw piles of burlap bags of chamomile, zedoria, and other spices from India, Spain, Africa, and Iran stacked in different rooms. Other herbs are kept in a refrigerated room. They store 2 years' worth of ingredients just in case there are any supply chain problems down the road.

Aging Fernet

Beneath the factory is a huge basement that stores tanks for aging Fernet-Branca. There are six cellars, plus two additional climate-controlled warehouses. These are full of gigantic wooden vats (one of them holds 100,000 liters!) aging the liqueur. Two of the smallest vats at the distillery date back to around 1908 and were used at the Italian distillery before being sent to Argentina.

Each tank ages separately, but before bottling they pour the Fernet-Branca into one tank that is connected to a series of other tanks by tubes. They only draw the finished product out of the last tank, so this is a way to marry and blend a great quantity of the Branca for consistency.

Production

The factory is running at full capacity making 4 million cases every year, and presently and they are expanding to double that over the next few years.

They also make Branda Menta here, Punt E Mes, and they bottle Borghetti coffee liqueur.

Drinking Fernet-Branca, Argentinean-Style

Mix it with Coke. They never drink Fernet-Branca on its own; I'd hazard a guess to say that almost nobody has ever even tried it neat there.

It's funny that to us Fernet and Coke sounds repulsive (while to them drinking Fernet-Branca neat sounds like drinking radiator fluid), yet it's not actually that bad. They seem to treat it like an everyday cocktail like a Gin & Tonic, but I actually didn't mind it as a digestif after a meal.

June 14, 2013
A Visit to the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen

This February I was lucky to be invited to visit the Nordic Food Lab, which is located on a boat floating in a harbor off Copenhagen. It was formerly the research lab of the world's top-rated restaurant NOMA, and I believe they still have a close relationship and work together on projects.

The lab is pretty small: A few work tables, refrigerators and cabinets on both sides of the room, and tons of samples in bottles, barrels, bags, and jars everywhere. It reminded me a lot of my apartment, except that the swaying back-and-forth was coming from the water beneath the boat, not the booze in my belly.

There I met Ben Reade, a scientist at the lab. He described some of the cool stuff he was doing, such as:

Going into the Swedish forest and collecting all sorts of possibly-edible plants

and doing all sorts of experiments with them, like making tinctures out of them.

He also brewed beer and added three different levels of (incredibly bitter) oak moss to it so see how it tasted.

I'm not sure what they're doing with this drying (boar?) leg, but they're attempting traditional curing/drying techniques. The one on the right is coated with some sort of wax.

He's also working a lot with fermentation. He made a vinegar from fermented elderflower, which led to us having a long discussion on shrubs and drinking vinegars.

He was also experimenting with kombucha – we tasted a ton of it with different levels of pear juice to seek the optimum amount.

He was also aging vinegar in a mini-solera. How much do I want a set of these barrels?

At the end of the visit we got to taste some non-sweet sugar with added lactasol (not sure if I am spelling that correctly). It's a chemical that inhibits the perception of sweetness. So the powder we tried is mostly sugar but it tastes like nothing.

Therapeutically it can be given to anorexic people mixed with high-sugar foods as apparently they don't want to eat anything sweet, but of course my thoughts went to cocktail applications: a drop of it in a too-sugary cocktail could dry it right up! (Unfortunately he said it's usually only available in massive-sized quantities.)

Overall the visit was very cool and very inspiring, making me wish I had more space for more experiments at home.

You can read about the work being done at the Nordic Food Lab on their research blog.

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March 20, 2013
2012: My Year in Boozy Travel
I decided to add up all the trips I took in 2012 and compare it to last year's travel, and it appears this year I was a total slacker.

I took a mere 17 trips this year (22 last year), and flew only 90,000 miles in the air, compared with 150,000 last year. I visited only 5 foreign countries this year (not counting repeats) as opposed to 12 last year.

I feel so lazy.

In 2012 I visited:
- New Orleans (twice), once for Tales of the Cocktail and once for vacation
- Vancouver for Tales of the Cocktail
- Seattle for 12 bar reviews
- Las Vegas for the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers' Association
- Lafayette, LA for Tabasco
- New York for the Manhattan Cocktail Classic
- Cuba for Havana Club
- Scotland for Laphroaig
- Marseillan for Noilly Prat vermouth
- Rio de Janiero for Diageo's World Class
- Mexico for Olmeca Altos and the Tahona Society
- France for Grey Goose Ten cocktail competition
- Portland, Oregon for Portland Cocktail Week
- San Diego to review bars
- And a mileage run trip to New York and back on one day
Still, a pretty good year in all ;
January 1, 2013
A Few Things Learned in the Agave Fields in Mexico
On my recent trip with the Tahona Society, we visited took ATVs into the agave fields and "helped" harvest some agave.

