A Shot of America

Twelve hundred people crowded into a big white tent Sept. 19, the men in tuxedos, the women in formal gowns. You heard a lot of gracious Kentucky accents in the excited crush but also Japanese and even Czech.

Well, sure. The Black Tie Bourbon-Tasting Gala is the highlight of the International Bourbon Festival held in Bardstown, Ky., every year. But it does have its peculiar aspects. For starters, a lot of people think of Bourbon as an earthy, working-guy sort of drink, not particularly black-tie at all.

And nothing might seem less international. Bourbon is utterly American; it’s the only form of liquor actually invented in this country. From the start, it was the drink of the frontier. When a cowboy asked for a shot of “red-eye,” he was calling for this reddish-amber whiskey.

The annual Bourbon Festival--this year’s was the seventh--is part of a Bourbon comeback that parallels what happened in the coffee trade in the 1980s. International marketing agreements had discouraged excellence in coffee, and coffee-drinking had declined; then the agreements were scrapped and premium coffee spearheaded a coffee renaissance.

Likewise, 45 years ago, when 40% of the liquor sold in this country was Bourbon, the economic outlook convinced most distillers to concentrate on low price rather than on premium quality. The result: decades of declining sales. Bourbon now accounts for only 8% of the liquor market.

The bright side of this picture is that Kentucky eventually learned what Scotland had long known with its single-malt Scotches; namely, that people will pay extra for extra quality. Every Bourbon distiller now produces premium and even super-premium bottlings. There are dozens made exclusively for the Bourbon-mad Japanese market.

There’s another parallel with coffee. Wine comes in so many forms--red, white, sweet, bubbly, fortified, to say nothing of the various grape varieties--that the differences between wines are obvious. By contrast, all coffee tastes pretty much like coffee, and all Bourbon tastes like Bourbon. The differences are more subtle than among wines but no less fascinating.

Foodies, it must be said, have been a little slow to pick up on the Bourbon revival. But Booker’s (Jim Beam), Blanton’s (Leestown Distillers), Kentucky Spirit (Wild Turkey) and other super-premiums have been impressive. So this year I used the Bourbon Festival as an occasion to learn a little about the resurgent Kentucky spirit and the people who make it.

Brown-Forman Distillers, situated in Louisville, played a crucial role in establishing Bourbon as a quality drink about 125 years ago. Until that time, whiskey had always been sold by the jug. You took your jug to a “barrel house” where it was filled before your eyes, but nobody knew whether the owner had adulterated his barrels, or with what. George Garvin Brown was the one who first sold Bourbon in sealed bottles. Those original bottles are the model for the sturdy, handsome bottles Brown-Forman uses for Woodford Reserve, its new premium brand. (See “The Littlest Distillery,” this page.) Its old premium line is Old Forester; its biggest seller is Jack Daniels, which is actually made in Tennessee.

The company Brown founded has a sophisticated, urbane style. One of its Louisville office buildings is a former barrel-aging warehouse that has been California-ized with fountains and a central air shaft lit by a skylight. Brown-Forman actively encourages its employees to train their tasting abilities in its sensory evaluation laboratory. A sensitive sniffer can earn such prizes as a better parking place.

There’s one other distiller in Louisville, with the significant name United Distillers. It represents the merger of a number of old-time operations including, Schenley, Fleischmann and Medley. (Consolidation has long been the name of the game in Bourbon; see “So Many Brands,” H6.)

For a while, U.D. operated two distilleries. A sign in front of one of them read “No Chemists Allowed.” That distillery was recently shut down and is being used only for warehousing these days.

Meanwhile, a state-of-the-art new distillery was built on the other site in 1992. And it’s run by a chemist, Michael Wright.

This is the most completely automated Bourbon distillery yet. Apart from Wright, the entire staff is two assistants who monitor computer screens and two men “in the field” who do a few manual chores such as tank clean-up.

Everything from dumping grain into the mash cooker to sending the raw whiskey to the barreling operation is computer-controlled. Wright points out that there isn’t a single manual valve in the plant. “Yes,” he observes matter-of-factly, “year 2000 is a serious concern with us.”

