Distillery Visit: Woodford Reserve

Over Spring Break I was lucky enough to go on the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky and visit several distilleries in order to better my understanding of the whole alcohol making process. One of my absolute favorite distilleries was hands down Woodford Reserve, and while this isn't exactly a winery, it still showed me a lot about how we get our alcohol.






This picture above was taken in the actual distillation room. I'll get more into that in a minute, but I just thought it looked really nice.

 

When the whole tour starts you get to see a nice little video about the distillery, followed by a very short bus ride that took us out to right here. Those barrels have been freshly filled and sealed, and the rails you see are used to move them from the filling station to the rackhouses. Pretty efficient if you ask me.





















Now I have to be honest here, I didn't take any good pictures of the fermentation tanks. I had so many from other distilleries that I forgot one for Woodford. HOWEVER this offers a very good representation of what I saw! The recipe, or mash bill,. that they use in their mash is roughly 70% corn, with 20% rye and 10% malted barley. After cooking the mash and adding some water, they throw it into one of these huge vats along with a generous amount of lovely yeast. For about 5-6 days these babies ferment until we have our desired amount of alcohol! If you ever get a chance to get close to one of these, definitely stick your finger in for a taste, its quite sour.









The next room we were taken into was the distillation room itself. What you can see are their three copper pot stills that heat up the alcohol taken from the mash. When it's immediately distilled, they like to call the resulting concoction "White Dog", which is both clear and potent, and reminded me of moonshine. Should the white dog meet the right alcohol levels, it's poured into the barrel, sealed, and rolled away to the rackhouse for storage. The lady you see to the left was our tour guide. She was awesome!

Above are two pictures I took in the rackhouse. Trust me when you walk into these places you can REALLY smell the bourbon, and it is awesome. It's a nice mixture between alcohol, wood, and that old cellar smell you get when walk into your grandparent's basement. It's amazing just how many thousands of barrels they were able to fit into this place, and even cooler how every specific barrel is labeled so you know how old it is and how much longer it has to sit. Every time I looked up it seemed as if they just went on forever. The bourbon standard is four years, but two is still okay. Anything less than four however MUST be labeled on the bottles. It's also important to note that what makes bourbon so special is that the barrels are ALWAYS new and are charred on the inside to provide that nice toasty and caramel like flavor.



Also, they had a rackhouse cat. This little fellow was about 18 years old and follows tour groups on occasion. Best. Cat. Ever. As you can see he's a little dirty...old rackhouses have that effect I guess.



I also didn't get a solid picture of the bottle myself, but this one should do just nicely. During the end of the tour after the rackhouse visit we got to do our tastings! Unfortunately we only got to try the Distiller's Select, but I bought myself some of their Double Oaked ($50!), which spends another 6 to 12 months in another fresh barrel. Here are my takeaways:

Distiller's Select: Exceptionally smooth start, hints of vanilla and caramel with perhaps a little honey in there. You can definitely feel the heat but it goes away pretty fast, leaving you with a nice toasty taste once it evaporates from your mouth.

Double Oaked: Easily one of the finest bourbons I have ever had. Just as smooth if not more so than the DS, but had much stronger flavors of caramel, vanilla, and some maple syrup. When I finished it I could definitely get that feeling of having just eaten a toasted marshmallow. Definitely one to try with a nice light cigar.





Lastly, here's a nice picture of my friends and I right by the tasting area in the main lobby (I'm the redhead...). The whole staff there was extremely friendly and the facility itself is the easily the nicest of all that I saw on the bourbon trail. Sorry if I'm not the best cameraman, but I hadn't even thought about documenting the trip at the time. Thanks for reading! And please do yourself a favor and grab yourself a bottle of that Woodford Reserve Double Oaked...it's to die for.