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The final distillery we visited was Four Roses. I’ve been a fan of the Single Barrel for a while (and unsuccessfully tried to get my hands on the 2014 special release all year long), so this was another I was looking forward to. Somewhat disappointingly, Four Roses doesn’t age on-site, so we got to see the factory end with none of the sweet-smelling art portion of production.

Four Roses takes a somewhat different approach to aging than others. Unlike Buffalo Trace, who put the majority of their stock in where and how long the whiskey is aged, Four Roses produces 10 distinct distillates that are mixed after maturation. You can see the mix (which taste surprisingly different from one another in some cases) on the labels of the Single Barrel in the form of a 4-letter code (OESF, one of my favorites, for example).

They produce 2 different mashbills: E (75% corn, 20% rye, 5% barley) and B (60% corn, 35% rye, 5% barley). The “S” indicates the blend is a straight whiskey, and the final letter stands for one of 5 yeast strains Four Roses uses. Using the codes is a nice way to ensure the bottle you buy will taste just like the one you enjoyed last time.

This was the first distillery we visited that was actively working while we toured through, which was interesting. While it is fun to see in action, I have to say that seeing people eat a sandwich from a control booth while monitoring levels on screens takes a little of the magic out of the whole process.

As the distillate is produced, it is shipped off in tanker trucks to the aging location to be barreled and aged in single-story rickhouses for consistency.

While it may not have been the most thrilling tour we went on, we did pick up a few fun facts along the way. The first of which being that the distillation process produces a chemical that turns the surrounding trees black. It’s harmless, but unmistakable, and was used during prohibition by agents looking for hidden stills. The other interesting fact that I didn’t know beforehand is that Bulleit, everyone’s favorite standby, doesn’t actually exist. For all the marketing and back-story, all their bourbon is Four Roses bourbon, and the rye comes from KDI in Indiana. purchased in bulk and bottled as their own. With the looming bourbon shortage, it is likely that Four Roses will cease bulk sales in order to keep their limited supply to themselves. With the mountains of money they must generate, I’m sure Bulleit will find a new source, but there are scenarios where the brand could simply vanish, or at the very least, taste completely different.

So, that was our trip. I have to say, it’s great to see where the stuff we love comes from. I’d even like to take a quick trip back down in the near future. Or perhaps the next trip should be to Scotland?

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The third stop on the trip was to Buffalo Trace, producer of several of my favorite bourbons. We called in advance and were set up with a pretty great private tour of the inner workings of the distillery. It happened to be a Sunday and no one was actually working, which turned out to be fortunate for us in terms of what we could see.

Buffalo Trace has been operating continuously since 1786, Originally opened by Colonel E. H. Taylor as O.F.C. Distillery (Old Fire Copper) and the Carlysle Distillery. George T. Stagg lent Taylor money, and eventually foreclosed on the distillery for non-payment. Taylor opened a second distillery down the road, which was eventually bought out by Beam, Inc., the name of E. H. Taylor along with it. Later, Buffalo Trace was bought out by Sazerac, and in 1992 they traded a vodka brand to Beam to recover the license to use the name E. H. Taylor, the original founder of their distillery.

Through the whole story, I was most surprised to find that George T. Stagg, a big name in whiskey, was never a distiller himself, but a money lender that ended up with a distillery of his own through foreclosure.

Buffalo Trace weathered prohibition by producing medicinal alcohol. 6 million prescriptions for 100-proof whiskey were filled at the distillery in a state with a population of 1.4 million at the time. The prescription allowed for 1 pint of whiskey every 10 days, but were often written for every member of the family, so a fan of the drink could bring his 6 children and wife, and leave with 8 pints to carry him through the next week and a half. The prescriptions were handed out for just about anything that was difficult to define concretely, like the weed card of its day. During this time, George Dickel also ducked shutdown during prohibition by relocating its distillery to the Buffalo Trace property.

Former site of the Dickel distillery during prohibition

First stop along the path to whiskey is the weigh station for the grain deliveries, which arrive 5-7 times every day. The corn is checked regularly to ensure quality and lack of GMO product, then the grain is sent up to the grinding mill, dumped into the hoppers, and finally dumped into the cookers. The grains are cooked individually, and then mixed together for the mash. Following the first stage of the distilling process, the spent grain is then piped into large roasters to remove the moisture and condense it into a feed that tastes surprisingly like Grape Nuts. To prevent wasted trips, the trucks delivering the grain are then filled with the roasted spent grain, and sent back to the farm to be used as feed.

Roasted spent corn on the left, Rye on the right. It actually tasted pretty good.

Buffalo Trace only produces 3 mashbills for all its products: 2 corn and one rye. The mash is then combined with the yeast, a single strain that has been propagated for 129 years, and is maintained on 6 continents to ensure its safety in the event of disaster. Just like everyone else, they ferment the mash and pipe it to the still with some of the last batch to be distilled into whiskey. The process of adding the previous batch to the current is called “Sour Mash,” and is used to ensure continuity of flavor.

