Buffalo Trace Distillery proudly holds the title of the oldest continually operating Distillery in America, remaining operational even during Prohibition– for “medicinal” purposes. Visitors can get a taste of history, heritage, and of course, fine Kentucky bourbon on their daily tours. Complimentary tours and tastings are happening 7 days a week. Rich in history and hospitality, Buffalo Trace has something to offer everyone...

Castle & Key, the newly restored distillery that once operated under the Old Taylor name, will officially reopen to the public on September 19. The Millville, Kentucky-based facility was built in 1887 by legendary Bourbon figure Colonel Edmund Haynes Taylor, Jr., and became renowned for its European-style, castle-like architecture. In 1972, it shuttered amid hard times in the Bourbon industry, and fell into disrepair...

A whopping 95 percent of all bourbon is made in Kentucky, but its appeal goes well beyond the Commonwealth’s borders. Over the past decade, high-end and super premium brands have driven huge growth in sales in America and given rise to the bourbon bar in cities across the country. There’s also been a major boost in international sales, with bourbon regularly at the top of the list of U.S. liquor...

By Carolyn Tribble Greer – Digital editor, Louisville Business First 2 hours ago The Bourbon Review has named its 101 best bourbon bars in the U.S., and eight Louisville bars are on the list. Twenty-nine of the 100 bars are in Kentucky, including seven in Lexington. Only one city, Chicago, had more bars — 10 — on the list than Louisville. New York City has six on the list, and San Francisco...

It is pretty common in pop culture to joke about certain places having an odd or backwater reputation. In the Northeast, New Jersey may get the worst of such stereotyping. But another oft-maligned locale — originally part of Virginia until it became a state of its own in 1792 — is Kentucky. Despite any jokes, Kentucky is famous for many stellar things, from horse-racing and bluegrass to Mammoth...

On a trip to Texas last month I had a free night to see some friends. With the words of my mother ringing in my head — “you don’t show up as a guest empty-handed” — I swung by the local big-box liquor store to grab a few bottles. As I turned the corner into the whiskey section, I saw something I haven’t seen in Nashville in years: a shelf filled with W.L. Weller bourbon just sitting there in the wild...

The full collapse of the Barton 1792 barrel warehouse at the distillery in Kentucky back in late June/early July has become something which now, for better or worse, is part of bourbon lore. For the folks tasked with cleaning up the whiskey mess, it is also a project that’s being done literally one barrel at a time. In video recently released by Sazerac, the parent company...

Chicago is laid out on a grid, as are most of its suburbs. But look at a map of the western burbs and Riverside stands out, a grid without corners. Instead of straight lines, Riverside’s streets are gently curved, like the Des Plaines River that borders the town on the south and west, and gives it its name...

Willett distills its own whiskeys but also sources others. This is sourced from other distilleries in Kentucky, the mash bill is not disclosed, and the age statement that was once on it was removed (it used to be a 15 year old whiskey). The acidic element diminishes with water, and the sweeter elements come up. Too much water, and, like most bourbons, it flattens out a bit, so experimenting...

A bit over two years ago, when I was brand new to Bourbon & Banter, I wrote an article called Glassware 101: Choose the Best Glass to Enjoy Your Bourbon. The purpose was to demonstrate just how important glassware is in the entire whiskey experience. I compared the differences between a shot glass, a rocks glass, a white wine glass, a Glencairn glass, and a NEAT glass. In that experiment, the Glencairn came out the clear...

Spearheaded by the popularity of TV programme Mad Men, Bourbon has cemented itself within the whisk(e)y ranks as the ‘cool kid on the block’ and an irrefutable driving force of American whiskey’s revival. The category has proven hugely favourable among that most coveted of demographics – millennials – as imbibers sip, shoot and shake it in cocktails. But it’s not just Bourbon that is relishing...

For more than year, I have chased unicorns. I’ve searched the Tampa Bay area. I’ve hunted in Baltimore, Denver, Detroit, Cleveland and Las Vegas. I’ve walked through dozens of doors, but I often strike out. I’m not chasing mythical creatures. My unicorns are rare bottles of bourbon that I have only heard of but never seen. I’m not alone. The craze has swept across the nation. Women and younger...

BARDSTOWN, Ky. (AP) — The collapse of a Kentucky distillery's warehouse last month has crews still cleaning up and trying to salvage roughly 18,000 barrels of aging bourbon. News outlets reported Wednesday the Barton 1792 Distillery in Bardstown has been working one barrel at a time to save the bourbon. Part of the warehouse fell in June and the rest collapsed in July. A video by Barton safety...

