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Heaven Hill Distillery releases ‘pre-fire’ 27-Year-Old Barrel Proof Bourbon

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Start stroking your whiskey retailer connections now, because you may want this.

Heaven Hill Distillery announced the late fall release of a 27-Year-Old Barrel Proof Small Batch Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey.

If you know the story of the Heaven Hill Springs Distillery fire in 1996, you’ve likely done the math to calculate that this whiskey was produced at before that. According to a news release, 41 barrels used in this upcoming bottling were produced in 1989 and 1990.

Each bottle of the 3,000-unit release will be priced at $399—not all that extraordinary given the bourbon’s age and the outlandish prices Paid for younger whiskeys on secondary markets.

Some cool notes about this whiskey:

  • All but five of the barrels in this small batch were aged on the first and second floors of Heaven Hill warehouses.
  • At that height, where the air is cooler, increased humidity saw more evaporation of alcohol than water, causing the whiskey’s proof to drop.
  • When the 41 barrels were mingled for bottling, the natural barrel proof was unusually low 94.7 (47.35% abv).
  • In the glass, the bourbon leads with aromas of dried fruits and baking spices; pipe tobacco notes emerge after a lengthy rest.
  • On the palate it leads with an “explosion of vanilla and floral flavor with traces of pepper and clove” and “the finish is incredibly long, yet very soft.”

Each 750ml bottle comes in a custom-made wooden box lined with blue satin. The box’s exterior bears a pair of Hs on each side and it’s secured with a magnetic closure. The distiller’s notes label features hand-written bottle numbers, tasting notes and DSP-KY-31, denoting the Old Heaven Hill Springs Distillery.

This one-time release is available only in limited markets for a suggested retail price of $399.

Copper & Kings’ new brandy cookbook features works of McGarity, Chavez-Graziano

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In May, Copper & Kings Distillery hired me to manage the making of a modest cookbook of recipes and pairings using its excellent grape and apple brandies. C&K co-owner Joe Heron’s cool idea needed a great team, and, lucky me, I got one: chef Dallas McGarity (Fat Lamb, Portage House), Erika Chavez-Graziano (Cellar Door Chocolates) and C&K’s creative director and photographer, Ron Jasin. I’ve got a great job, but my work isn’t often this fun. To collaborate with a great chef, chocolatier and photographer was a treat. (Better yet, all did their stuff on time, which is any project manager’s dream.)

Now it’s your turn to see what we did.

The book’s name, “Take Me to the River,” is a bit of a double entendre dreamed up by Heron, an unabashed rock music enthusiast. Some know of Al Green’s deliciously bluesy original recorded in 1974, but likely most are more familiar with the Talking Head’s spectacularly quirky remake done five years later. The latter tune, Heron says, is a funky and fitting tribute to Louisville, the river-side city which he and wife, Lesley, have called home for several years.

The book (click here to get your copy or get it at Copper & Kings’ distillery souvenir shop) features Copper & Kings’ aged American Craft Brandy, Floodwall Apple Brandy and Butchertown Reserve Casks Brandy in recipes ranging from amuses, soups and salads through appetizers and entrées. All dishes were developed and prepared by McGarity at the Portage House kitchen over two days of shooting.

Since opening almost four years ago, Copper & Kings has worked closely with U.S. bartenders to develop a solid presence in cocktails. But according to Jasin, the brand saw an opportunity to inspire chefs to cook with its spirits. McGarity’s ease with using brandy as an ingredient, I must add, impressed us both—and the dishes he wrought with kept us full over those two shoots.

McGarity—who wins the award for “Most Organized Chef I’ve Worked With On a Photo Shoot”—believes his peers who use the book will immediately recognize brandy’s versatility.

“The flavor profiles are so dynamic, with fruit, honey, spice and it avoids a cloying sweetness when used well,” he said. “It can be delicate and robust, it can add punch, as well as subtlety. I think chefs are going to have a lot of fun exploring the brandy opportunity in cuisine.”

Home cooks: These recipes were created for your use as well. Instructions are clear and methodical, plus McGarity avoided complex techniques that would have made them inaccessible.

