I've never been the biggest fan of whisky or bourbon in particular, but this year I arranged a trip to Kentucky with my family and visited the bourbon trail after seeing so many advertisements for it while traveling on I-75 and trips to the Smokey Mountains. For a family trip, with something for everybody to do the way we did it was pretty good, but it definitely wasn't the best way to maximize your time at distilleries and hitting up all of them on the bourbon trail.
The first recommendation I have is to pick up the Bourbon Trail Passport. Each distillery on the trail has a page to stamp and they date it for you as well. The distilleries are split into sections so when you finish a section you let the distillery know they are the last one in that section and they'll put a special qr code stamp or provide the challenge coin, but eventually you end up with a barrel stave challenge coin holder for two different trails; one for the bigger names and a separate one for the craft distilleries.
My second recommendation if you are maximizing distilleries would be to probably do one of the tours that takes you from location to location by van. I wouldn't go that route, but the other keys are to schedule a day in Lexington, Louisville, and Bardstown and a fourth and fifth day for the random distilleries outside those cities that require a little bit more of a trip. Most are in those three cities so there isn't a lot of extra driving to do. Those days are going to be Wednesday through Saturday where they are all open and you're going to have to start your drinking early as the distilleries seem to run on bank hours of 9AM-5PM. Ideal if that's what you're there for, but makes it a little difficult to get your family excited to drink liquor that early.
We stayed in Bardstown the whole time and took day trips to the cities as most of the people weren't drinking too heavily so we had sober drivers. It works as a nice hub being an hour from Lexington, a little over a half hour from Louisville, and an hour from the Mammoth Caves. I'd recommend adding a trip to the caves as it is just cool to see, but gives you a break from a bunch of drinking so your body can recover and rest for a little bit. If you want to do a more family oriented trip this is a good way to do it as it's a smaller town so you can find a good AirBnB to stay at and have a nice downtown area to visit. The town does tend to shut down earlier so always be aware of that, although there is a good amount of chain places that you can visit that stay open later.
The Bourbon Trail passport is a very useful resource for planning your trip. There is a key that lets you know if they are a bourbon distillery, electronic booking, cocktails available, onsite food, other spirits, and size. Each distillery has a signature cocktail listed as well although some are lazier than others. Old Forester, Green River, Heaven Hill, Wild Turkey, New Riff, Dueling Grounds, Castle and Key, and James Pepper all list some variation of the old fashioned which is pretty weak to me, but it's a classic and I get wanting to put your own twist on it. Evan Williams is probably the laziest with theirs being a whiskey sour that tells you to use sour mix. Jim Beam and Preservation also put in variations of the sour and Bardstown went with the Manhattan, but they were the only ones who did that so I guess it's not that egregious. Several distilleries have prebottled versions of the cocktails for sail to take home or the ingredients that are special for their drink. Those were a nice pickup as well as several new bitters to try out. My girlfriend really enjoyed that many of the places had bourbon chocolate balls. There were many different barbecue sauces with bourbon added and other foods that were also fun to pickup and try.
Having only visited eleven of the forty-one distilleries on the passport I can't give a definitive ranking of all of them and what they offer, but I can offer impressions of the places that I visited. The places in Bardstown and just outside of the cities offer the best overall view and are impressive with the sheer size of the complex and all the rickhouses they have setup. The places in cities are more compact and have to utilize space better and often have their barrels aging at the larger complexes.
For overall impression I'd have to put Lux Row at the top. You pull into their driveway and go through a tree lined path up to their welcome facility. We did the deluxe tasting and it's paired with chocolate which was nice chocolate and did add some different flavors to the bourbon and we sampled some great bourbons and was the place where we bought our expensive bottle after tasting the seven year aged single barrel. The best part of the tasting was going into the rickhouse where we got to thieve from a barrel that was was one of the first that they produced and have aged at the facility without having to use any other companies product or aging facilities and it tasted amazing.
Right on the backside of that facility is Bardstown Bourbon Company and like them it has a beautiful welcome facility and an impressive rickhouse setup. I just got a sampler flight at the location and they had a nice selection of cocktails as well. The entry also has live camera feeds of the boiling pots and a digital view of the whole process and the current temps, which I didn't know what it meant, but it looked cool. This is where I tried the most expensive bourbon which didn't seem to utilize a lot of their product, but was very good stuff. Definitely a place where I'd want a tour next time to understand the process they use. They didn't have a huge selection of bourbons to buy, but it was a great facility and had very friendly staff.
Heaven Hill and Jim Beam fill a pretty similar spot in my mind. They are huge facilities and are impressive just to look at and you're probably going to see one of them on your way into town and they'll catch your attention. Heaven Hill has a nice self guided tour and both have very extensive gift shops. Both have bars that you can get flights or cocktails at and are good experiences. Heaven Hill had free samples of some of their stuff when we went to the self guided tour as well. The Jim Beam facility is on some beautiful land that is a great backdrop for pictures.
Woodford Reserve is as good looking as you'd expect from a company with their reputation. Their welcome facility and rickhouses are on one side of the road and is a very nice looking place. The tasting bar is on the other side is right next to some stables so you can check out some horses on your way in. Cocktails come with souvenir mint julep cups which is cool, because a lot of places were charging quite a bit for those.
