R and J in the USA

It’s fair to say that we loved pretty much everything about Kentucky bourbon – everything, that is, except the bourbon itself. 

We loved the artistry, the craftsmanship, the traditions and the pride. We loved the smell of the barrels and the look of the blackish brownish rustic buildings housing barrel upon barrel amidst rolling green hills. We loved the family farms and the mostly locally sourced ingredients that made this drink truly at home in this place. We loved the family distilleries passed down through generations. We loved the skill, the care and the dedication to every little element of the bourbon and the process of making it just so. We loved the bourbon enthusiasm that was there at nearly every stop we made in Kentucky. whether it is bourbon signage or bourbon store fronts or bourbon merch. The enthusiasm for bourbon fused with creativity to create t-shirts, magnets and all manner of culinary bourbon infusions. You could find bourbon-infused chocolate, bourbon-dipped pecans, bourbon-steeped maraschino cherries, bourbon-smoked salt and more.

There are 100 bourbon distilleries in Kentucky producing 95% of the world’s bourbon and we were right in the heart of it. We toured the Maker’s Mark distillery in Loretto, Kentucky and got to see the genuine love and care that goes into making it. We got to see how it is about so much more than just running a business and making profits. It is about people and family. It is about craft and artistry. It Is about pride and generations and stewardship. Yes, we loved every bit of what we learned about bourbon.

Even the Louisville Slugger bat factory (a stop that we also loved) had their own bourbon experience to share. Right next to the bat factory, there is a place called Barrels and Billets (barrels are what bourbon is made in, billets are what the cylinders of wood that bats are carved out of are called) where folks can enjoy the art of bourbon blending – the craft of mixing and matching different bourbons to make your own bespoke bourbon. The passion and depth of the ways to relate to and enjoy bourbon are as deep as any you could find. What is not to love?! Such passion. Such enthusiasm. So much to learn and taste and explore.

We loved the aesthetic and the presentation of the bourbon in its bottles and glasses and the buildings that crafted it. We loved the nuance of hints and undertones of delicious words like chocolate, toffee, vanilla, maple and cherry that went with different bourbons. We loved the palpable heart and soul that is poured into making the best bourbon whisky that can be made.

Yes, we loved everything about Kentucky bourbon – everything except the act of actually drinking it and the taste that would result in our mouths when we did. 

To be clear, this was in no way the fault of the bourbon and in every way the fault of our lame, unrefined and ill-equipped palates. We are not drinkers. Neither of us enjoy the taste of alcohol in the slightest. Whatever that urge is that makes people want to relax with a cold beer at the end of the day, we just don’t have it. We knew, going into our bourbon tasting, that the cards were stacked against our ability to truly appreciate all the fine craftsmanship we had just witnessed. We were only just learning about bourbon, but we knew ourselves. We wanted so much to enjoy it, but seeing as neither of us particularly like alcohol in any of its various drinkable forms, the odds were not in our favor that we’d be able to jump into the whisky deep end of the alcohol pool and find ourselves at home.          

But we were damn sure we were going to dive in anyways. How could we possibly say we visited Kentucky if we didn’t take a swig of bourbon?!

And we did TRY to like it. We followed the steps of our tour guide that mentored our tour group on the best way (or at least a way) to take in bourbon to get the fullest benefits of its rich and layered offering. We learned how to “nose it”, which is when you breathe in the bourbon from its vessel before drinking it – opening both your nose and your mouth at once to let the molecules get as deeply into your olfactories as possible. We did that, and we enjoyed that part of the process too. We loved the presentation of the glasses with their single finger of auburn liquid at the bottom of their delicate curves. The whole experience was so classy, so homey and so elevated – we so wanted to be able to rise up and meet it. 

Our tour guide told us which order he suggested we take in the various bourbon options in front of us to get the best arc for the experience. He told us to drink some of the water in between each different bourbon to cleanse our palate. 

We were all in for the experience and we put every ounce of heart and effort we could into noticing those overtones and undertones, the hints and the layers.

We were both in awe after walking through the Maker’s Mark distillery and learning all of the subtleties and nuances that went into crafting a particular bourbon taste. We were fascinated learning about the barrels and the staves that all went into eliciting into the final product, through what seemed to us a somewhat mystical process, a different and varied array of wood sugars. Just even the fact that humans figured out that wood has sugars and that we can somehow coax them out into a drink for us – that on its own was a certain type of intoxicating. We were fascinated by the artistry and the science alike that went into it all – but, more than anything, we found ourselves enamored with the palpable feeling of care and pride that surrounded every element of the process.

We were really hoping to find out that we were secret bourbon lovers and just didn’t know it yet. 