Besides organizing the project, I created a three-country-ham and brandy pairing, in addition to collaborating with Chavez-Graziano on a second paring featuring her chocolates and multiple cheeses. The point of both pairings was to show chefs and home entertainers how easy it is to create dazzling flavors by doing little more than procuring the right ingredients and matching them with good spirits.

Country ham sliced paper thin goes especially well with brandy.

Two other benefits: The book is gorgeous—thanks to Jasin’s photography and McGarity’s and Chavez-Graziano’s edible art—and its compact; barely larger than pocket size, and easy to handle while you’re making the recipes within.

Get it.

Enjoy reading it—with a pour of brandy or a cocktail at hand, of course.

Cook with it just to learn how to use some new spirits and unique ingredients.

And after you’ve enjoyed it some, thank the providers of the food and drink in this book. While books require the likes of me and Jasin to knit the words and static images together, the distillers, chefs and chocolatiers behind it all are the real heroes of this little story.

Old Forester Distilling Co. opens remarkable Whiskey Row distillery

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If you stand on the Main St. sidewalk with your back to the new Old Forester Distilling Co., you’ll see George Garvin Brown’s picture painted on the east-facing wall of Merle’s Whiskey Kitchen. From that angle, Brown’s fixed gaze peers over your head and at the 19th Century brick edifice behind you, which long-ago housed Brown-Forman’s offices.

The distillery’s third floor provides a better view of the static, stoic Brown: you’re now eye-level with the black-and-white image, and it seems, silly or not, wherever you go on premise, Brown’s eyes are ever watching this rebirth of his bourbon creation, a whiskey many regard as unimaginably underappreciated.

Just two years from its sesquicentennial birthday, Old Forester’s case sales remain vastly overshadowed by its 22-year-old sibling, Woodford Reserve. And compared to Brown-Forman’s mega-brand, Jack Daniel’s, the world’s most popular whiskey, which it purchased in 1956, “Old Fo’s” total inventory is a mere splash on the floor.

Yet loads of Louisvillians and spirits pros in the know claim it as a favorite beloved for its bargain price, back bone of spicy rye and accents of stone fruit and caramel. Though I have yet to find a bartender who doesn’t love it, the dozen or so Brown-Forman employees I’ve asked about it will acknowledge their preference for it over Woodford only in hushed whispers. Seems that all public praise—unless one works specifically for Old Forester—is saved for the brown spirits found in the slumped-shoulder bottles filled in Versailles, Ky.

Now, however, it appears Old Fo’ is getting its proper due. Seventeen years ago, B-F, began extending its product line, albeit cautiously. To the reliable line of 86-proof proof standard and the stellar 100-proof Signature came Birthday Bourbon. This was a whiskey B-F master distiller Chris Morris said at a recent

press conference, “used to be something we couldn’t give away at $39,” but today people wait in long lines to pay triple that price. Fourteen years later, Old Forester launched the first of its four-expression Whiskey Row series, a lineup that has been wildly successful.

Then, four years ago, B-F announced plans to build a distillery in the very spot where Brown-Forman set up its downtown offices in 1882: Whiskey Row, where 89 other booze-related businesses operated. That distillery opens today, and if you’re a whiskey fan, you’re going to love it.

Old Forester Distilling Co. is the finest example of a purpose-built tourist distillery in the state—and that’s saying a lot given the likes of flashy, full-production facilities like Kentucky Peerless Distilling and Angel’s Envy just blocks away. Why? Because no distillery in the country has a working cooperage on premise except this one. When bourbon gets 100 percent of its color and 50 percent of its flavor from the barrel, it’s about time someone figured out out how to make barrel coopering the pièce de résistance of an actual distillery tour. (Check out my short video of the charring process on my Facebook page, and make sure to have your sound on.)

Coopers hand assemble barrels to be filled with whiskey distilled on site.

The reality is such a feature is prohibitively expensive. The specific and uncommon machinery, ventilation and labor required to create such a working exhibit surely claimed a sizeable chunk of the $45 million cost of the project. But when you see it in action, you’ll deem it shareholder money well spent.

The rest of the tour is much like others’: a story told with ample visual and palpable cues, concluding with a whiskey tasting. All good stuff, necessary parts of the experience.

