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The parking zone of the Celebration Supply, an enormous liquor retailer in Newport, Kentucky, might sound an unlikely location for an award-winning craft distillery. However as my pal Will Hinkle and I pull into the lot, New Riff Distilling’s gleaming copper nonetheless, ensconced in a glossy glass tower, instructions consideration. We study throughout our early afternoon tour {that a} hundred-foot-deep nicely faucets right into a limestone-filtered aquifer beneath the distillery, which helps clarify why Celebration Supply’s former proprietor Ken Lewis determined to construct it proper right here in a nook of the lot. Naturally stripped of iron and sulfides, the mineral-rich nicely water is right for cooking floor grains to ferment and distill into bourbon. Flowing from the earth at a relentless fifty-eight levels, it’s additionally circulated all through the distillery as an energy-efficient technique of cooling sizzling liquids.
Based in 2014 as the continuing bourbon increase was nonetheless gaining traction, New Riff takes an innovation-within-tradition strategy to its whiskey. We style that in a pour of Bohemian Wheat, an eight-year-old bourbon made with malted, unmalted, and darkish wheat along with the requisite corn. It’s an anomaly, but its honeyed sweetness and bready undertones captivate with nuanced simplicity. It’s additionally indicative of the range of contemporary approaches Will and I purpose to uncover over the following three days as we discover bourbon nation from Northern Kentucky by means of the center of the state.
“Distilleries as we speak are primarily involved with consistency, nevertheless it’s the inconsistencies of the previous that make these bourbons so attention-grabbing”
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New Riff’s hovering copper nonetheless.
Driving up Monmouth Avenue to Pensive Distilling Co. + Kitchen, opened in 2021, we discover blocks of new-looking eating places, bars, and boutiques interspersed with empty storefronts that stand out like lacking tooth. After lunch on the microdistillery and restaurant (attempt the Strike the Gold burger, dressed with house-made bourbon barbecue sauce), we go to its second-floor speakeasy, the place we study that in Prohibition, Newport was a haven for bootleggers, gangsters, and common lawlessness. Extra just lately, it stood as a largely blighted suburb of Cincinnati. However today, Newport and neighboring Covington are present process their very own bourbon-fueled booms. Will and I examine in at Hotel Covington, which accomplished a $26 million enlargement final spring, reworking a former YMCA constructing subsequent door into luxe all-suite lodging.
After a fast refresh, we stroll a block to Revival Vintage Bottle Shop. Kentucky’s legislature handed a legislation that went into impact in 2018 permitting licensed retailers to purchase and promote classic spirits—something that’s not in manufacturing as we speak. Co-owned by Shannon Smith and Brad “Dusty” Bonds, Revival retains at the least 100 bottles obtainable for tasting behind the store’s copper-topped bar, and its single-room retail area is stocked flooring to ceiling. Will and I choose half-ounce tasters of an I.W. Harper distilled within the Nineteen Seventies ($15) and a private-label bourbon made for the Watergate Lodge in 1968 ($10), and we splurge on a 1977 Insurgent Yell and a 1941 Previous Timbrook (each $40). Every pour drips with persona, the flavors starting from wealthy butterscotch to the woody musk of an previous rickhouse. “Distilleries as we speak are primarily involved with consistency,” Bonds says, “nevertheless it’s the inconsistencies of the previous that make these so attention-grabbing.”
Our desk on the just lately opened Opal Rooftop Restaurant & Bar overlooks the Ohio River and Cincinnati skyline. Over Redux cocktails (a Manhattan riff made with rye, candy vermouth, pistachio liqueur, and a barspoon of torched maple syrup) and a dinner of wood-fired steak and dry-aged duck breast, Will and I speak about how early Kentucky distillers like Jacob Spears, an ancestor of Will’s, relied on the river to drift flatboats laden with barrels downstream to drinkers in New Orleans and ports past. We’re each comparatively sober, so with the automotive already parked for the night, we get pleasure from a Sazerac made with a New Riff barrel decide at Lodge Covington’s hip cocktail bar earlier than handing over.
If New Riff represents a modernist strategy to bourbon, then Neeley Family Distillery, forty-five miles south in Sparta, is a proud continuation of its (usually illicit) previous. As we wait within the rustic customer heart for a late-morning tour, Will and I look at an in depth household tree, newspaper clippings, and a show of rifles and home made stills that hint the household’s eleven generations of moonshiners and bootleggers, and at the least one deadly household feud. Royce Neeley and his father, Roy, took the household enterprise legit in 2015, and as we speak the distillery makes use of conventional pot stills to make a wide range of bourbons, rye whiskey, and ’shine from previous household recipes, producing round two barrels a day. I significantly get pleasure from a single-barrel bourbon precisely dubbed “caramel apple” throughout a post-tour tasting, so I fill and label a bottle to take house.
Roughly following the Kentucky River south, we meander by means of small cities and stretches of rolling countryside on our drive to Millville for lunch at the Stave. Over old-fashioneds and smoked bologna sandwiches topped with chowchow, we reminisce that not way back, a conventional tour at Woodford Reserve (simply down the street), Four Roses, or a handful of different distilleries was just about the extent of the official Kentucky Bourbon Trail when it was based in 1999. Right now it contains forty-six distilleries throughout the state and varied methods to expertise them.
