I started writing this post a few days ago, and now I'm completing it on a day when many of my coworkers and friends were laid off. And I'm doing so without a drink in hand. The optimism of the first half of the post is genuine, but no promises about the second half.
Downtown Bardstown won me over instantly. It's so cute! A bunch of restaurants, independent shops, coffee houses, bars, and at least one good liquor store. It all closes up very early though.
Thousands of acres of bright green not-quite-bluegrass surrounds the town. And upon that land stands a number of distilleries and their warehouses. Thus I booked two nights in Bardstown.
My original goal was to wake up early and walk a few miles of Bernheim Forest. I did neither. And in a rare moment of insanity, I arrived at my first facility early.
Though I have no pictures of the Heaven Hill Bourbon Experience, there are plenty of notes staring back at me right now. Heaven Hill's actual distillery operates in Louisville, but their offsite Experience offers more whiskey stuff than Evan Williams in River City (more on that in a few days). At the Experience I chose the "Grain to Glass Tasting Experience" experience.
That Heaven Hill had partnered with independent farmers to make spirit-forward whiskies I had known, but not much more than that. The Grain to Glass range offers a bourbon, wheated bourbon, and rye. With the corn (strain Becks 6198) and wheat grown at Peterson Farms. The event lets tourists try each of the three, get all the supply chain details, and receive a Heaven Hill history lesson.
While the wheated bourbon and rye rumble in at barrel strength, the rye-d bourbon is bottled at a lower strength, 52%abv. Each has a 6-year age statement. And, yes, they are spirit-forward, but in a calmer fashion than Craft whiskey. For what it's worth, I enjoyed all three, but the straight rye won (surprise!), it also took to water much better than American whiskey usually does.
Heaven Hill stats: The founding family, the Shapiras, still owns the company with Kate Shapira running the show. (Yes you read that correctly, a woman of Jewish lineage oversees a massive American whiskey company. 🩷) Within their 83 warehouses, in seven different locations, Heaven Hill has the second-highest volume of aging whiskey in the country; 2.6 million barrels, with Beam edging them out at 2.8 million. The current distillery produces 450K barrels per year, while a new smaller distillery in the works.
If you have not seen any of the footage of the 1996 Heaven Hill fire, I strongly recommend you do so. The images may be triggering for some of my California readers, specifically the size and intensity of the conflagration's flames. As the company rebuilt its facilities in the late '90s, many of the other major distilleries provided whisky for Heaven Hill to bottle so that business wouldn't stop completely. One wonders if the industry would be so united today.
On a final note, I may have discovered why I find HH's whiskies so much more palatable than most of the other distilleries' products. The majority of major bourbon distilleries use a #4 or #5 char inside their barrels, while Heaven Hill uses #3 char. Could that lead more graceful aging, more spirit notes, and less bitterness? I think so.
And then I went to Willett...
On the tour I tried nine of their whiskies (all of them distilled on site), and liked none of them. The rye, of all things, was the most difficult to drink. The bourbons were all very bitter and acidic. The rye was such a shock because, after all the years of gorgeous MGP-sourced single barrels, the product with the same bottles and labels now contain unbalanced Craft rye. Expensive unbalanced Craft rye. Maybe it gets better after 4 years?
Here's the rundown of Willett info: They have seven five-story rickhouses, none of which are temperature controlled. They do not rotate their barrels (similar to Four Roses but with very different results). Their mash gets 2-3 days of fermentation (in their seven 10K fermenters) until the beer is 8-10%abv. Each whiskey comes from a small batch, 18-24 barrels (#4 char).
After buying a bottle of Noah's Mill — Why? I don't know. — I drove to downtown Bardstown for dinner at the Talbott Inn bar. Then I walked around until the sun set. This old body started feeling beaten up by all the booze. Weather reports said there'd be no rain the next day. So I tumbled into bed, setting my alarm so that I'd wake up early enough to get to Bernheim Forest before my lone distillery tour...