The heart of the distillery is a 44-foot-tall, gleaming copper-clad column still approachable via a stroll through the gift shop (naturally) and a short ascent up a series of stairs vaguely resembling a Gothic church altar. The visual message is clear: this is a working distillery, and you’ll see how whiskey is made.

About 100,000 proof gallons of Old Forester will be distilled here, but all its mash will be cooked at Old Forester’s larger Shively distillery. Once cooked, the mash is moved to the 119 Main St. distillery where it’s fermented and distilled. According to our tour guide, about 20 percent of Old Forester’s annual production will derive from Whiskey Row. (Update: According to WDRB.com, brand president Campbell Brown wants to boost business to 1 million cases, a five-fold increase over now.)

Within its 70,000 square-feet are four, 4,500-gallon fermenters and a 900-barrel rickhouse in the building’s rear. To understand the difficulty of setting up a working distillery and cooperage in a tight, urban space never designed for such occupancy, filled barrels weighing more than 500 pounds each must exit the front of the building, be loaded onto a flatbed truck and then hauled around the block to the back of the building where they’re stored for aging. At a production snail’s pace of about 15 barrels a day, the rickhouse will be filled in roughly six months. (For comparison, Jim Beam’s Booker Noe Plant in Boston, Ky., produces 1,500 barrels daily; Heaven Hill, 1,300.)

Visitors will see a sophisticated modern bottling line as well, one filling 15 bottles per minute—less than one-tenth the speed of B-F’s Shively bottling operation.

Though Old Forester Distilling Co. will be the site of private single-barrel selections and where many of its special releases will be made, its creation wasn’t only about having a new production site. Such an operation could have been built for far less than what the company spent on the Main Street site.

The new distillery is about driving consumer education, increasing brand awareness and adding fuel to the fire of bourbon culture. It’s also a statement that the bourbon boom is far from a bust, and that it’s time to celebrate these halcyon days.

From the top of the rickhouse one can see barrels in aging and the distillery’s blending tanks.

To Fo’ fans like me, this also about a prized brand getting its due: a home bearing its name and a high-profile location where others can learn just how good this whiskey really is.

Tours operate daily: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (the only days when production is in full swing), Monday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 12-5 p.m. Cost for tours is $16.

ALEX&NDER bar opens at Copper & Kings distillery in Butchertown

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For fans of Copper & Kings American Brandy Distillery in Butchertown, the opening of its ALEX&NDER rooftop bar has been a long time coming. They knew it would represent more than just another good watering hole, they knew it would be first rate like everything else the state’s lone brandy distillery does: innovative, modern, artistic and just plain cool, too.

ALEX&NDER is the manifestation of a brandy-centric cocktail bar envisioned by owners Joe and Lesley Heron. And since they make gin and absinthe as well, expect those on the list, too.

“Who wouldn’t want to have a bar where nearly all of what’s featured on the shelves is your own products,” said Joe Heron. Wines and cocktail amendments C&K doesn’t make, but which are needed for drinks with classic lineage, are interspersed throughout the bar, but by and large, all else bears the & for which its known.

Nope. No bourbon or tequila. (Yet at least.) This is all about grape distillate, not grain or agave.

“Our timing was just great—OK, we were lucky as hell,” Heron told me months ago when the overhaul of the distillery’s upstairs party room—a glass-walled, third-floor space with a dramatic view of Louisville’s skyline—began. “The law (prohibiting drinks sales at distilleries) changed in our favor, and we were really eager to take advantage of it.”

Want crazy good brandy cocktails? This is your place. The bartenders here have mad skills, and you’ll recognize them from around town.

Try a Negroni, made with Copper & Kings dry gin, when you’re there. Photo by Steve Coomes

Wait, what’s that? You’ve never had a brandy cocktail? Then class is in session, a class you’ll never cut, I’m sure.

You’ll recognize many names on the list: side car, Negroni, old fashioned, etc. But if you’re an open-minded cocktail fan, prepare to be wowed by the brandy and gin-based versions you’ll get here.

On Monday’s Industry Night preview, I had only time for one (a Negroni, of course) before leaving. It was fabulous; one of the best I’ve had in Louisville. My wife raved equally about the Gin Gin Mule made with C&K’s ginger beer—the most flavorful ginger beer you’ll find in this market. (Don’t buy it if you don’t want to get hooked on it.)