Castle & Key, our subsequent cease, is a major instance. E. H. Taylor Jr. constructed the unique facility in 1887 because the Previous Taylor Distillery, envisioning a vacation spot generally known as a lot for the fantastic thing about its grounds as its bourbon. It shut down throughout Prohibition, like dozens of others within the state, and lay in ruins when Fort & Key’s founders purchased the property in 2014. The complete tour begins by the keyhole-shaped peristyle and spring Taylor constructed, takes you thru the clang and hiss of the stillhouse, previous the crumbling basis of Warehouse A (now planted with seasonal herbs and botanicals), and into the world’s longest rickhouse. However even guests who haven’t booked a tour can stroll the botanical trails, laid out by the Kentucky panorama designer Jon Carloftis, or sip a cocktail on the renovated Taylorton Station, the place friends arriving by prepare as soon as disembarked.
It’s only a quick drive to Lexington’s Manchester resort, which opened final summer time within the metropolis’s burgeoning Distillery District. A fast Uber journey takes us to Fresh Bourbon. Considered one of Kentucky’s first Black-owned distilleries, it opened its downtown tasting room in 2022. Heavy velvet curtains draw again to disclose a brightly lit room with leather-based stools and an extended cream-colored bar prime with marbled accents and pops of gold. “We wished to create an area inviting not solely to males but in addition to girls,” says Tia Edwards, Contemporary Bourbon’s co-owner together with her husband, Sean. The bourbon contains a hefty addition of honey malt in its four-grain recipe, and the tasting explores its candy and savory interaction by pairing sips with pecans, cinnamon cereal, and different nibbles earlier than we select from a wide range of bitters to make a personalized old school.
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Contemporary Bourbon house owners Sean and Tia Edwards.
Constitution Rare & Antique Books—a darkish, club-by speakeasy—makes for a stark however no much less inviting distinction. Will and I enter by means of a door secreted in a bookcase and sit at a small bar tucked on the entrance of the comfortable lounge. We chat with beverage director Rusty Wright as he methodically mixes a Smoking Gun, made with a cut up base of Rittenhouse rye and Mellow Corn whiskey with espresso liqueur and orange and cardamom bitters, and completed with a flaming spritz of expressed orange oil. Stirring one other cocktail, Wright explains that he’s feeling for a chill on the facet of the Yarai mixing glass and expecting the ice to drop barely. “Cocktails are romantic, however making them might be intimidating,” he says. “We’re right here to carry an academic part to the expertise.”
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The Contemporary Bourbon tasting room.
We are able to’t resist a cease at Lexington’s Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse, with its red-velvet chairs, colossal chandeliers, and a Wildcat-blue piano perched in the midst of an enormous U-shaped bar. As we sip barrel-aged Manhattans and devour giant cuts of seared meat, it looks like a throwback to the bourbon-and-cigar life-style. However bourbon lovers as we speak embody a variety of individuals and tastes.
I discover this the next day on a tour of Kentucky Cooperage in Lebanon, certainly one of three such factories owned by Independent Stave Company, based in 1912. Our group contains women and men of various ages and backgrounds. We watch as employees form seasoned staves of white oak into the brand new, charred barrels required for growing old bourbon. As barrels emerge from the char tunnel, a cloud of smoke paying homage to toasted marshmallows wafts over the group. “We don’t make the whiskey,” says tour information Pat Daugherty, “however we do make the flavour.”
Greater than eleven million barrels of bourbon are at the moment resting in Kentucky alone, up some three million from just a few years prior. Because the bourbon trade continues to increase, guaranteeing a sustainable provide of white oak timber—which may take eighty years to succeed in maturity—is turning into ever extra crucial. We get a glimpse at efforts towards a extra sustainable bourbon future at our final cease, close by Maker’s Mark, on a brand new tour of its Star Hill Farm, which the distillery launched final summer time.
Founders Invoice and Margie Samuels bought the farm’s unique acreage after they began the distillery in 1953, primarily to guard the water supply used to make its bourbon and to remain near the grains. Right now the farm helps an interrelated ecosystem. Advocacy and expertise supervisor Amanda Humphrey leads us by means of a backyard with varietals like purple peas and alpine strawberries utilized in cocktails and dishes on the distillery’s restaurant. We go a rock quarry the place they’re rising mushrooms, and he or she factors out clusters of bee containers, explaining how pollinators and rotational grazing among the many farm’s Wagyu cattle and sheep assist to replenish the land. “You’re in all probability pondering to your self, ‘What have mushroom quarries and bee containers acquired to do with bourbon?’” she says. “I feel the easiest way to explain it’s that bourbon is an agricultural product. If we’re not good stewards of our land, we’re not going to be down right here in 200 years’ time making whiskey.”
We glance towards a distant hillside planted with neat rows of white oak seedlings. Working with the College of Kentucky’s Division of Forestry and Pure Assets, the distillery collected greater than 4 hundred varieties from throughout the tree’s vary to plant the world’s largest white oak analysis forest. The purpose is to check the timber’ progress, longevity, and resistance to drought and illness to enhance the genetics of the species. We head down a brief path to an impressive white oak generally known as the “mom tree,” estimated to be at the least 300 years previous. Scientists used samples from this tree to map the white oak genome for the primary time in 2021, and saplings from it are additionally now rising within the analysis forest. “We’ll all be lengthy gone by the point this involves fruition,” Humphrey says of the undertaking. “It’s an funding in future generations, which I feel is a good looking factor.”
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Thirsty for Extra?
See Nine of the South’s Best Whiskey Bars, Seven Women Brining Bourbon into the Future, and extra at G&G’s Guide to the Bourbon Boom.
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