Brace your arteries, if you can. Because starting next week, Sivori Catering will be back at the 2018 Kentucky State Fair with its latest calorific creations. This year's star attraction: The Big Clifty Bourbon Donut Burger — a beefy behemoth that's topped with a slice of country ham, a maple bourbon glaze and two doughnut buns. Owner Larry Sivori said his company has been serving doughnut...

Fair season is the best season—a beautiful three month window between summer and fall where you can pay nine dollars to win a stuffed bear that you could purchase outright for two. But it doesn't matter because you love the fair, and if there's one reason to always be pro-fair season, it's the food. This year's pièce de résistance? The bourbon ham donut at the Kentucky State Fair. Properly, the...

Jefferson’s Bourbon, a Louisville-based small-batch producer, is best-known for blending and the products that come out of that experimentation. The brand’s slogan, after all, is “Alchemy is everything,” which should give you a hint at the mindset right from the get-go. Jefferson’s newest experiment is once again exploring the wood involved in the bourbon-making process: a custom barrel to finish...

How do you untangle a multistory pile of broken barrels and smashed staves to rescue the surviving bourbon? Very carefully. Since last month, Barton 1792 has been working to pluck one barrel after another from the pile formed when a barrel warehouse collapsed at the Bardstown distillery. The first half, with about 9,000 barrels, fell abruptly on June 22; the second half finally came down on July...

Try this experiment: see if you can book a tour of your nearest consumer goods manufacturing plant. Depending on the operation, you might get in the door. Beer makers usually offer generic tours, as do some auto manufacturers. Craft and specialty producers of all stripes are usually excited to show off what they do. But at most big consumer products plants, you’ll find the door shut (and often...

It’s not just mixologists who like to shake things up. Distilleries are pushing the boundaries too, and now Irish whiskey is the fastest growing spirit in the world. For Jameson, this means finishing Jameson Caskmates IPA, a triple distilled Irish whiskey in craft IPA-seasoned barrels. It’s ideal for anyone who’s torn between the soft smoothness of an Irish whiskey and the refreshing...

With the wax-focused workshop, bartenders can make their own scented candles, picking up the flavour profiles in Maker's Mark. At the Print Club in London, bartenders can personalise their own cocktail mats from paper with a range of screen-printing techniques. The wood workshop will enable bartenders to personalise and engrave their own bar tools to take back into their bars. Susan Walkinshaw, brand...

Every year since 2002, Old Forester has marked its founder’s birthday on 2 September with a 12-year-old limited edition Bourbon release. This year’s Bourbon is the first to be bottled at the new Old Forester Distilling Co site in Louisville. The 2018 Birthday Bourbon is produced from 93 barrels matured in Warehouse J and 27 barrels matured in Warehouse I. It is bottled at 50.5% abv, the highest...

DANVILLE, Ky. (Aug. 7, 2018) — If you like your bourbon aged and smooth and your BBQ slow-cooked and savory, Wilderness Trail Distillery can fill the bill for both when it has its second bourbon release during the KY State BBQ Festival Sept. 7-9 in Danville. The Danville distillery’s first Bottled in Bond Bourbon release was a huge success and it’s time for the second of the three releases this...

Old Forester has unveiled this year’s release of Birthday Bourbon, the 18th release of the highly sought after bourbon and the first to be bottled at its newly opened distillery. The bourbon marks the birthday of the distillery’s founder, George Gavin Brown, and is released on his birthday, September 2. First released in 2002, previous versions of the bourbon have won numerous spirits awards. The...

Joyce Nethery says her distillery exists because she wanted a good-tasting tomato. “The kind that I just ate straight off the vine in my mother’s garden,” says Nethery, now the CEO and master distiller of Shelbyville’s Jeptha Creed, which opened in 2016. Her search for a non-grocery-store tomato led her down a gardening hole. She attempted to grow her own tomatoes until she discovered the...