ALEX&NDER is gorgeous, spacious and includes an expansive outdoor deck. Go see it for yourself. If you’ve grown fond of events held in the courtyard downstairs, just wait until you come upstairs.

You’ll have plenty of opportunities to visit: Wednesday and Thursday, 5-11 p.m., Friday and Saturday, 5 p.m. to 2 a.m., and Sunday, 5-11 p.m.

Experience great cocktails like you’ve never had them in Louisville. Go to ALEX&NDER.

American cured ham’s time has come

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“American food is wonderful, but if this country is ever going to rise to the gastronomic heights of France, Italy and Spain, and take strides toward global respect for our national cuisine, we must begin to see our country as a unified gastronomic mosaic and acknowledge brilliance where it exists.”

— Patrick Martins, author, “The Carnivore’s Manifesto” and founder of Heritage Foods USA

When I read that quote this morning, I knew Martins was right. It’s well beyond time for American food to stand alongside edibles made in historically food-centric countries around the globe. Doesn’t matter that our nation is just 242 years old and France, Italy and Spain are comparable culinary geezers; we can and should raise the bar.

But he’s not talking about our restaurants as much as the ingredients we feed ourselves and others; that’s the motif woven through his excellent book, “The Carnivore’s Manifesto,” (hyperlinked here). When we begin 1. shopping more for quality and taste, 2. less for price, and 3. make good, nutritious and healthful ingredients affordable to all, we’ll have a nation whose standards for what we consume—the very fuel for our bodies—will rise high enough to gain the respect of others.

Fresh slices of Tennshootoe 18-month old ham by The Hamery in Murfreesboro, Tenn. Photo by Steve Coomes

There are few other places where improvement is needed—and could be cherished the world round—than in our cured hams. According to USDA numbers, about 2.5 million hams are cured commercially every year in the U.S.

Yet according to Italian and Spanish ham curing sources, the U.S. imports 4 million hams annually.

The demand here is clear, but the supply is upside down.

Part of the blame can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the USDA, which, if you ask any ham curer, is ill-trained to inspect ham curing plants fairly. I’m told regularly that most inspectors simply don’t understand the science or the application of curing and, consequently, drive curers crazy with their ignorance. And while imported hams endure no such scrutiny, American cured hams—country hams especially—bear warning labels stating, “this product should be cooked before eating,” even though it’s held safely at room temperature.

Part of the blame also lies in the laps of some dry-curers, who hold their products in low regard. They see them as food set aside for special occasions like Easter and Christmas, when they’re boiled, simmered, deboned and baked … to death.

Few I interviewed for my book, “Country Ham: A Southern Tradition of Hogs, Salt & Smoke,” ever eat their ham sliced paper thin like prosciutto, which is exactly what’s being done to the FOUR MILLION HAMS imported here every year! Not all are guilty of this, but the major players make no effort to tap into the exploding market for charcuterie by selling their hams as ready to eat, much less taking the time to long-cure them. Somehow it’s not obvious to them that foreigners rule their market!

Those who are really pushing cured ham eaten as charcuterie—Edwards & Sons, La Quercia, The Hamery, Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams and  Col. Bill Newsom’s Aged Kentucky Country hams—make up less than 100,000 of that 2.5 million-ham supply. They’re fighting an uphill battle while super-small producers in restaurants and butcher shops across the country, are making inroads with restaurants, gourmands and newcomers to cured meats.

As Martins says elsewhere in his book, better food—in this case, pigs—starts with heritage breed hogs allowed to root in fields for grubs, nuts, vegetables and more, not lean hogs raised in factory settings and genetically modified for uniformity. Hogs with good lifestyles produce good, interlarded meat that cures well over long periods, meat that tastes sublime and on par with anything coming from Europe.

The market is there for American cured ham. And if you don’t believe me, check out the dozens of curing groups on Facebook alone. I predict that this grassroots movement born in home kitchens will do to American cured meats what homebrewing did to American craft brewing.

American cured ham makers, your time is now.

Corbett’s sale of Equus and Jack’s Lounge was timely and wise

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Thirty-three years ago, when I cooked alongside Dean Corbett at Sixth Avenue (he a 23-year-old sous chef, I a 21-year-old cook), he said he was leaving to take over Equus, a little-known, struggling restaurant in St. Matthews. I thought to myself, “He’s talented and ambitious, but I’m not sure he can actually own and run a restaurant.”