Wright likes to show off the gleaming new facility. For instance, the gigantic “mash head” where 15,000 gallons of corn and rye or wheat are being cooked (United Distillers produces I.W. Harper, Old Charter and Kentucky Tavern from a rye formula and Old Fitzgerald, W.L. Weller and Rebel Yell from a wheat formula). It smells like breakfast cereal.

When malted barley has been added to the mash to convert the starches to sugars, it goes to 124,000-gallon stainless steel fermenting tanks where it’s “set” by adding yeast. After fermentation, as at every distillery, the porridge-like “beer” trickles down through a two-story-high column still where up-rushing steam strips the alcohol out. U.D.’s still is the most approved modern sort, stainless steel at the bottom, to stand to the high heat and the abrasion of the boiling mash, and copper toward the top, to remove unpleasant sulfur compounds.

All Bourbon is double-distilled to remove other off-flavors. The second distillation takes place in a “doubler,” which Wright calls “a big, wide, lazy pot still.”

What comes out of the doubler is the unaged raw material of Bourbon. It has a sweet flavor, a pleasant, faintly grainy aroma--and a shocking bite; it spreads through your mouth like jet-propelled razor blades. No wonder they call it “white dog.”

Another cluster of Bourbon distilleries is found around Frankfort, about an hour’s drive east of Louisville. The handsomest location belongs to Boulevard Distillers, better known as the Wild Turkey distillery. Unlike most distilleries, which are set in valleys for better access to water, Wild Turkey is on a bluff 250 feet above the Kentucky River.

“That’s my favorite view,” says master distiller Jimmy Russell, a big, eager, genial man with a bear-paw handshake, nodding toward the luxuriantly wooded river gorge and the 19th century railroad bridge spanning it.

Like most other distilleries, it’s surrounded by warehouses for aging the barrels; tall, metal-clad structures with high windows covered by iron bars. “They look like prisons, don’t they?” asks Russell. “They had to be built that way, government specs.” Whiskey is an important source of tax revenue, so the federal government has insisted on tight security in warehouses.

This isn’t a distilling giant like Jim Beam or a tiny operation like Labrot & Graham or Maker’s Mark. It turns out about 400 barrels a day. It’s also in the middle on some practices, such as the use of antique cypress-wood fermenting tanks. Some places stick to these traditional tanks, despite the fact that they’re all wearing out and there are no cypress groves to replace them, and other distillers have converted to stainless steel tanks, which are far easier to clean and maintain. Wild Turkey does about half its fermentation in cypress, half in steel.

Wild Turkey has been a premium brand ever since its introduction in the ‘40s. Most Bourbon is aged four years, but Wild Turkey’s best-selling line is aged eight. There are also super-premium bottlings: Rare Breed, a blend of barrels up to 12 years old, and the single-barrel Kentucky Spirit.

To guarantee consistency, Russell keeps a library of samples from the various batches of whiskey being aged. “That way, if somebody has a complaint,” he says, “we can go look it up, find out what’s going on.” As another quality check, his bottling operation also stamps each label with the date and minute of bottling.

The Leestown Distillery is situated at the east end of Frankfort, where you can’t miss it--a high water tank with the letters AA (for Ancient Age) dominates the landscape. Its history goes back to 1865, so its architecture is an anthology of styles from the last 130 years. There are even a couple of Kentucky-style log cabins on the grounds, though they were actually built in this century.

Despite its antiquity, Leestown is a very modern operation. Like Brown-Forman, it uses newfangled techniques like warming its warehouses in winter for quicker maturation. It turns out 10,000 bottles an hour and recently filled its 5 millionth barrel, putting it second only to Jim Beam, which has produced 8 million.

On the other hand, with the Blanton’s line, it introduced the idea of single-barrel bottlings in the 1980s, ushering in a new era of hand-crafted premium Bourbon (see “The Big Chill,” this page). It uses the highest percentage of corn in the business (80%), meaning that all its whiskeys are at the sweet end of the Bourbon spectrum.

The Four Roses distillery looks like a bit of old L.A. dropped into the bluegrass country. Back in 1910, an earlier owner decided for some reason to build it in Spanish Mission style.