Even though the topic of Wednesday night’s Bourbon Salon was “Women in Distilling,” and the panel featured three extraordinary examples of women in lead roles at distilleries, the subject of gender only came up once — and even then, it disappeared faster than the bourbon in everyone’s glass. Led by the bourbon author and expert Michael Veach, Bourbon Salons are held every other month at Oxmoor...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Old Forester is releasing its 2018 Birthday Bourbon on Sept. 2 in honor of founder George Garvin Brown's 178th birthday. After moving from the spot in 1919, Old Forester reopened its distillery on Whiskey Row earlier this year. "We've just got so much history to share, a lot of different stories to tell, and that's the exciting part: being able to share some of those...

Construction workers are racing the clock to complete work at Louisville’s Frazier History Museum by the end of this month, when the new “Spirit of Kentucky” Bourbon history exhibit and the Kentucky Bourbon Trail Welcome Center are scheduled to open. Both represent a multi-million dollar investment in Bourbon tourism on Louisville’s Whiskey Row, and we’ll take a “hard hat” tour with the Frazier’s...

The northernmost stop on Kentucky's Bourbon Trail Craft Tour is finally selling its own locally produced whiskey. New Riff opened five years ago, and after four years of aging, the distillery is finally offering its first bonded whiskey, meaning it was made in a single distillation by a single distillery. Founder Ken Lewis aims to capitalize on being part of Kentucky's Craft Tour."The Bourbon Trail...

Meet the newest member of the Woodford Reserve core family. In May 2018, Woodford Reserve Straight Malt whiskey was released as part of Woodford’s permanent lineup. This straight malt should not be confused with American single malt, a growing category in the American market. What’s the difference between the two? While it so far lacks a TTB-approved standard of identity, American single malts...

The food and drink industry has long been filled with unscrupulous types who misrepresent, relabel and adulterate products for their personal ill-gotten gain. Unfortunately, this is still true today - I wrote an entire book about it that became a New York Times bestseller (Real Food, Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating & What You Can Do About It). But when it comes to whiskey, this...

The first caller to report a partial warehouse collapse at the Barton 1792 Distillery last month sounded — perhaps understandably — shocked at what he'd seen. "The whole end of it just fell off," he told the dispatcher. "... The whole end of the building is gone. It just fell off. One of their big warehouses." He watched it play out from a job site a few hundred yards away, he said in the call...

Talk about your historic whiskeys: Heaven Hill, which lost its Bardstown distillery and seven rickhouses in a 1996 fire, is releasing a limited edition bourbon produced before that fire. The Heaven Hill 27-year-old Barrel Proof Small Batch Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey (that’s a mouthful of a name) is so rare there are fewer than 3,000 bottles available, according to Heaven Hill. Only 41...

If you want to get intimate with your whiskey — right down to the molecular structure — master distiller Justin Stiefel and the latest new outpost of the Heritage Distilling family is for you. The new Capitol Hill tasting room opened during Block Party. While the overlap in alcohol preference between the event’s average attendees and Heritage’s targeted customer base may not have a large amount of...

This spring, Buffalo Trace commemorated the filling of its 7 millionth barrel of bourbon with a celebration at its Frankfort, Ky., distillery. The barrel in question was signed by a bunch of workers and some visiting journalists and then rolled through the crowd into the tiny Warehouse V, a “single barrel” warehouse/tourist attraction, as Sazerac president and CEO Mark Brown spoke about the...

Grapefruit and Campari are the Tracy and Hepburn of the cocktail set—one of the greatest pairs to ever mingle in a single glass. Yet curiously, there’s no iconic drink featuring the duo—no gin with tonic, no mint-meets-rum in a mojito. Which is wholly inexplicable since the sweet-sour of the grapefruit juice and the sweet-bitter of the Campari wind like a helix around each other, creating an...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A company that make barrels for storing bourbon is planning a new $35 million operation in Southwest Virginia. Gov. Ralph Northam announced last week that Speyside Bourbon Cooperage plans to barrel cooperate in Smyth County and a stave mill facility in Washington County. The stave mill will produce the narrow strips of oak used to make the barrels. The company said about 160...

Louisville’s booming distilleries took a big hit after Prohibition killed the buzz in the 1920s, although a lucky few managed to survive for “medicinal” production. Nearly a century later, change is in the air. Evan Williams Bourbon Experience ushered in a whole new generation of tour-able bourbon attractions when it set up shop on Main Street’s Whiskey Row in 2013. By the end of this year, new...