Dean Corbett and Jared Matthews. (Photo courtesy of Jared Matthews)

I told him that story once and in his characteristically self-effacing way, he laughed and said, “Trust me, I was thinking the same thing back then! I was terrified I’d gotten myself into something I couldn’t manage. Had my dad not believed in my ability to do it, I’d have not done it.”

In late May, Corbett sold the venerable restaurant and its sister business, Jack’s Lounge, to Jared Matthews, a longtime partner in Diamond Station who bought Café Lou Lou more than a year ago. Just as he’s given new life to Lou Lou, he plans to move similarly to tweak and adjust Equus-Jack’s—named fittingly after Corbett’s late father.

Details of the sale were not disclosed, but for the near term, Corbett will retain his dual role as executive chef and affable front-of-the-house figure. Some wonder if the eventual end of Corbett’s influence as Equus-Jack’s essential persona will damage the restaurant’s feel and appeal, but I doubt it. Corbett is, at present, undeniably the face of the business. But as he gradually winds down his role there over the next couple of years, Matthews’ influence will take over, new customers will be courted, and the business will begin a new cycle of life.

This is not a bad thing, as some portend. It’s normal. Founders can’t live forever. Businesses very regularly operate for years under the guidance of successive owners. I’m happy to see Equus-Jack’s live on, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it’ll head.

Frankly, I’m glad to see Corbett dial back his workload. He needs a break, needs some family time. Few, if anyone, in the local restaurant community works harder than he. The restaurant industry punishes the body, mind and, sometimes, the soul. No one emerges unscarred from daily battles in its trenches. He’ll tell you that he could use some healing rest.

And that’s just the work done inside his businesses. No local restaurateur has raised more money or worked as tirelessly piloting charity fundraisers as Corbett. Volunteering his time and determination, he’s raised millions for Norton’s Children’s Hospital (Bourbon & Bowties) and Gilda’s Club (Night of a Thousand Laughs), among others.

Perhaps equally important is his incredible influence among local restaurateurs and chefs. When he wants you to cook for or contribute to a cause, it’s desperately hard to say no to Chef Deano. I can’t think of any other chef who has such pull.

Perhaps Corbett’s most notable mark on the community was his namesake restaurant, Corbett’s: An American Place. For 10 years it was the finest of the city’s fine dining restaurants. For all the good Casa Grisanti, Sixth Avenue, Mama Grisanti, Embassy Club, Hasenour’s and others did to lay the foundation for Louisville’s ongoing restaurant boom, none had the total package like Corbett’s. It was a dining temple built for grandeur, and its food and service delivered balanced excellence like none other in town.

To say Corbett was heartbroken when he closed it last November is an understatement.

“I put everything I had into that place,” he told me the day after it closed. “I couldn’t have given it any more than I did.”

A few weeks ago, when he and Matthews were arranging the Equus-Jack’s sale, Corbett told me, “I’m worn out after 40 years in this business. I started as a dishwasher at Red Lobster, worked in restaurants in Texas when I was in college, worked for the Grisantis and then myself. Forty years is enough for anybody in any job.”

Those are the words of a tired man who knows relief is on the way, but who isn’t far-enough removed from his career to see its impact. When that overdue rest and relaxation come, I bet it’ll change his perspective; delight will begin to replace the blinding fatigue. When the day-to-day grind of ordering, managing and bill-paying are gone from his plate, Corbett will begin to feel the joy of a hard life well lived. I predict he’ll see, as so many of us already do, how he helped advance the Louisville restaurant scene far beyond where it was when he bought Equus in 1985, and he’ll delight in that fact.

MICHTER’S BARREL STRENGTH RYE REVIEW

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A short summary of my latest whiskey review of Michter’s Barrel Strength Rye posted to BourbonBanter.com …

Michter’s Barrel Strength Rye

NOSE: Stone fruit/cherry  |  bubble gum, graham cracker, cereal  |  whiff of mown grass and sawn lumber, light minerality

TASTE: Loads of brown sugar on entry  |  baking spice at midpalate  |  viscous and oaky all around  |  delicious lingering, mouthcoating sweetness

FINISH: Long, luscious, warm and memorable, leaves me craving another sip. Despite the 113.8 proof, there’s only warmth, no burn. Though reluctant to add water, I did and saw the oak ramp up appreciably and the fruit intensify sharply. Peppermint and meringue come alive. Long after my sip was finished, dried rye comes remains on my palate.