It’s another computerized operation, but operations superintendent John Rhea shows off an astonishingly old-fashioned fermenting room. Most distilleries have either worn old cypress tanks or gleaming new stainless steel ones, but Four Roses has the only new cypress tanks in the world. The last tank-quality cypress groves may have been clear-cut in the 1940s, but century-old cypress logs have been found in Florida rivers, untouched by time (cypress is completely impervious to water). Four Roses snapped them up and is replacing all its old cypress tanks with new ones.

Another unique thing about Four Roses is that it uses two “mash bills” (proportions of corn and rye) and five yeasts (one of them smells exactly like apples), making 10 slightly different Bourbons in the course of a year. They’re later blended for consistency.

Four Roses is a name that goes back 110 years, and quite a few people remember it from the ‘40s and ‘50s. Forty years ago the Seagram’s company pulled it off the U.S. market, and since then it has been available only in Europe and Japan. This year, however, Four Roses has tentatively been reintroduced in the Kentucky and Indiana markets.

The remaining distilleries are all in or around Bardstown, about 45 minutes south of Louisville. They include Barton Brands, which specializes in budget-priced whiskeys. If you order a Manhattan at a bar, it will likely be made with Barton’s Ten High.

The 800-pound gorilla of this and every other Bourbon-distilling town is Jim Beam, producer of the top-selling Bourbon in the world. Beam is the only distillery that doesn’t divulge its recipe or allow photographs inside its computerized plant. Hey, it doesn’t have to.

It’s hard to convey the scale of the Beam operation. Just consider that the primary yeast tank--this is just for yeast--is two stories tall. The prized Beam yeast, which is preserved in four locations against disaster, has a delicious winy smell, by the way.

Beam has the world’s largest inventory of aging Bourbon, stored in 54 warehouses. The traditional Bourbon warehouse is up to nine stories high with three layers of barrels per floor. The higher the barrels are stored, the more they undergo extremes of temperature over the course of a year, which forces the whiskey into the barrel wood, gaining flavor but losing body and other qualities. So it’s traditional to shift barrels between floors over the years to equalize the aging process.

Like some other large operations, Beam solves the problem another way--it blends barrels from different levels and bottles from several warehouses at once to make a consistent product.

In the middle of this highly industrial operation, however, stands the most distinctive personality in Bourbon business: Booker Noe, Jim Beam’s grandson and a fifth-generation distiller. Jovial, sly, irrepressible and full of colorful anecdotes, Noe is Bourbon’s charismatic public face. Booker’s, one of Beam’s super-premium whiskeys, is his personal selection of whiskeys bottled straight from the barrel, with nothing filtered from it but the bits of charred wood that come loose from the barrel during aging.

Noe may represent 200 years of Bourbon history while Heaven Hill goes back only about 65. But Heaven Hill has become, depending on how you calculate these things, the second or third largest player in the field.

One of its secrets is simply having the wisdom to hire members of the Beam family as distillers for the last three generations. But Heaven Hill also has a kind of business sense that has not always gone along with Bourbon-making.

In the 1930s, the five Shapira brothers saw that the aging process spelled risk--you never know what price you’d get when it was ready to market--so they pioneered the idea of selling their product to brokers while still in the barrel. This way, they accepted a lower price but passed along the risk.

Their idea has since become an accepted practice around the world. As a result of it, Heaven Hill holds the second largest inventory of aging Bourbon, right after Jim Beam.

At one time, it also had a very modern distillery, but on Nov. 7, 1966, a disastrous fire broke out among its warehouses and burned all night, consuming 14% of its inventory. When tons of alcohol burn, you have a truly ferocious fire--the flames could be seen for seven miles. A river of burning whiskey flowed into the distillery, and it too went up in flames.

The next day, Heaven Hill contracted with other distilleries to take up the slack, so the production of its Bourbons has continued without a break. However, it hasn’t rebuilt the distillery. According to industry talk, Heaven Hill has its eye on that brand new United Distillers plant in Louisville. U.D. was recently acquired by an English firm that may be more interested in U.D.’s Tennessee Bourbon, George Dickel, than in its Kentucky brands, so the distillery might be on the market, and one day Heaven Hill might be produced in Louisville.