There, Olmeca Altos tequila Master Distiller Jesus Hernandez filled me in on some details about agave I didn't know, so I thought I'd share them:
- The quiote, the giant asparagus-shaped sprout that shoots up from a mature agave plant in order to spread its seed, only comes from the female plant. This is nearly always cut soon after sprouting so that it doesn't drain energy from the agave heart.
- After the quiote sprouts, you have a year and a few months to harvest the plant – it can go through one rainy season after sprouting but not two.
- Only the male plants that do not sprout quiotes have a cogollo, a dense circle of leaves where the quiote would have been. Most quality producers make sure to cut out the cogollo when harvesting or before baking the agave, as this negatively impacts the flavor of tequila.
- Agave can be harvested year-round but they tend to harvest less/none in the rainy season. This isn't because the agave are waterlogged and therefore have a lower sugar-to-weight ratio, as Hernandez says that mature plants aren't effected so much by this, but because logistically it's hard to get the trucks in and out of the muddy fields to collect the heavy agave after harvest.
- Sometimes you'll see an agave field with the tips of all the spiky leaves cut off. Hernandez says that some producers think that this helps the heart of the agave grow stronger, but he doesn't believe this is true. However, he says it is common to cut off the tips of the leaves when they come through annually to apply pesticides and herbicides, just so that they can get through the dense rows of agave without getting cut on the leaves.
- The leaves of the agave plants grow and die annually and new ones grow above them, much like how a palm tree grows with rows of dead leaves left lower down. I always thought they were the same leaves just growing bigger each year!
- They apply pesticides and herbicides annually up until the year before harvest, as they don't want any of that residue around for harvest.
- At the base of agave plants sprout rhyzomes, little baby agaves called hijuelos. These are cut and replanted after the mother agave plant is 3-4 years old.
I also learned something from Guillermo Sauza, distiller/owner of Fortaleza Tequila.
- You can get huge agave hearts in the Lowlands, you just have to fertilize the fields. Sauza says that people don't usually do that in the area anymore since the current prices are so low for agave.
September 12, 2012
A Visit to the Sauza Distillery in Tequila, Mexico

Today on the Tahona Society trip to the tequila regions of Mexico we visited the distillery of Sauza. Yesterday’s visit to La Fortaleza was an example of the most primitive/traditional production methods for tequila. Today at Sauza we say the most high-tech.

I last visited Sauza about a year ago, and that post on Alcademics is here, and probably a bit more thorough than this one. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take pictures in most of the distillery, so mostly text will have to do.

Sauza uses what they call “soft extraction” of the sugars from agave plants. While almost every tequila maker bakes agave plant hearts (pinas) then crushes the baked plants to extract the fermentable sugars from the plants, at Sauza first they crush the plants then they cook the liquid.

The agave is first run through a big roller mill, and then a diffuser, a huge machine that specializes in getting the most of the sugars out of agave. Then this liquid is cooked at 120 degrees Celsius for 4-5 hours.

This sugary liquid is then fermented super fast- 24 to 26 hours- then it is distilled.

Distillation for Sauza products takes place first in a column still, where they distill up to anywhere from 24 to 35 percent alcohol depending on the product, and then in a copper-lined stainless steel still up to 56-65%.

An interesting fact I learned on this trip is about their mixto tequila – tequila distilled from the fermented sugars of at least 51% agave and 49% other sugars, usually sugar cane. However at Sauza, where they do use the minimum 51/49 percent ratio, the sugar used is corn syrup, not sugar syrup.

September 6, 2012
La Fortaleza Distillery Visit

Yesterday I visited the La Fortaleza distillery. This tiny distillery makes 100% tahona tequila, in the heart of the city of Tequila in the Lowlands.

The distillery was rebuilt in a 100 year old distillery site by Guillermo Sauza, 5th-generation Sauza family. His grandfather sold Sauza to the company who sold it to Jim Beam. Guillermo decided to return to distilling the traditional way.