Read my complete Michter’s Barrel Strength Rye review at BourbonBanter.com

Long overdue: Mario Batali focus of 60 Minutes exposé on sexual harassment

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Oh, Mario. Boy, oh, boy, Mario.

For years, industry talk trickling southward said you were a bad boy. But until last night’s episode of “60 Minutes,” I had no inkling of just how bad. I’d heard stories about what men in the restaurant industry call normal horseplay, but I’d never heard the debased tales of what viewers of the nation’s most respected news show heard last night:

  • The unwanted remarks
  • The forceful grabbing
  • The drugging of drinks
  • The implied forced sex

Molto terribile, capucuoco.

But it was all in fun, right? Just life in the restaurant biz; stuff that happens.

Or was it more a power play, say your right as an employer to paw whomever whenever?

I’m not motivational expert, but I’m not seeing that as a staff morale booster, Mario.

No wonder they nicknamed you the Red Menace.

Seems like your buddy, Ken Friedman, owner of The Spotted Pig, thought he was entitled to it. According to the women interviewed, he simply preyed on who he chose to and dared those women employees to retaliate; blackballed them if they quit to work elsewhere.

Reckon what clever nickname Friedman got?

On second thought, I don’t want to know.

For those who don’t follow the restaurant industry closely, this merely is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the rampant problem of sexual harassment. Batali and a handful of other star chefs are just the famous ones. It happens at every level of the industry.

Harassment was common when I was in the biz: lewd remarks and groping—and that was just the women on the men—which dudes didn’t seem to mind or didn’t claim to. That wouldn’t be macho. Happened even to me: two different women and one gay man. Strange and alarming every time.

Of course, that was small potatoes compared to what men did to women: the endless remarks, the constant bumping into and pawing, the cornering in cramped spaces, the creepy leering, the “Oh, come on, let’s go out, get some drinks, smoke some pot, you and me, baby,” variety of perverted nagging.

But I never saw or heard of what was mentioned in the 60 Minutes piece. Ever.

And I never saw it from the owners I worked for. Ever.

Did they know it was happening in their restaurants? I can’t say for sure. I know for certain that I never heard a woman on staff say they any owner did or said anything like what Friedman and Batali are accused of. I think they were (and still are) decent, high-integrity men.

Call me lucky, I guess, because I’ve read a couple of dozen books by chefs and restaurateurs who remark casually—sometimes triumphantly—about the sex, drugs and rock and roll culture of restaurants.

Reckon if they’re wondering now whether they should have written those stories?

But all that’s starting to change, especially with the momentum triggered by the #metoo movement.

Such change is long overdue, and as abused and harassed women speak out, stars like Batali will fall from the foodservice firmament. And there will be hell to pay.

Mangia that, Mario.

WATCH THE EPISODE BY CLICKING HERE.

The British came and launched American Whiskey magazine

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American whiskey is hot. We’re experiencing a bourbon boom and a rye renaissance, and though brandy isn’t whiskey, domestic versions of that potent potable also are on the rise. We make great liquor here!

So, if you heard about the launch of American Whiskey magazine this past Tuesday in Louisville and thought, “Well, ‘bout time,” you’re not alone.

That’s not the only bit of irony tied to this good news, great booze story.

It was London-based Paragraph Publishing, owner of Whisky magazine, that moved to launch a Yankee version. Redcoat distillers (of Scotch and Irish whiskeys) still own the lion’s share of the global market, but over the past few years, Yankee liquor has consumed a sizeable-enough number of that mag’s editorial and advertising pages that it saw fit to give North American spirits a publication of their own. (Expect stories on Canadian whiskey also.)

Whisky Advocate, a terrific U.S.-based spirits publication, is like Whisky magazine in that it takes a global look at distilled grain spirits. It has for years been the lone whiskey authority, yet while that mantel will be challenged, there’s PLENTY to write about.