The most interesting part of the Buffalo Trace distillery (for me, at least) is that there is a microdistillery right in the middle of everything. One self-contained room with cookers, fermenters, and a little 250 gallon pot still that Buffalo Trace’s master distiller uses to experiment on his quest to find the “perfect” whiskey. It’s here that the Buffalo Trace Experimental Collection and Single Oak Projects are made, and any future bottlings that haven’t yet come to be.

Finally, the ricks. Interestingly, Buffalo Trace’s 13 rickhouses are brick buildings, unlike the wood-and-tin structures at Heaven Hill and Willett. They currently have 400,000 barrels on the property, and like Willett, they do not rotate. All the Blanton’s Bourbon comes from the Blanton rickhouse and the high-rye mashbill #2, etc. The incredibly specific tradition of it all is endlessly interesting to me.

At the end of the tour, our guide clarified the one hazy portion of the definition of “bourbon” for us. We’d been hearing it had to be matured for 2 years, 4 years, and “as long as it passes through a charred barrel.” It turns out, it’s all 3. Bourbon whiskey only needs to pass through a charred white american oak barrel. “Straight” bourbon whiskey must spend a minimum of 2 years maturing in the barrel, but must list the number of months it spent there right up until 4 years. So basically: “Bourbon Whiskey” could be any age at all. If the label reads “Straight Bourbon Whiskey,” and has no age listed, you know it is at least 4 years old.

I can’t recommend the “hard hat” tour enough, we got to see a great deal of the distillery that we might not have known about otherwise. And if you happen to get David for a tour guide, you’re in for a treat. The guy knows his stuff.

Next up: Four Roses

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Next up, and just down the road from Heaven Hill was one I’d been really looking forward to: Willett Distillery. Occupying a strange middle ground between craft microdistillery and large producer, Willett places their emphasis on very specific small-scale methods that can only really be this closely controlled when making a more manageable amount of product.

The first step in the distillation process is to essentially make some beer. The large fermenter tanks combine yeast and water with the grain mashbill, and spend several days fermenting into a mash, which is then fed into the still. Once it is cooked down, only 10% of the original liquid will remain, which is how something starting as a beer can be concentrated into a much higher-proof distillate.

Willett runs a large copper pot still, similar to the ones used to make Irish whiskey and Scotch, rather than the large column stills used by the vast majority of american whiskey producers. They cook 5 unique bourbon mashbills and 2 rye mashbills that are then blended together in specific recipes depending on the whiskey they are making, always barreled with a #4 char. Rowan’s Creek and Noah’s Mill are both blends of the same 3 mashbills, but one is aged at the cooler lower floor of the rickhouse, while the other is aged in the heat, just below the roof.

Speaking of the ricks, they have 8 of them, each capable of holding 6,000 barrels. By comparison, Heaven hill has about 50 rickhouses, each containing somewhere around 30,000, so you could just about fit every barrel Willett has into just one of Heaven Hill’s buildings.

Another interesting part of Willett’s production is the handling of the raw distillate. The best raw whiskey is right in the middle at a very specific temperature, so the first white dog to come off the still (the head) at a lower temperature is downright bad. Same can be said for the last (or the tail) when the still becomes too hot. The really large-volume producers never really turn off the stills, so they just dump the heads and tails back in for a second try. Since Willett is cooking one batch at a time, they discard the heads and tails and only keep the good center distillate (or the heart). The distiller pumps the whiskey through the tanks above and tastes until he’s happy with it, then switches it over to the second, or the Heart Tank. He’ll continue to taste, and when it drops below his standards, he switches it back to the first.

The heart tank is then pumped over to an adjacent room for barreling. Once full, a poplar bung is hammered into the hole (the soft wood will swell and keep a tighter seal in the white oak), and the barrel is rolled down a ramp to the rickhouse, or a waiting truck, should that rick be full. There, it will sit for however many years, undisturbed, until it’s time to be bottled.

Finally, it’s ready to drink, which we most certainly did. The nice thing (for me, at least) about Willett is that they don’t make any low-quality, bargain whiskey, just Willett Pot Still, Rowan’s Creek, Noah’s Mill, and the Family Estate Rye & Bourbon (bottled unblended, unfiltered, and at barrel proof). I’m a little partial already, but the spectrum of taste of the Family Estates are pretty amazing. They can range from a 4 year all the way up to a 23, all bottled with the same label. One of the highlights of the trip was getting to sample the 23 year Family Estate Rye. Lots of great burn, but not nearly as much as you’d expect on something north of 130 proof.

Overall, Willett is a great distillery to check out if you’re in the area because you can see the whole self-contained process and really get a feel for how your whiskey is made. A lot of the other distilleries produce off-site, or purchase the white dog from another distiller. It’s rare to be able to actually follow the pipes and see the exact path from grain to bottle. Not to mention that you can get a tour from the actual distiller and not a tour guide.

Next up: Buffalo Trace

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