The tahona is a volcanic stone wheel that is rolled in a pit to crush baked agave. Most distilleries use a diffuser, rollermill, or a combination of rollermill and tahona.

The fibers are removed and the sugary water and pulp remain. These are fermented in wooden fermenters.

Then they are distilled in the tiniest little pot stills.

The aging room is about as big as a two-bedroom apartment.

The view from the hill behind the distillery is amazing- they own 80 acres right in the city of Tequila.

There are caves underneath this hill. In the caves they’ve put a bar. We were in there for a good two hours.

Short blog post, but an amazing distillery and a great night!

September 6, 2012
The Surprisingly Interesting History and Production of Tabasco Pepper Sauce

This spring I went to Avery Island, Louisiana, to see how Tabasco pepper sauce is made.

Avery Island isn't really an island, but more of a dry mound (a salt dome) surrounded by wetlands. It's about 165 feet high and that makes it the tallest point in the Gulf Coast.

The island is owned entirely by the Avery family, of which the McIlhennys form a branch. The first of them on the island was a man named Marsh, who built the Marsh House in 1818 that is still used for family weddings and other gatherings. Marsh wasn't a pepper sauce maker, but grew sugar cane on the part of the island that he owned. There are remains of three sugar refineries still on the island, and sugar cane is still grown in the surrounding area.

Marsh's son-in-law, who was an Avery, bought the rest of the island. This Avery's daughter married a McIlhenny, so that's where the families come together. And it was this McIlhenny who invented Tabasco sauce.

At some point, they discovered that the island was rich in salt deposits. Salt is still mined on the island by the Cargill company, and they've now drilled to 2000 feet below ground to do so. Every night, they detonate an explosive underground to ready some more salt for harvest, and sometimes you can hear the boom from the Marsh House.

During the Civil War, the families fled New Orleans to live on the island and escape the conflict. But armies need salt, for preservatives and for animals, so the war soon came to them. They were making salt for the Confederate army and the Union army tried to seize the island in a conflict that came to be known as "The Great Salt Expedition." Though this was a victory for the Confederates, the Union won the island just six months later.

After the Civil War, Edmund McIlhenny, a banker whose industry had been destroyed by the conflict, succeeded in his venture creating a pepper sauce. (It wasn't the first pepper sauce in America, though they were not common. It was said people initially complained that the sauce was too hot, as they applied it in quantities like the ketchup they were used to.) He grew peppers and developed the recipe from 1866-1868, and sold his first Tabasco sauce in 1869.

Unlike most brands who tout their recipe as being identical to the original, Tabasco has definitely changed. Initially, the pepper mash was aged for 30 days in jars, then vinegar was added and it aged for another 30 days.

Tabasco Today

Today, Tabasco sauce is a global business, but all of it still originates and is processed on the island. The seeds for all the peppers grown for Tabasco originate on the island, picked from the best plants, then peppers used in the sauce are grown in Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique.

Around the world the peppers are all hand-picked, ground up, have eight percent salt added (in South America, the salt they use is actually sent from Avery Island), and then the peppers ferment for a month before they're shipped back to Avery Island.

Back on the island, the "pepper mash" is aged in ex-bourbon barrels- about 50,000 of them here at the warehouse. The barrels are first de-charred and re-hooped, as the acidity of the mash would eat right through the typical barrel hoops. The pepper mash then ages in a barrel for three years on Avery island, stacked six-high on top of each other.

Not only is there salt used in the pepper mash, salt is added on top of each barrel. The barrels have a valve on top that releases carbon dioxide from the fermenting peppers, and it bubbles through the salt. When the fermentation is done, the salt forms a hard rock salt puck on top of the barrel, helping to seal the valve.

The three-year-old pepper mash is then added to vinegar and aged for up to 28 days before bottling. Peppers make up about twenty percent of the final product.

The actual peppers register from 40,000 to 50,000 on the Scoville scale, but after aging and dilution the final Tabasco sauce is around 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville heat units.

Inside the warehouse, we were able to taste the pepper mash- just putting a bit on our tongues and then spitting it out. As expected, it's hot as heck. But as a reward for doing so, we are given a necklace with a spoon attached, engraved with N.S.A.O. N.S.S.S. – allowing us membership into the The Not So Ancient Order of the Not So Silver Spoon.

My fellow Tabasco taster Amy Sherman made an illustration of me undergoing the initiation.