Shares of advertising between the two will be another concern altogether. Launching a print publication in this era of the Internet seems foolish to some, but I think there’s plenty of room for profitability in this space since American spirits, as a whole, lack coverage. It’s my hunch that if you print it, they’ll read it, and that the mag will do well.

Dozens of local bartenders have told me that Louisville customers, by and large, aren’t whiskey savvy—much less bourbon savvy—which tells me we have lots to learn. Good thing there’s a new print piece to further that education.

If you plan to read it (here’s the link to subscribe for $19.99 a year), don’t expect bourbon only. Shocker, I know, but some in the Bluegrass don’t cotton to the notion that the sun doesn’t rise and set solely on distilleries cooking 51 percent corn mashbills. As I mentioned, American rye whiskey is on a rocket ride, and malt whiskey (the base great for Scotch) is bubbling up from the craft distillery level at an impressive rate. As I wrote about recently, Woodford Reserve will release a malt whiskey in June, and you can expect other large(ish) distilleries to follow suit in due time.

Bottom line is this magazine will serve to highlight more of what’s happening in Kentucky, where most of the nation’s spirits are produced. How whiskey is made here is very different from what happens overseas—not better, just different. Same for the people who make it: different, not better. I’m looking forward to reading (and writing) about more of what happens long before a bottle hits a retailer’s shelf. And I hope you will too—especially since these people are your neighbors.

Bardstown’s Getz Museum of Whiskey History receives Frazier Prohibition exhibit

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Ever wondered where longstanding museum exhibits go when their time ends?

Thanks to the Frazier History Museum, the incredibly popular “Spirits of the Bluegrass: Prohibition and Kentucky” exhibit will live on for at least two more years when it’s reopened this month at the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History in Bardstown, Ky.

The goodness and smartness of this idea is hard to exaggerate. The Getz gets too little love attention despite its location at the center of Bourbon Country. This shot in the arm will serve it well by raising the museum’s profile among visitors and give even more people good reasons to visit Bardstown.

To the details supplied in a news release:

“On May 19 Spirits of the Bluegrass: Prohibition and Kentucky, one of the most popular exhibitions in the Frazier’s 14-year history, will re-open at the Getz Museum in Bardstown, marking the first time ever that a Frazier original has hit the road as a traveling exhibition. The acquisition has inspired the Getz to renovate its own permanent collection, adopting a rotating cast of displays to help freshen up the experience for visitors. …

“Featuring two full bars and a lighted stage, the Frazier’s Prohibition and Kentucky exhibit, which ran from fall 2016 to winter 2018, explored the unintended consequences of Prohibition by tracing the rise of the temperance movement, bootleggers, speakeasies and flappers during the 1920s and ‘30s. But given the size of the venue, the new exhibit will be a slightly scaled down and — no pun intended! — distilled version of the original. …

“A lineup of artifacts organized chronologically will tell the story of the temperance movement, followed by Prohibition in 1920 and its repeal in 1933. A new point of focus will be Prohibition’s impact on the city of Bardstown, where a black market for moonshine replaced the shuttered liquor distilleries. …

“Prohibition and Kentucky will open to the public on Saturday, May 19, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and remain open at the Getz Museum for a period of two or three years. …

“On June 14, National Bourbon Day, the Getz will host a ceremonial ribbon-cutting to officially kick off the exhibit and celebrate the holiday. As a nod to the culture of the Prohibition era, the Getz will have a 1920s jazz band play while teetotalers and partiers voice their preferences.

“The Oscar Getz Museum opened in 1984 … and is located in Spalding Hall, an antebellum brick building that served as a hospital during the Civil War. …

“At the insistence of the Getz family, admission to the museum remains free of charge.

The Frazier’s new partnership with the Getz reflects its burgeoning commitment to Bourbon tourism. On August 25 the Frazier Museum will be launching two Bourbon-themed projects of its own: the Kentucky Bourbon Trail® Welcome Center and Spirit of Kentucky exhibition. …

“The Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History is open year-round, six or seven days a week (closed on Mondays during the winter) with attendance thriving during the Kentucky Bourbon Festival in September. Whisky Magazine has named the Getz as a “Whiskey Visitor Attraction of the Year.” Guided tours are available upon request.”