Thursday, May 26, 2016

Day 1 of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail

My Old Kentucky Home Campground

Under beautiful skies we pulled out of our little piece of heaven above the Mississippi River and headed East, towards the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.

 

 

 

Our first stop was Four Roses. We took a tour of their bottling and warehouse operation.

 

These are newly emptied bourbon barrels. Mmm...know what would taste awesome in these barrels? Bourbon aged Cello Chocolate.

 

 

 

Here's the single barrel bourbon being bottled. (Try and say that fast 3 times after you've sampled bourbon all afternoon!)

 

 

Ned in the rickhouse, one of 4 Roses' 20 warehouses. The aroma in this place was amazing!

 

 

After the tour we sampled 3 bourbons.

 

 

 

 

My fave was definitely the Small Batch.

 

Ned measuring up a barrel to see if it would actually fit in Winnie. Yes, we are seriously considering buying a bourbon barrel from 4 Roses and aging some of our chocolate in it. The question is...

1. Will it fit? 2. Do we really want to haul a 53 gallon bourbon barrel with us for the next 5 weeks? 3. Will we get used to the bourbon smell? 4. Does this qualify as an open container? 5. Are we just plain crazy?

 

 

We decided to go to visit another bourbon place and mull things over. We went to Heaven Hill Heritage Center and opted out of the tour and just went right to the tasting.

 

Ned checking the aroma before tasting the Elijiah Craig bourbon.

 

 

 

Debi tasting the 25 year old bourbon. Not my favorite. Good thing there are others to keep trying.

 

 

Yeah, I tried them all. Oh hell, let's go buy that ol' bourbon barrel and drive it 8,000 miles!

 

 

Ned doing the sniff test on aromas of differently aged bourbons. We were pretty silly by this point.

 

 

We decided to sober up by looking for a local bbq joint. After all, this is Kentucky. (For the record, Ned was in much better shape than me. Perhaps he didn't imbibe as much?)

Perfect...can't go wrong when you see a smoker in the parking lot, in the rain.

 

Ordering cornbread with our bbq. In this part of the country it comes as a cornmeal pancake.

 

 

In the camper now doing some serious pros v. cons of buying the bourbon barrel. If we do this, what friends will help taste our aged bourbon barrel chocolate? Figure by the time we get back, roast the beans, age the nibs, we're looking at late fall. Who's in??

 

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