A Man Alone In Bourbon Country

Unsolved smalltown murders, tornado touched whiskey and racking up the miles in a musty rental car.

Photo by Jeff Frank on Unsplash

I need Jesus or I need whiskey,

Whatever works best to get me through.

– Tim McGraw

America.

Land of opportunity.

Land of the free.

But perhaps, more than all of that, land of contradiction.

Once vilified, and even outlawed entirely during prohibition, America’s relationship with alcohol is deeply conflicted. For evidence of that, you don’t need to look much further than Elijah Craig.

Often called The Father of Bourbon, Craig was both a reverend and a distiller. A microcosm of the puritan-sinner dichotomy that exists within so many Americans to this day.

From country artist Chase Rice “lost somewhere between Jack Daniel’s and Jesus” to Justin Moore, who sings about how his “mama loved Jesus, daddy loved Jack Daniel’s”, there’s no getting away from the inexplicable link between how much Americans love whiskey and religion.

I’ve never been a particularly religious man. Maybe that’s why, when I felt compelled to do a little soul searching this summer, I settled not on an epic voyage to Mecca or Vatican City but the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.

The closest thing to a pilgrimage I could think of.

Fear and Loathing In Bardstown

A loose chain of 18 distilleries across Kentucky, the Bourbon Trail is set right in the heartland of America. The sort of place where you can expect, to borrow a Little Big Town lyric, “five card poker on Saturday night, church on Sunday morning.”

At around 100 miles, my abridged version of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail wasn’t exactly the Camino Santiago (500 miles). It wasn’t even The Pilgrims’ Way (120 miles, give or take). But, then again, it’s not like I’d be walking it.

My noble steed would be a Nissan Sentra that smelt of wet dog and had a defective windshield. It did, however, have air conditioning powerful enough to combat the brutal heatwave sweeping the South and Midwest in July.

I quickly learnt to deal with the smell.

My base for the week would be a 2 star motel, with ambitions of being a hotel, in Bardstown, Kentucky. The aim? Seven distilleries in five days.

Barton 1792

Jim Beam

Heaven Hill

Makers Mark

Woodford Reserve

Buffalo Trace

Wild Turkey

Bardstown is unbearably pretty, something between Stars Hollow and Mickey Mouse’s Main Street USA. It’s the sort of place that frustrates you if you’re on big city time until you remember it’s a real town, not the booze-soaked Disney World that so many of us Bourbon Trail-ers treat it as.

I’d later learn that it’s also home to a string of unsolved disappearances and a murder rate close to double the national average. Maybe that’s why all of the stores in Bardstown close before 6pm and most of the bars by midnight.

Another day, another contradiction.

By the time my third night in town rolls around, I’m on speaking terms with most of the other guests at my hotel and the employees in the gas station next door. I get a stinging reminder that I’m not a young man anymore when a twentysomething kid sparks up a conversation with me at the gas station.

He compliments my shoes (kicks, in his words) and we chat for a while, but it becomes apparent that he has no intention of inviting me to join him and his crew at the basketball court around the corner from my hotel.

I’ve seen them there sneaking sips from bottles of malt liquor and passing cigarettes around, trying to make halfcourt shots. He’s probably worried I’d break a hip if I tried to hoop with them. Hell, I’m a little worried about it too.

I slink back to the hotel where I start knocking back spiked seltzers, an obsession I ostensibly shared with every sorority girl in 2019, sitting at the patio furniture in front of my room.

Everyone Dies, But Not Today

Back in the Bourbon Trail bubble, I don’t feel quite so old. I don’t meet anyone else on the trail under 40, which doesn’t exactly help to dispel bourbon’s reputation as “your father’s drink.”

One evening I chat with a old-timer who’s sitting in the threshold of his room. He smokes a seemingly endless chain of mini cigars, pausing only to spit into an empty Mountain Dew can, with Fox News pointing at the office chair he’s dragged to the entrance of his room.

Sometimes he’s asleep in the doorway when I walk by, occasionally with a lit cigar still dangling from his fingers, and looks irritable when anything wakes him up. I wonder why he doesn’t just go inside to bed.

I guess he’s caught somewhere between wanting to be left alone and not wanting to be alone. As I fall asleep to the hum of the air conditioner, I wonder if he’s a glimpse into my future.

Life on the trail is never boring, and the old-timer is the latest in the long list of outlandish characters I encountered. Painted with broad brushstrokes, they could hold their own against any of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales stereotypes.

From the autistic young farmer obsessed with British politics to the members of a classic car club who seemed to have a breakdown every other day, the people I met all live on in my head. I wonder if I still exist in any of theirs.

Holy Water And Brown Liquor

The bourbon trail is, like America’s relationship with alcohol, riddled with contradictions. Despite being responsible for producing more than 95% of the world’s bourbon, more than a quarter of Kentucky’s counties are dry.

Some locals are eager to capitalise on the growing popularity of the Bourbon Trail, with gift shops and merchandise galore, while others rally against the commercialisation of something that they consider part of their history.

It’s worth noting that Buffalo Trace, Barton 1792 and a handful of others declined to become part of the trail because they don’t charge for their “historical” tours or tastings.

The majority of the distilleries are set in their own grounds, totally inaccessible except by car, yet serve up multiple tasters to guests before they (presumably) gear up and head to the next stop on the trail.

Of course, this doesn’t seem weird to anyone but me. Americans are used to living in their cars, and have been ever since the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, so they probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

Besides, it’s easy to argue that racking up the miles is part of the experience of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.

Spending your days in a car with only the radio for company, and your nights with only a glass of the good stuff, turns you inwards. It makes you take a look at yourself, and occasionally shines a light on the stuff you don’t like seeing.

That Sentra turned out to be a pretty good listener.

We’re All The Same, Until We’re Not

“All bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon. Whiskey has to contain a minimum of 51% corn and aged for a minimum of 2 years in new charred oak barrels to be considered bourbon.”

I would hear this spiel, or some variation of it, seven times over the course of the week. What it hammered home to me was that bourbon is a game of minute, seemingly trivial details. Like how a barrel’s position in a rick house could determine whether it would produce bottles that sell for $20 or $100+.

There’s something in that, I thought, as I lay by the hotel pool on my final night in Bardstown. We start off the same, waiting to be shaped into what we’ll eventually become by external factors.

For bourbon, that’s things like the weather and location in a rick house. For humans, it’s things like upbringing and the opportunities that are placed within our reach.

I’m reminded of a story that our Buffalo Trace tour guide told us: in April 2006 a tornado tore the roof off of Warehouse C and exposed the barrels within, first to stormy conditions then to the brutal heat of Kentucky summer.

The result? A 2012 release widely hailed as one of the distillery’s best ever.

Sometimes turbulent conditions destroy things, but other times they forge something incredible and utterly unique.

If E.H. Taylor Jr. Warehouse C “Tornado Surviving” Bourbon, a bottle of which now sells for thousands of dollars, can make it through then maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.