That is not what happened.

Hope can only take one so far. It was still 90 proof alcohol hitting our non-drinker taste buds, and we could barely control the natural contortions and involuntary protestations our faces made as we took in the vaunted liquid.

We DID like that warm, burning sensation it puts in your chest that we learned is called a “Kentucky hug”. We just didn’t enjoy the taste that was necessary to traverse to get to it.

But even as our faces scrunched up in what we experienced as outright pungeancy as the liquid hit our tongues and raced down our esophagi to give us that welcomed Kentucky embrace, we did our best to appreciate the nuances we could find. We both had “favorites” among the four of the different Maker’s Mark bourbons we tried. But none of that favoritism meant that either of us would ever drink bourbon for pleasure in the future. 

But, still, we appreciated the heck out of it. We walked away definitely glad we had gotten to taste it and definitely expanded for feeling that we had learned a bit and done our best to get into the bourbon experience.

As we walked away, Julie was wondering out loud what others were experiencing that we just didn’t. We wanted so much to enjoy it and found ourselves hard-pressed to imagine what others are tasting that makes them love it so much. For Julie, it conjured memories of drinking medicine as a kid that she would have to be coaxed into doing. Or, she imagined it might be what drinking some kind of astringent cleaning fluid would taste like. Julie is no stranger to liking things that lots of other people find truly disgusting, and even enjoying the disgusting taste of it. Julie likes drinking apple cider vinegar drink and kombucha, both of which she can recognize as, in the most technical and literal sense, disgusting – but a disgusting that she likes anyways. So, she wondered, maybe this is just like that. Maybe there is a likability to the very same taste that is a taste bud that she just doesn’t have. Or maybe it is an acquired taste that one develops over time from drinking all manner of alcohols that our untrained palates simply did not prep us for.

As Julie’s wonderings continued, she began to think of it like running. People who don’t run often look at runners, people who run, by choice, on purpose and appear to derive some kind of enjoyment from it, people like us, as crazy. And we would say, justifiably so. It IS crazy to like running. It IS crazy to run, on purpose, when you don’t actually have to do it. But we like it! Why do we like running? We could make lists, but, at the end of the day, it is still a choice to do something that, for a considerable amount of time, is actively painful or unpleasant. And we can understand, if you just don’t have the bug for it, there is just no way to really explain liking it. Maybe it is the same with bourbon, we thought. If you have the taste for it, you just do.  

And we don’t run just because of the runner’s high that is there after you endure the unpleasantness. It’s pretty great. The euphoria of the runner’s high is definitely worth chasing, and definitely worth enduring a certain amount of discomfort for, but it is not, at least for us, reason enough to start running when all you want to do is sit on the couch. We assume the runner’s high to be akin to the joys of inebriation that a swig or 12 of liquor eventually delivers. Both highs are definitely coveted and valued prizes, but we suspect that, like running, a love of bourbon is not just in pursuit of the freedoms and joys of intoxication that they can bring. 

So, we figured, perhaps bourbon is like running. For those that enjoy it perhaps, the thing that makes it unpleasant is the very thing that is so delicious and delightful and enticing – that is, if you have the taste for it. The taste for running, we’ve got. The taste for bourbon, unfortunately, we do not.

But, other than the taste, yes, we loved everything about bourbon.

Our Maker’s Mark tour guide talked about another part of his job that included being one of the tasters for Maker’s Mark, his job being to taste each barrel that goes through the process to make sure it tastes like Maker’s Mark bourbon. It was clear that this young man felt he was the luckiest man in the world to have such a job and wasn’t planning on giving up his coveted position anytime soon. He clearly loved drinking bourbon. Whatever taste we did not have, he clearly had it. But it was also clear, bourbon was not just something he loved drinking, but something that meant something to him. As he guided us on how to partake of our tasting, he told us of the moment, when he had his first (legal) swig of bourbon – a special moment, sitting on the porch with his Dad in his Kentucky home where he grew up, only 20 minutes from where we stood. You could almost see him travel back to that porch in his mind and become filled to the brim with a different kind of warm, Kentucky hug of nostalgia. There was a little hint of him getting choked up that you could tell he was hiding and holding back behind his respectable barrier of professionalism. He shared a sincere wish for us all that we had a memory like that and that this tasting might bring us back to it.

There was no question, there is something special about bourbon, something much more than a taste or just a liquid and something that is not just contained in the glass or the bottle or the barrel. It is something that is fully alive in the state of Kentucky. We could tell there was a bourbon spirit and that it pulsated through the people of Kentucky and maybe even through the hills themselves. And that spirit was absolutely something we had a taste for.