Читать книгу Barrel Strength Bourbon - Carla Harris Carlton - Страница 12

ALONG THE OHIO RIVER in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, bourbon’s future is rising from its past.

At the turn of the 20th century, Brown-Forman warehoused hundreds of barrels of Old Forester bourbon in a three-story brick building at 117 W. Main St., a bustling thoroughfare then known as “Whiskey Row” for the scores of spirits companies located there. As a strategic shipping hub, Louisville was once the center of the bourbon universe. But when Prohibition was enacted in 1920, most of the distilling companies were shuttered and Brown-Forman, which had been granted one of six licenses in the nation to sell bourbon for medicinal purposes, left downtown for a location several miles south, where it could store the thousands of barrels it acquired during consolidation of other distillers’ inventories.

In early 2016, the sounds of hammers and power saws echoed inside the building at 117 W. Main and its next-door neighbor at 119, both steadied from the outside by steel rods spread like poker hands. (You’d probably need a little propping up, too, if you were 159 years old.) Unfurled across their facades, a large banner proclaims, OLD FORESTER DISTILLERY: OPENING IN 2017.

More than 80 years after this river city’s Whiskey Row faded into obscurity, distillers and civic leaders are betting that the recent global thirst for bourbon will continue. Just a few blocks east of the Old Forester site, Angel’s Envy has opened its own distillery behind the facade of another 19th century–era building. As you travel farther west on Main, you’ll pass the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, a microdistillery and tourist attraction, at 6th Street; the old Fort Nelson Building at 8th Street, which Michter’s is rehabbing into a boutique distillery; and, at 10th Street, Peerless Distilling a craft distillery that bears the same name and Distilled Spirits Plant number (50) as the distillery that owner Corky Taylor’s great-grandfather operated in the early 1900s in Henderson, Kentucky.

Angel’s Envy’s new Whiskey Row distillery, which opened in November 2016 on Louisville’s Main Street, incorporates the arched windows and vaulted ceilings of a century-old warehouse. (Photos: Kevin Curtis/Louisville Distilling Co.)

Angel’s Envy’s new Whiskey Row distillery, which opened in November 2016 on Louisville’s Main Street, incorporates the arched windows and vaulted ceilings of a century-old warehouse. (Photos: Kevin Curtis/Louisville Distilling Co.)

Angel’s Envy’s new Whiskey Row distillery, which opened in November 2016 on Louisville’s Main Street, incorporates the arched windows and vaulted ceilings of a century-old warehouse. (Photos: Kevin Curtis/Louisville Distilling Co.)

These projects represent just a fraction of the more than $400 million that distilling companies have invested in capital projects in Kentucky since 2008: new stills, bottling lines, and warehouses, and larger visitor centers. And another $630 million in projects is planned over the next five years.

A new wave of craft distilleries is rising not just in Kentucky but across the country. Kentucky actually ranks only 11th on the list of states’ total numbers of distillers nationwide. But its numbers include all of the industry giants—Brown-Forman, Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, Four Roses, Buffalo Trace, Maker’s Mark, and Heaven Hill among them—and, as a result, Kentucky produces about 95% of the world’s supply of bourbon.

Since the year 2000, that production has increased by more than 315%, to 1.89 million barrels in 2015. And more than 6.6 million barrels are currently maturing in warehouses in the Bluegrass State.

People aren’t just drinking Kentucky bourbon; they’re coming to visit it. In 2016, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and Kentucky Bourbon Trail Craft Tour recorded 1,065,961 visits, breaking the 1 million mark for the first time. That number is expected to grow as more distilleries join the tours.

MB Roland Kentucky bourbon. (Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association)

The Old Pogue Distillery. (Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association)

Still at Old Pogue. (Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association)

Barrels at Copper & Kings American Brandy Co. (Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association)

Boone County Distilling’s Tanner’s Curse. (Photo courtesy of Boone County Distilling Co.)

Corsair product samples. (Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association)

Close-up of Wilderness Trail still. (Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association)

New Riff Distillery (Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association)

Willett Distillery (Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association)

On the job at Limestone Trace (Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association)

A five-story bottle keeps the “bourbon” flowing at the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience in downtown Louisville, where guests may sample premium products made by Heaven Hill. (Photos courtesy of Heaven Hill)

Guests may sample premium products made by Heaven Hill. (Photos courtesy of Heaven Hill)

“I think some of that has to do with the millennial generation wanting authenticity and being entrepreneurs, but also the older business generation realizing how important it is to promote your differentiating points,” says Stacey Yates, vice president of marketing communications for the Louisville Convention & Visitors Bureau. “Not to dis the chains, but most travelers want that authentic experience now.”

