{"id":4229,"date":"2019-03-27T03:21:35","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.incirliseviye.com\/?p=4229"},"modified":"2019-03-27T03:21:35","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:21:35","slug":"on-the-whiskey-trail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/?p=4229","title":{"rendered":"On the Whiskey Trail"},"content":{"rendered":"

G<\/span>iven that Dominic Roskrow is from the U.K., he might seem an unlikely advocate of American whiskey. \u201cYours is made to a vastly higher standard than Scotch,\u201d says Dominic, author of The World\u2019s Best Whiskies<\/em> and editor of Whiskeria<\/em>, Britain\u2019s largest whiskey magazine. \u201cThere are rules governing what\u2019s in the bottle, which we don\u2019t have in Scotland. You have something really, really special. But makers of American whiskey haven\u2019t been good at telling its story, which is amazing considering how loud and aggressive Americans can be.\u201d<\/p>\n

I decide to let this backhanded compliment slide, since Dominic has been such good company for the past few days and is so enthusiastic about our culture in general. We had met prior to our guided tour of America\u2019s whiskey trail at a hotel bar in Nashville, Tennessee, where, to get in the spirit, we\u2019d sampled several flights of Jack Daniel\u2019s. We started with the Old No. 7, then Single Barrel and Gentleman Jack\u2014and along the way discovered our common enthusiasm for quality spirits. While Dominic rhapsodized about America and the quality of its water and distilleries, we drifted figuratively from the deep smoky forests of Tennessee to the rolling, bluegrass-clad horse country of Kentucky, moving up the map like vapors of alcohol rising through a copper still.<\/p>\n

Has America failed to tell its whiskey story? Well, someone\u2019s getting the word out. Sales of super-premium American whiskies have doubled in five years while exports of U.S. spirits of all kinds have doubled over 10. And in recent years, the most storied brands have been joined by artisanal distillers from Florida to Alaska. There are now some 250 regional small-batch distillers compared with fewer than 50, 10 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any question that we\u2019re in bourbon\u2019s heyday,\u201d says Rich Ruth, former co-owner of Sidebar at Whiskey Row, a restaurant-bar in Louisville. \u201cTen years ago people would come into a bar and order vodka. Now we have people coming in and naming the brand of bourbon they want in a Manhattan.\u201d<\/p>\n

If that sounds like a contemporary trend, well, it may well be. But American whiskey is anything but trendy in the here-today-gone-tomorrow sense of the word. Indeed, whiskey (usually spelled without an \u201ce\u201d on the other side of the pond) has deep roots in American history. To tell the story, the Distilled Spirits Council mapped a route it calls the American Whiskey Trail that runs in an arc from Washington, D.C., through Pennsylvania and Kentucky into Tennessee, and Dominic and I and a few other passionate whiskey-philes set out to follow it.<\/p>\n

The trail officially starts in Mount Vernon, Virginia, the home of America\u2019s first president. George Washington was himself a whiskey maker and a whiskey drinker, but just to complicate things, during his presidency, he instituted the nation\u2019s first tax on whiskey. In 1791, this triggered the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. The conflict pushed distillers west into Kentucky and Tennessee, where new state governments were giving settlers land grants and shielding them from the whiskey tax. It didn\u2019t hurt that these new locales also had superb water thanks to a deep limestone bedrock that filtered out impurities.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say water\u2019s water, but it\u2019s not,\u201d says John Lunn, the master distiller at George Dickel Whisky in Tullahoma, Tennessee, where we pick up the trail. (Dickel is one of the very few American manufacturers to follow the Scottish spelling.)<\/p>\n

As John walks us through the Dickel plant, describing the water and the mash, the stills and the barreling, it becomes clear that Dickel distills not just whiskey but a kind of heritage. The entire town of Tullahoma is a delightful throwback, set deep in a lush valley surrounded by a forest of the same sugar maples that Dickel uses for its charcoal. There\u2019s a post office and a \u201cProvisions & General Merchandise\u201d store, and the distillery itself is housed in a building made of old wooden planks. Inside, you\u2019ll find no banks of electronic monitoring systems controlling the process. \u201cComputers can\u2019t make good whiskey,\u201d John says. \u201cPeople make good whiskey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next stop is Lynchburg, Tennessee, home of Jack Daniel\u2019s. Its black label Old No. 7 is the world\u2019s best-selling whiskey, its distillery the most visited. The company\u2019s target market is wide, or as one executive puts it, \u201cfrom the LDAs to the DNDs \u2014 the legal drinking age to the damn-near-dead.\u201d About half is sold in America and half in 135 other countries.<\/p>\n

The Jack Daniel\u2019s tour is crafted around its eponymous founder. Here, too, the water gets a lot of play, and our guide, attired in jeans and a cap, invites us to the mouth of a limestone cave where we gaze in like parents looking at newborns, except that while we all know where babies come from, no one has yet solved the hallowed mystery of the source of the water.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good story. So is the life of Jack, though it\u2019s not as darkly peculiar as his death. He arrived at his office one day, couldn\u2019t unlock his safe, and in his frustration put a boot to the heavy metal box. His injured foot became severely infected, and weeks after he kicked the safe, he kicked the bucket.<\/p>\n

By the time we get to Lexington, Kentucky, the landscape has opened up, and we enter some of Kentucky\u2019s most expensive real estate, with undulating fields anchored by horse paddocks and framed by plank fences and fieldstone walls.<\/p>\n