KUALA LUMPUR, July 23 — From the highlands of Scotland to the southern reaches of Australia by way of India, there is a whisky made to quench every thirst. Whisky’s journey began some 1,000 years go as travelling monks from mainland Europe took the drink to Scotland and Ireland where the friars perfected fermenting grain mash, as the islands lacked vineyards. Loosely translated from the Scottish

When was the last time you walked around your city and didn’t see someone with at least one tattoo? It’s probably been a while. Ink has become ubiquitous in our society as people strive to find new and creative ways to express themselves. Bulleit Bourbon, in its latest edition of Frontier Works, is tapping into that with limited-edition “tattooed” bottles. Bulleit Frontier Works is a series of art...

160 jobs coming to Southwest Virginia - Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced Friday that Speyside Bourbon Cooperage, Inc. will invest $26 million to establish a bourbon barrel cooperage in Smyth County and $9 million in a new stave mill facility in Washington County. The stave mill in Washington County will supply the company's new Smyth County cooperage, and the two operations will start...

To promote its Tattoo Edition bottle and help celebrate National Tattoo Day this week, Bulleit Bourbon has launched a limited edition collection of tattooed bottles featuring augmented reality. The bourbon maker teamed with tattoo artists to create four different tattoo designs on the Bulleit bottle, the first time the Bulleit Bourbon bottle has been altered. Each bottle contains a scannable QR...

Going to work would be more enjoyable if you could drink bourbon, go down slides and hang out with dogs whenever you felt like it, right? Sound unrealistic? Not for some of Louisville's most unique offices that offer those perks and more to keep employees excited about coming to work. Though offices often renovate and update for a more modern aesthetic, Jennifer Deal, a senior research scientist...

As you probably already know, Kentucky makes 95 percent of the world’s bourbon (if you didn’t, you do now). Just about every major producer of the stuff calls the Bluegrass State home. That’s given rise over the years to a booming bourbon industry, which has, in turn, spawned the official Kentucky Bourbon Trail, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail Craft Tour and now, Northern Kentucky’s own “trail,” The...

Today we're inciting you to drink the Roughneck Colada, a stimulating remix of the piña colada using coconut cream, Kentucky bourbon from John Wayne-inspired Duke Spirits and Dominican rum, with an assortment of fruit juices and a float of Fernet. Those are a lot of summer's greatest hits in just one Collins glass. So mix up a few, sit back, drink them with a friend and talk about all the stuff...

Barrel House Distilling is capping a decade of making spirits in the Distillery District on Manchester with a weekend-long party. The events at Barrel House and the Elkhorn Tavern will include live music and food and drink specials nightly, including Oak Rum and Barrel House White Rum Cocktails on Friday. On Saturday, the distillery will release its Barrel House Reserve 10-year-old bourbon at 11...

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky—In Kentucky, bourbon is king. The barrels used to make bourbon can only be used once, so in their next lives, they are sometimes enlisted for other purposes, such as making furniture. But their most unique use by far might just be soy sauce brewing. At Bourbon Barrel Foods, Matt Jamie runs the only soy sauce microbrewery in the U.S., out of a warehouse in the up-and-coming...

Whiskey is renowned for complementing lots of different foods, but it’s a great addition within a dish as well. Encapsulating a host of flavours, Irish whiskey is a versatile yet distinctive ingredient and is a surefire way to put your own stamp on any dish. Irish charcuterie master and one of Ireland’s top trending chefs, Rob Krawczyk, has been using whiskey in his cooking and meat curing...

SHELBYVILLE, Ky., July 17, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tattoos aren't just an art form, but a means of personal expression that continues to evolve as tattoo artists push creative boundaries with ink. Leading into National Tattoo Day, Bulleit Bourbon is teaming up with four trailblazing artists and shaking up tattoo culture with the announcement of Bulleit™ Bourbon Tattoo Edition. The latest Frontier...

Under the partnership, Woodford Reserve will sponsor beverage studies scholarships and also sponsor the Outstanding Bar Program award, which is presented annually at the James Beard Awards. The Brown-Forman-owned brand will also become a “premier sponsor” of the James Beard Foundation’s Taste America, which celebrates America’s “diverse culinary culture”. The Woodford Reserve Beverage Studies...

In 2017, Freddie Noe (son to Jim Beam’s Fred Noe, grandson to the legendary Booker Noe, and the eighth generation distiller of the Beam family) released his first ever batch of liquid gold, Little Book Chapter I: The Easy—a blended straight whiskey. His intent? To make an annual limited-release of blends. Back then, it was a tad of a surprise that Freddie chose to focus on blends—considering that he...