Yates has helped to burnish the reputation of what was long regarded as a rough-edged spirit by creating Louisville’s Urban Bourbon Trail, in which member restaurants not only feature at least 50 kinds of bourbon but also use it as an ingredient in fine cuisine and serious cocktails. Social media and mass media have also done their part to make bourbon cool again, she says. “You can’t underestimate the power of Don Draper drinking an old-fashioned on Mad Men. You just can’t. It did for Kentucky what Sideways did for wine country.”

The longstanding annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival in Bardstown, the Bourbon Capital of the World, has been joined by other high-profile bourbon events, including the Bourbon Classic in Louisville, in which top mixologists and some of Kentucky’s finest chefs create classic pairings; and the Kentucky Distillers’ Association’s Bourbon Affair, a weeklong “fantasy camp” that offers enthusiasts exclusive opportunities such as the chance to fish with Jim Beam Master Distiller Fred Noe or shoot skeet at Wild Turkey with Master Distiller Jimmy Russell. Each year, the KDA offers 50 Golden Tickets that offer a combination of events and experiences. In 2014, the Affair’s inaugural year, the 50 tickets sold out in a week at $1,350 each. In 2016, at $1,595 apiece, they sold out in 15 minutes.

Additional proof of bourbon’s appeal could be found in the Fantasy Gifts section of the 2015 Neiman Marcus Christmas Book, where “eye-popping, jaw-dropping dreams come true.” Nestled between a two-day California coast road trip on custom motorcycles with actor Keanu Reeves ($150,000) and an exploration of the edge of space in a capsule lifted by a high-altitude balloon to 100,000 feet ($90,000) was the Orphan Barrel Project gift, a trip for six to Stitzel-Weller in Louisville to sample rare bourbon finds and create two new blends to be bottled with custom labels. In all, the recipient was promised 24 bottles each of the two blends and the six other Orphan Barrel varieties; a bespoke whiskey cabinet crafted in Kentucky; barware; a leather-bound book about the whiskey; and three nights of luxury accommodations, meals, and first-class travel. The price? A cool $125,000.

The popularity of bourbon is further evident in the variety of businesses jumping on the bourbon bandwagon. There are bourbon chocolates, bourbon-scented soaps and lip balm, furniture made from bourbon barrels, and a new bottled water called Old Limestone that is being marketed as “the official companion of Kentucky Bourbon.” Kentucky grain farmers are even starting to talk about “terroir.”

We’ve come a long way from the time when former Four Roses Master Distiller Jim Rutledge (who was then working at Seagram) and an associate asked for bourbon at a restaurant outside Kentucky. “We both took a drink and almost spit it out,” he says. “We thought, ‘God, what’s wrong with this? Is it poisonous?’ And then we realized that it wasn’t poison—it was just Scotch.”

Jim Rutledge, former Master Distiller at Four Roses (Photo: Carla Carlton)

Scotch whisky (without the e) has dominated the world whiskey market for centuries. That began to change, Rutledge says, when the American bourbon industry started focusing on premium single-barrel and small-batch products. The pendulum has swung so far in the other direction, in fact, that now Scotch producers are highlighting their lighter, mellower whiskies. One Scotch distiller he encountered at trade events has begun aging his spirit in new oak barrels rather than in the used ones typical to Scotch.

“I’d ask some of these other distillers or blenders what they thought about it, and they’d say”—here, Rutledge puts on an expression of disgust—“ ‘It tastes like bourbon.’ They were really irritated. They didn’t like it at all. You’d see them turning red. They’d get mad. But that’s the biggest compliment of all, when Scotch starts to emulate what we’re doing.”

Can this bourbon boom continue? I’ll try to answer that question in the following pages. Along the way, I’ll take you on a short journey through the history of the amber spirit and introduce you to some of the industry’s biggest personalities. I’ll explain how bourbon is made and how it differs from other kinds of whiskey. I’ll teach you how to taste bourbon, and I’ll give you a vocabulary to describe what you’re tasting. If that sounds a lot like school, take heart: there won’t be a test, and the homework is delicious.