Copper & Kings was my favorite visit on the trip which is funny as they aren't really a bourbon distillery. They do have some bourbon they buy and finish in their brandy barrels since it made them more money than selling the barrels to other bourbon companies to do the same thing. We got there close to closing and they had a short tour so they threw us in with them for the tasting part and the guy who checked us in gave us a rundown of the company and how they do things which was informative and the tasting was great. A great selection of different liquors and the tasting let us choose our own after starting with their base brandy. Since I was with my gf we shared our samples and got to try six other of their products which had a nice selection of liqueurs, gins, and one of the bottles we picked up absinthe. Since they're a smaller company they don't have the people to rotate the barrels so they just have music playing to get the same vibrations to move the liquors around in the barrels. When we bought their brandy barrel aged bourbon we got to fill our own bottle which was fun. Definitely the place I would most highly recommend checking out in Louisville whether you're going to try the bourbon trail or not.
Angel's Envy and Michter's were the other two in Louisville we visited and definitely would have needed better planning to visit Angel's Envy doesn't have a bar to try stuff and Michter's was full with an hour wait to get in. On the plus side when you visit Louisville almost all the big distilleries are on one road and there is other places to visit. Across the street from Envy we went to Against the Grain brewing and had some good beers and smoked meat which was good, and across from Michter's we went to Barrels and Billets which had their own bourbon which wasn't great and was connected to the Louisville Slugger location so we got to see the giant bat outside the building and get some souvenirs there. Just down the road from Michter's was a Art Eatables which has a huge selection of bourbon chocolates using liquors from many of the distilleries on the trail.
Bluegrass Distilling in Lexington is where we took a tour of the production of bourbon and they have a small area where they distill the liquor and age it, but they are building a much bigger facility near Versailles so I don't know how much my time here will reflect on them in the future which could be good. I had a great experience with the tour guide and the small nature of the facility, but the bourbon left a lot to desire. They had a bunch of bourbon adjacent food products that all tasted really good that we did pick up so don't write them off just yet and maybe once they have their own aging facilities they'll be able to get better product out. For lunch afterward we went to West Sixth Brewing which had some nice beers and I did bring home some of their Oktoberfest that I didn't finish there. Smithtown Seafood is connected to them and provided much better seafood than you would expect from a place in the middle of the Kentucky.
The other two distilleries in town are right next to each other, but sadly Barrel House wasn't open so we only visited James E Pepper where I really liked their products and picked up a barrel. Their facilities are pretty small, but they offered a more rye forward bourbon which was smooth with a nice spicy not to it. After that we took a break at Crank & Boom craft ice cream which is right next door and if you're not tired of flights yet you can get a flight of four of their different flavors and I'd recommend it because you get a lot of ice cream and it is amazingly good ice cream.
The final distillery we visited was Willett in Bardstown on our way home. Perhaps the best example of what you'd hope to find on your trip to Kentucky and visiting distilleries it's just a bit down the road from Heaven Hill which has its own road going through it, but Willett is a dirt road that takes you past their homemade signs to direct you through a pretty good sized complex with rickhouses and several fountains on your way to their gift shop and restaurant. They have a small menu, but with some nice looking stuff and the trout dip we chose was excellent. I got a flight of bourbons from here and they were very good and the best part is that the price on the bottles was some of the cheapest that I saw and came away with a Bottled in Bond Bardstown Bourbon that was around $20 and will serve as my mixing bourbon. Definitely a place you're going to want to make sure you stop in to visit.
For the non-drinking parts of the vacation we had two real destinations which were the Louisville Zoo which I found to be a nice zoo. How much animal activity you get depends on the temperature and it was pretty good for seeing a lot of movement when we went there. It was pretty cool out and feeding time when we saw the polar bear and it's impressive to see an animal that size move when you can get so close with just a glass barrier when the other bigger animals tend to be further away. One of the nicer things was that the animals who were trying to stay warm or were napping tended to do it near the viewing areas so you got some nice close up views of the animals. They had some really nice displays and while it's kind of annoying as a visitor it's generally good for the animals that there was space between the displays. Although since it was near Halloween the zoo had a bunch of displays setup between the enclosures to add some fun to it. It's not a top tier zoo, but it's a really good one and has a good selection of animals to enjoy.
The Mammoth Caves was a very fun excursion as well. An important note that I found out the wrong way is that when you go there you will enter the Central Time Zone so we were super early for our tour, but I managed to switch it to the Domes and Dripstones tour earlier and the visitor center there has tons of shopping with two separate gift shops and a big display of the history of the caves and current exploration going through the caves which is a lot of fun to walk through as well. The onsite hotel was undergoing renovations, but I imagine spending a night there would be very cool. Going into the caves is just a very cool experience. It does have modern steps in it, but you're still twisting through some narrow areas and going down steep descents. Photos you take don't really do it justice and it's just so cool to see with all the drops and areas that aren't on the stairs or path to look at. The first stop when the tour guide tells the story of Floyd Collins who got caught in a cave trying to explore it and turns the lights off so you're in the pitch black of the cave as he continues was very cool. A pure experience of what pitch black really is. The tour we took ended in the Frozen Niagra area which is the one part of the cave with stalagmites which is just so cool looking.
A small excursion about halfway between Bardstown and Louisville was Bernheim Forest and the giant wooden sculptures there. The three giants are very cool to look at and it was a very nice walking area and you can drive to most of the areas and have less of a walk if that's what you prefer.
The Bourbon Trail proved to be a very fun vacation with a ton of great and interesting stops for people interested in trying out a bunch of different bourbons, but many stops for people who were looking for excursions that don't involve drinking. If you're into horse racing you can also plan your trip around that as well. We went in the right month, but the distilleries in Louisville tended not to be open on Tuesday when there was horse racing which would have been cool to see. So my biggest take-away from this trip is to be a planner and schedule things out, but don't let that deter you, because it is a trip well worth taking and fall weather in Kentucky was a great break from the Florida heat.