Maker’s Mark is the smallest distillery (not counting Labrot & Graham) and also the one with the strongest aesthetic sense. There are a lot of antiques around, including a display of revolvers belonging to Frank and Jesse James--relatives of the Samuels family--and a lot of gleaming 19th century brass work in the distillery, which is actually a designated historical landmark. Every whiskey warehouse develops dingy mold stains, so Maker’s Mark has preemptively painted its warehouses black all over--and then added striking red shutters with cutouts in the shape of whiskey bottles. The shutters match the trademark red wax seal on the every Maker’s Mark bottle.

And the whiskey reflects a very conscious aesthetic choice by distiller Bill Samuels Jr.’s father. “He was never satisfied with the Bourbon he had been making,” says Samuels, “so he spent six months on a new formula. He experimented by baking bread with different mash bills, hundreds of loaves.” He ended up using winter wheat in place of rye and upping the proportion of malted barley. The result was a less grainy Bourbon with a clean, elegant flavor concentrated in the front of the mouth.

He happened to bring this new-style Bourbon out in 1959, just as the Bourbon market was heading into oblivion. “But the horse people in Lexington picked it up,” says Samuels, “and it became a hot Bourbon in Kentucky.” Since then it has developed an international following. During the Bourbon Festival, Samuels hosted a dinner for a group of Japanese fans who had made the long pilgrimage to Kentucky.

At that Bourbon-Tasting Gala the last night of the Bourbon Festival, all these distilleries had booths, each in its personal style. Brown-Forman was emphasizing Woodford Reserve, in its sleek, handsome, antique-style bottles. Jimmy Russell was jovially pouring Rare Breed at the Wild Turkey booth. The Maker’s Mark crowd broke the black-tie code by dressing up like Prohibition-era gangsters, complete with a barrelhouse piano player. Four Roses featured a stunning piece of retro-chic straight from the ‘40s: a Four Roses bottle frozen in a huge block of clear ice.

The ice was welcome in the unseasonably hot evening. At the crowded west side of the tent, Heaven Hill was pouring fine 18-year-old Elijah Craig but really getting mobbed for its icy “bourbonritas.” And right next to Heaven Hill, the Jim Beam booth was mobbed by people who wanted to talk to Booker Noe, sitting in a rocking chair under the only fan in the tent (one more proof he’s a very smart guy).

From the tasting, the gleeful crowd went on to a larger tent for a sort of Nouvelle Kentucky meal: Bourbon-marinated portabello mushrooms with arugula and shaved Reggiano-Parmigiano, Bourbon-smoked scallops, loin of veal with Jim Beam demi-glace and chocolate bread pudding with Evan Williams single-barrel creme anglaise. You didn’t think Bourbon was a black-tie thing? This was black-tie all the way.

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BOURBON RASPBERRY VINAIGRETTE

Another tangy recipe from Gerhardt.

3 shallots, chopped

2 3/4 cups raspberry vinegar

1/4 cup Bourbon

3/4 cup olive oil

Juice of 1 lemon

1/2 bunch parsley, minced

2 teaspoons sugar

1/2 cup water

Salt, pepper

Combine shallots, vinegar, Bourbon, olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, sugar, water and salt and pepper to taste. Serve on salad.

5 cups dressing. Each tablespoon:

21 calories; 4 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 2 grams fat; 1 grams carbohydrates; 0 protein; 0.01 gram fiber.

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HEAVENLY BOURBONED PORK ROAST

The Times Test Kitchen started with a recipe in “Cooking With Bourbon,” published by Heaven Hill Distillery, made some changes and came up with a terrific roast.

