I have a house very close to the Woodford Reserve Distillery in Versailles Kentucky and the Makers Mark and a few other Distilleries are just a few miles away as well.
Below are a few facts I lifted from a website ……….
* Bourbon can be made anywhere in the U.S.
Many people assume that because bourbon is named after Bourbon County, Kentucky, where it was first made in the 1800s, that it must be made in Kentucky to be called bourbon. After all, isn't Jack Daniel's basically the same thing, only it's made in Tennessee? That's a common misconception. According to Maker's Mark Master Distiller Kevin Smith, whiskey can be called bourbon no matter where in the country it's made -- it just has to be made according to the rules we laid out above. So why is JD's not bourbon? Because it's filtered through maple wood charcoal before being aged in oak barrels, which is an extra step that isn't included in making bourbon.
* Bourbon distillers can only use their barrels once
When bourbon distillers are done with the barrels they use to age the bourbon, they are reused to age other non-bourbon whiskies. Reusing the barrels makes sense, because they cost around $120 each. For example, Maker's Mark and Jim Beam send some of their barrels across the Atlantic to Scotland, where they're used to age Laphroaig single malt Scotch.
* The weather during the aging process affects bourbon's taste
During aging, bourbon-filled barrels are kept in big, multi-storey warehouses called rickhouses. Rickhouses are very rarely climate-controlled, and depending on the outside weather, the wood barrels expand and contract, imparting different types of flavor into the liquor. The hotter the weather, the more the pores of the wood open up and impart their flavor -- as a result, barrels stored on the top floor of the rickhouse, where it's hotter, will have a slightly different flavor than those stored on the bottom floor.
* During World War II, bourbon distilleries were converted to make fuel alcohol and penicillin
Bourbon distilleries were shut down during Prohibition (which lasted from 1920 to 1933), and they barely had the chance to get back up and running when World War II started and the distilleries were repurposed to make recently invented penicillin. Penicillin is a product of fermentation, so distilleries were a natural choice for places to make it in mass quantities. Because of these historical disruptions to bourbon production, the market for the spirit didn't pick up again until the late 1980s.
Woodford Reserve Distillery where I eat lunch a few times a month when in Kentucky:
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