After they make the Tabasco sauce, the spent peppers are sold to a pharmaceutical company that makes things like pepper spray and medicinal applications.

Types of Tabasco

The main line of Tabasco sauces now includes the Original, Green (jalapeno, the first sauce extension from 1993), Chipotle, Buffalo, Habanero, Garlic Pepper, and Sweet & Spicy.

But a trip to the gift shop on Avery Island shows just how many other brand extensions there are: Tabasco has hundreds of products it co-brands with, including A1 steak sauce, Hormel Chili, Cheez-Its, Slim Jims, and SPAM. They're all there, along with Tabasco-branded clothing and accessories and just about everything you can put a logo on.

They also sell some other sauces not available everywhere, like a Raspberry Chipotle and a Family Reserve that's aged up to eight years. They always seem to keep experimenting, and we got to try some prototype sauces.

So yeah, it turns out that Tabasco pepper sauce, something we see practically every day and never think about, actually has a fascinating history, production process, and global reach, all from this little island in the Louisiana bayou.

August 21, 2012
I Peated in your Scotch: A Trip to Laphroaig
In June I took a short trip to Islay, Scotland to see how Laphroaig single-malt scotch whisky is made. Islay is an island off the coast of Scotland known for its smoky, peaty whiskies.

What Laphroaig does differently from other scotch producers, as you'll read, is:
- Floor maltings
- Separation of malt flavoring (with peat smoke) and malt drying
- An uneven number of pot stills
- Quarter Casks
Floor Malting

Laphroaig is one of six scotch makers that floor malts some of its own barley. Floor malting is the historic technique of preparing barley for fermentation. Most of the 100 distilleries in Scotland purchase malted barley from commercial malting plants, and most (all?) of the distilleries that do floor malting also purchase additional malt from commercial malters.

The other distilleries that malt their own barley are Bowmore and Kilchoman on Islay, Highland Park on Orkney, Springbank in Campbelltown, and The Balvenie in Speyside on the mainland. (Other brands including BenRiach have announced considering it.)

In floor malting here at Laphroaig, barley is soaked three times at room temperature (simulating spring rains), then spread out over a floor where it will begin to germinate. During four days in the summer (seven in winter), the malt is turned over with rakes to reduce heat build-up and release Carbon Dioxide that builds up in the piles. Then it is dried to halt germination.

Traditionally, the wet barley was dried over the local fuel source, be that peat (thick blocks of muddy decaying vegetation from bogs, on its way to becoming coal), or actual coal in the case of Highland distillers that had access to coal from the railroads. Now that other sources of energy can be used to blow hot air through the barley to dry it, smoke isn't necessary in the flavor of scotch. From commercial maltings, distillers can specify the level of smokiness they want their malt made.

Harvesting Peat

But for distillers with floor maltings who want smoky scotch, that means harvesting the local peat to burn for fuel. We donned Wellington work boots and headed out into the bog.

The peat for Laphroaig is all harvested by hand. The procedure is to first cut off a top layer of grassy soil that hasn't decayed enough yet and place it on the next row over so it will keep decaying. Then peat is cut in long brick-shaped pieces by pushing down into the muddy peat with a special peat cutting tool, then placing it on the surface grass to dry outdoors.

Click through the images below to see me harvesting peat.
The seaweed and other Islay plant-rich peat harvested here imparts more "peaty" (earthy and medicinal) flavor characteristics to the barley than peat harvested from the mainland (which may be comprised of other vegetation), which imparts more wood smoke flavors.

After the peat dries outdoors (but before it is too dry, as moist peat gives off lots of the desired smoke), they bring it back to the distillery where it is time to use it to dry the wet barley on the floor of the malting house.

I Peated in Your Scotch

Wet peat is moved into the drying room, which sits a floor above a big boxy fireplace like on a steamship. Down below, peat is shoveled into the fire and the smoke rises to the room above to engulf the wet barley with smoke aroma. I took a turn throwing some peat onto the fire so you could be drinking my handywork in ten or so years.

Laphroaig is unique in that first they flavor the barley with smoke for 17 hours, and then after that they pump hotter dry air through it for an additional 19 hours to fully dry the barley. Other floor malting distilleries do the flavoring and drying steps together.