They say the same limestone that makes for good whiskey also makes for strong bones, hence Kentucky\u2019s famed racehorses. It seems fitting, then, that prior to our distillery tour, we head for the iconic Keeneland race track.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho are you taking?\u201d Dominic asks as we step up to place bets.<\/p>\n

\u201cVoodoo Dancer to show,\u201d I say. Voodoo is handicapped at 15:1. I\u2019m handicapped by not knowing anything about horses. But I like the name.<\/p>\n

Lo and behold, Voodoo shows.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like capturing magic in a bottle, and we look for more of it later at Wild Turkey. Master distiller Jimmy Russell, the grand old man of the Kentucky bourbon establishment, greets a group that has gathered at the distillery. His speech is all Kentucky \u2014 the speech of smart guys whose accent and manner of speaking is by itself a reason to visit. \u201cMore men drinks bourbon than women,\u201d Jimmy says. \u201cLotta people puts it in coffee.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lotta people are also liking Wild Turkey\u2019s higher-end cousins. After decades of producing just one whiskey, the company not long ago started rolling out a whole line. At the time of my visit, their Wild Turkey 81 had just won a double-gold medal in San Francisco. My favorite is Russell\u2019s Reserve \u2014 named after Jimmy, of course \u2014 Single Barrel, which has a full but gentle mouth feel and rolls back into a spicy-sweet finish.<\/p>\n

Jimmy invites more impressions. One fellow noses a snifter, swirling the amber nectar under his right nostril with one eye pinched. Like he\u2019s doing an oral defense of a Ph.D. dissertation, \u201cMacadamia,\u201d he intones, and adds, \u201cred apple.\u201d I have no idea what he\u2019s talking about, but what it does show is how bourbon is bringing people, a continuum from plain-spoken to downright effete, into one room.<\/p>\n

If the big distillers are experiencing a revival, it\u2019s the little guys, the small-batch artisanal distillers, who are nudging whiskey into the 21st century. They\u2019re whiskey\u2019s \u201cFacebook generation,\u201d since it\u2019s social media that enabled them to reach an audience that previously would have been inaccessible. Many of these newcomers are making their mark by reviving heirloom recipes.<\/p>\n

Take Steve and Paul Beam, brothers from a branch of the Beam family that left distilling, and one generation later wanted to get back in. They founded Limestone Branch Distillery and produce T.J. Pottinger\u2019s Moon Shine Kentucky Corn Whiskey (88 percent corn, 12 percent malted barley) and Sugar Shine (uncooked mash of 50 percent heirloom white corn and 50 percent sugar cane). \u201cWe are reviving the art and craft of pre-Prohibition distilleries,\u201d Steve says. \u201cPrior to Prohibition there were thousands of small distilleries, some turned out rot gut, but the majority took great personal pride in turning out quality spirits. My great-grandfather grew his own grain, chose specific oak to make his own barrels, and was very particular about the entire process.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the morning we go to Bardstown, Kentucky, and eventually find the Talbott Tavern, a place that Dominic wanted to see, next to the Jailer\u2019s Inn, now a B&B with the original iron bars on the windows and 30-inch-thick stone walls.<\/p>\n

We enter and ask the way to the bar, but we\u2019re too early. Perhaps it\u2019s just as well, after all we\u2019ve consumed over the past few days, that it\u2019s still closed.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

American Whiskey: A Primer<\/h2>\n

B<\/span>ourbon can be made anywhere in the United States, but to be called by that name certain rules have to be observed. The mash, or mix of grains, has to be at least 51 percent corn, and it has to be casked in new charred oak barrels, from which the liquid, which goes in clear, leeches out color and flavors like vanillin and toffee. The corn mash itself is de-flavored. Other flavors come from malt barley and either rye or wheat, and the recipes, the fermenting process, and other factors that reflect the distiller\u2019s style and intention will make whiskeys smoother or spicier or sweeter. (Tennessee whiskey goes through an additional step of being filtered through charcoal.)<\/p>\n

The narrow list of approved ingredients means that American whiskey doesn\u2019t have the bold and striking flavor varieties of Scotch. (An Islay Scotch is so different from a Highlands Scotch that it can be hard to know you\u2019re in the same spirit category.) Instead, you get different levels of sweetness, spice, and smoothness. If some expert\u2019s tasting notes can seem esoteric to less experienced drinkers, some flavor notes are easy enough to discern: vanilla, caramel, toffee, white pepper, and banana. And as with Scotch, it\u2019s not necessary to drink it neat. Water can cool down a whiskey\u2019s heat and draw out different flavors.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, most American whiskeys don\u2019t make age claims. When iconic master distiller Jimmy Russell of Wild Turkey says, \u201cWe don\u2019t age it, we go by when it\u2019s ready,\u201d he is voicing an industry-wide tradition.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Todd Pitock has written for<\/span> The Atlantic, ForbesLife, and<\/span> The New York Times, among others<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given that Dominic Roskrow is from the U.K., he might seem an unlikely advocate of American whiskey. \u201cYours is made to a vastly higher standard than Scotch,\u201d says Dominic, author of The World\u2019s Best Whiskies and editor of Whiskeria, Britain\u2019s largest whiskey magazine. \u201cThere are rules governing what\u2019s in the bottle, which we don\u2019t have … <\/p>\n

Read more “On the Whiskey Trail”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}