1 (3-pound) pork loin

Juice of 1 lemon

1 heaping tablespoon light brown sugar

1 teaspoon flour

1 teaspoon paprika

1/2 teaspoon salt

Freshly ground pepper

2 to 3 tablespoons minced parsley

1/2 cup Bourbon plus extra for soaking prunes

1 bay leaf

1 whole clove

1 small onion, chopped

4 to 5 very firm apples, such as Granny Smith, halved and cored, not peeled

8 to 10 pitted prunes soaked in Bourbon 15 minutes or more

2 teaspoons granulated sugar

Rub meat with lemon juice. Mix brown sugar, flour, paprika and salt and rub all over roast. Sprinkle with pepper. Place on meat rack in roasting pan with cover and sprinkle with parsley and 1/4 cup Bourbon. Pin bay leaf to roast and put and onion in pan. Cover tightly and roast at 325 degrees 45 minutes.

Stuff each apple with 1 prune. After 45 minutes, remove roasting pan from oven and uncover. Arrange apples, cut side down, in overlapping layer around roast. Pour remaining 1/4 cup Bourbon over roast. Replace cover and return to oven until meat thermometer shows internal temperature has reached 150 degrees, 40 to 50 minutes.

Remove meat and apples to serving dish. Add sugar to pan juices and boil until reduced by 1/2. Serve roast with 1 prune and 1/2 apple for each diner and pass sauce.

6 to 8 servings. Each of 8 servings:

325 calories; 232 mg sodium; 82 mg cholesterol; 14 grams fat; 20 grams carbohydrates; 25 grams protein; 0.69 gram fiber.

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BOURBON SHRIMP

This recipe, by Rick Szekely of Milwaukee, won the grand prize in this year’s Jim Beam Bourbonqueing Cook-Off.

1 cup olive oil

1/2 cup Bourbon

1 teaspoon salt

2 cloves garlic, chopped

1 tablespoon prepared horseradish

1 tablespoon Bavarian mustard

1/3 cup hot pepper sauce

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1/2 teaspoon pepper sauce

1 tablespoon chopped basil

2 pounds shrimp

Mix oil, Bourbon, salt, garlic, horseradish, mustard, chili sauce, Worcestershire sauce, pepper sauce and basil in bowl. Shell and devein shrimp, leaving tails on. Marinate shrimp in sauce 3 to 6 hours.

Remove shrimp from marinade; reserve marinade. String shrimp on skewers and grill 3 minutes on each side over very hot coals. If desired, transfer marinade to saucepan, boil 1 minute and use as dipping sauce.

4 to 5 servings. Each of 5 servings:

580 calories; 946 mg sodium; 176 mg cholesterol; 45 grams fat; 6 grams carbohydrates; 24 grams protein; 0.05 gram fiber.

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KENTUCKY BOURBON BALLS

The recipe comes from Kentucky Distillers’ Assn. The paraffin gives a sheen and more stable consistency to the chocolate.

1 cup chopped pecans

3/4 cup Bourbon

2 pounds powdered sugar

1 stick butter

1 (12-ounce) package semisweet chocolate chips

2 tablespoons paraffin

Soak pecans in Bourbon about 8 hours. Add sugar and butter, with additional sugar if it’s too thin. Form into small balls and refrigerate on wax paper 1 hour.

Melt chocolate and paraffin in saucepan over medium-low heat. Drop Bourbon Balls directly into chocolate; remove with spoon to waxed paper, then refrigerate 15 to 30 minutes. If chocolate cools and thickens, reheat with few droplets of water.

About 60 (1-inch) balls. Each ball:

116 calories; 16 mg sodium; 4 mg cholesterol; 4 grams fat; 19 grams carbohydrates; 0 protein; 0.08 gram fiber.

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BOURBON-MARINATED BERRIES

Recipe from Jim Gerhardt, executive chef, the Seelbach Hotel, Louisville, Ky. The berry juices are like a rowdy American version of Chambord liqueur.

1 pint blackberries

2 pints raspberries

1 pint strawberries

8 ounces sugar

4 ounces Bourbon

Whipped cream, optional

Combine blackberries, raspberries, strawberries and sugar in large bowl. Add Bourbon and refrigerate until berries throw their juice, at least 1 hour. Serve on biscuits or ice cream with whipped cream.

8 servings. Each serving, without whipped cream:

202 calories; 1 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 1 grams fat; 43 grams carbohydrates; 1 grams protein; 3.53 grams fiber.