This longer, slower flavoring and drying method changes the flavor profile of the barley, and the finished product – it doesn't just make it smokier. According to Master Distiller John Campbell, when we talk about the phenol profile of a whisky we're talking about 5-7 flavor components. The process of flavoring the barley at Laphroaig particularly brings out 4-ethyl glycol guaiacol and creosole components, present in other whiskies but not to the same extent as in Laphroaig.

The malted barley made at the distillery is mixed with malted barley made just down the road at the Port Ellen maltings, along with malted barley from the mainland as well. Now it's time to ferment and distill.

Fermentation and Distillation

The water source for Laphroaig is a large reservoir a ways from the distillery, uphill.

The dried, malted barley is then ground up and put through the "mashing" process. Hot water is added to the barley and this inspires the enzymes released through the malting process to break the starches into fermentable sugars.

Next they collect the sugary water and discard the solids, adding yeast to allow the sugar water to ferment over 55 hours into a beer. Then it's ready to be distilled.

At most scotch whisky distilleries, the stills come in pairs. A larger still (wash still) performs the first distillation, and a smaller one (spirit still) paired with it takes on the second distillation.

Here at Laphroaig, things are weird. There are 3 wash stills and 4 spirit stills. The 3 wash stills are all the same size, but there are 3 small spirit stills and 1 big one with twice the capacity of the small ones.

One batch of fermented beer fills up 5 wash stills, so what they do is run 3 wash stills to go into 3 small spirit stills, then 2 more wash still runs to go into the one big spirit still.

Campbell says that the large and small spirit stills produce different tasting whiskies, but it's because they run the larger spirit still distillation too fast. (They've been doing it for 40 years that way though, so he's not about to change it.) The big still produces heavier, slightly oilier spirit as opposed to the lighter, sweeter, fruitier spirit that comes off the smaller spirit stills. Regardless, they blend all these together before putting it in barrels.

Barrel Aging

The spirit is 136 proof after distillation (68% ABV), but they put it into the barrel at 127 proof, which is common in the industry.

Nearly all Laphroaig is aged in ex-Maker's Mark barrels. On Islay, they have 8 warehouses holding 50,000 casks. As is now the norm in Islay scotches, they also age some of their stock on the mainland. However, Campbell says that he believes the majority of the whisky used in the single-malt Laphroaig (as opposed to stuff sold to other brands for blending) is aged on the island. He says aging on the island imparts earthier, saltier notes to the whisky.

The warehouse we visited is four floors tall and is the largest warehouse they use. Campbell says they get great flavor out of the whisky aged in this warehouse, but less color extraction from the wood as in their other warehouses. (The other warehouses are covered with metal and get hotter than the oceanside warehouses with their thick walls.) But putting together the barrels for the final products is the job of the blender.

The Range

10 Year – This is 70% of Laphroaig's single-malt sales. Minimum of 10 years aging in ex-bourbon casks.

Quarter Cask – After aging 5-11 years in ex-bourbon barrels, a blend is made and then it is further aged in "quarter casks" for 7 months.

Quarter casks are a quarter the size of a sherry butt, though they are made out of ex-bourbon barrels. They hold 30 gallons as opposed to 55 for bourbon barrels. These smaller casks impart more wood influence into the spirit in a smaller amount of time.

Triple Wood – This starts with the Quarter Cask liquid, then it is aged for an additional 2 years in ex-oloroso sherry casks.

I made the point that since quarter casks are actually made out of ex-bourbon casks, this is technically only two woods, not three. Lies! Maybe they should have called it triple barrel instead…

PX – This is the same product as the Triple Wood (that is actually double wood), except for those additional 2 years it is aged in ex-Pedro Ximenez (PX) sherry barrels instead of oloroso. This bottling is only available at duty-free.

18 Year Old – A minimum of 18 years in ex-bourbon barrels.

Cask Strength – This is the 10 Year Old at cask strength. Previously this was a blended product so that each bottle tasted the same (called Original Cask Strength), but now they release this in batches, so it should be a little different with every batch.
August 17, 2012
Brown-Forman Cooperage Pics and Videos

The Brown-Forman Cooperage is located in Louisville, Kentucky. There they make the barrels for Jack Daniels and their other brands. Below are some pictures from my visit.

You can read about what I saw in my story for CLASS Magazine here.

Below are a couple of videos. The first is the machine that puts hoops around barrels.

The second video is of the charring process of the barrels. Fire!

August 10, 2012
Buffalo Trace Distillery Visit

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.

August 3, 2012