Trip West - Bardstown - Barton Distillery

 

It's moving day but we have the 9 a.m. Distillery Tour so we head into town.  We always pass they black buildings and a new one is under construction.

This time we follow the Barton Van

It is a busy place with tractor trailers in and out.  We watch this one unload it's corn.  There are miles and miles of cornfields in this area.

It's a huge place.  Barton 1792 Distillery was started in 1879.  It is the oldest fully-operating Distillery in Bardstown, KY.  It sits on 196 acres, has 29 barrel aging warehouses with an additional 22 other buildings, including a still house and Tom Moore Springs.  The 1792 in the name is the year Kentucky joined the United States.

We begin the tour

The steam works it's way up

and is condensed up at the top into this.  Un-aged and straight from the distiller it is known as White Dog - it is 125 proof.

Who needs coffee?  I actually preferred the flavor (or lack of) compared to the aged stuff, but then I never liked anything aged in wood barrels.

Next we head to one of the warehouses (rickhouse).

 In June 2018, a portion of the Barton 1792 Distillery warehouse collapsed and 9,000 bourbon barrels fell to the ground. Two weeks later, the rest of the warehouse crashed down and another 9,000 bourbon barrels were smashed. No one was hurt in either incident, there is a large basement designed to hold spills,  but run-off from the barrels still seeped into two nearby streams, killing hundreds of fish. 

The warehouses are seven stories high with three ricks on every level.  Each warehouses hold about 19,000 barrels.  Each Barrel holds 53 gallons of Bourbon..  I asked if they had their own forest for a supply of trees.  I was told good question and she would be getting to that.  She never did.

 So I researched it.  It takes at least 80 years for a white oak to begin reaching a harvestable point.  

All bourbon must, by federal law, be aged in new, charred oak barrels. Almost all of the color and more than half of the flavor of a Kentucky bourbon or Tennessee whiskey comes from white oak.

Presently, the bourbon industry uses over 3 million barrels a year, averaging a little under 1 1/2 barrels per tree.  A representative from Buffalo Trace Distillery said back in 2016 -  "We’re thinking 20 years down the road — we need a forest the size of Rhode Island populated solely with white oak just for us,” 

Interesting tour, but we won't be drinking any more bourbon.  Next stop Danville, KY