Original subtitles

[birds chirping]

[man 1] The soil's made up of silt, clay and loam.

And what you really want is the combination of all three of those components.

But it all goes into making bourbon.

It starts with the corn growing in the soil

into barley, into wheat, into rye.

But also, the oak trees that we have across the road here to make barrels.

Really everything about bourbon

comes from the soil.

[narrator] This is the story of grains, water, and wood.

It's the story of immigrants, and farmers,

and businessmen, and criminals.

The story of cold winters and hot summers.

It's the story of time.

This is the story of bourbon.

[man 2] Two things are important.

The first is, you never bring out old-aged-bourbons

until you're with friends and family,

and you're not in any hurry to go anywhere.

[Marianne] It's all about the earth and the soil and the natural ingredients

that go in to make it, because bourbon is an all natural product.

There's nothing synthetic about it.

[man 3] America's only native spirit is so big and so beautiful

that it can handle anything you wanna throw at it

and still give you the true character that's in that glass.

[man 4] Bourbon heritage is American heritage.

Every phase of American history is reflected through bourbon history.

[man 5] It's not grabbing a bottle of beer out of a cooler.

It's, let me pour you a glass of this, let me tell you where it came from.

Let me tell you the story on this.

It's history in a glass.

[man 6] I think people have discovered that bourbon is not just a shot and a beer.

It's amazing to see it.

'Cause to me it's not just your granddad's drink, or your dad's drink,

like it used to be when I was young.

[man 7] If you like the idea of going to the horse races

and living kind of an agrarian type of life,

bourbon sort of gives you a way to live in central Kentucky

just for a moment in your life,

whether you're actually there or not.

[man 8] It's almost like a legacy that says,

if time was not a factor in our lives,

bourbon could transport us back

into some of those places where

maybe life was a lot easier going.

That's what bourbon's all about.

[birds chirping]

[Zoeller] Whoever came over on the Mayflower

brought a still with them.

And whoever came over the Appalachian Mountains

to settle at Kentucky first,

brought a still with them.

Whiskey was much, much more than just a drink.

Distilling was a way of life.

It was what you did with your surplus corn.

If you stored corn, it could rot,

it could get eaten by mice or other vermin.

You turn it into a bottle of whiskey,

it's gonna stay the bottle of whiskey.

It's gonna be good then or forever.

They didn't have refrigeration like we have it today.

They didn't have the canning technology that we have today.

So one of the best ways to preserve your corn

was to turn it into whiskey.

In Scotland, in Ireland, and in England,

if you grew more corn than you could use for your family,

it belonged to the king.

But in the new world,

if you grew more corn than you could use for your family,

you got to choose what you did with it.

And what did they do? They made whiskey.

that was very much like moonshine.

It was kind of a rough cut,

not the, you know, very elegant spirit that we make today.

It was thought to be medicinal.

And remember, you're on the frontier.

There's not a drugstore to go to.

[Michael] You gotta remember, these are frontiersmen.

They work from sun up to sun down.

You get up in the morning, you're still aching from the day before,

so you have a little eye-opener.

A drink of whiskey to get you going.

Lot of people don't realize that's where the mint julep comes from.

It was a breakfast drink.

Whiskey was used as a medium of exchange.

You would first grow enough corn

to feed your family and your livestock.

And whatever you had leftover,

you either carried around large bushel baskets of corn,

or you distilled it.

[Michael] Whiskey was just a very important part of that life.

So when the frontiersmen came into the west...

You gotta realize, Kentucky is the first American West.

A lot of people brought stills.

[Freddie] They weren't whiskey folks.

They were architects,

they were structural engineers,

they were chemists, they were bio chemists.

It's not about the whiskey,

it's about the people

that make the product so cool.

[narrator] Now, before going any further,

we need to answer a very simple question.

What does it take for a spirit

to be able to call itself a bourbon?

Bourbon is the most heavily regulated product in the world.

Our Federal government tells you how you have to make bourbon.

[Potter] I think the first thing to understand is,

all bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon.

By definition, whiskey is a grain based distillery.

Once you understand that bourbon is a whiskey,

then it's what defines a bourbon.

So, the rules of bourbon. I call it the ABCs.

Start with A, American made.

Bourbon is uniquely American,

'cause you can only make in America.

You distill 51% corn,

age it in charred oak barrels...

You jump through all those hoops.

But if you do it in Mexico, you can't use the term "bourbon".

It does not have to be made in Kentucky.

A lot of folks believe that

bourbon can only be made in Kentucky.

Bourbon, by active Congress,

can be made anywhere in the United States.

B, barrels.

It must be aged in a brand new charred white oak barrel,

just like what's behind me.

[Chris] The lead character of a bourbon whiskey

is the use of a new charred barrel.

That gives bourbon that big, rich, caramel vanilla note.

Yeah, it just makes bourbon so special.

C is corn.

To be a bourbon, you have to use at least 51% corn.

There's a very good reason for that.

Corn imparts a very unique flavor to bourbon.

That sweetness.

If you taste a Scotch whiskey and Irish whiskey, you get some sweetness.

A lot of it from the wood, maybe a little bit from the grain.

But if you taste bourbon, you can taste that sweetness.

You can almost taste the corn.

D is distillation proof.

So when you come off the still,

you cannot be higher than 160 proof.

The higher the proof, the less flavor that's gonna be there.

Think about it. Vodka is 190 proof,

192 proof when it comes off those stills.

It has no flavor, it's just pure alcohol.

You start getting over 160,

you're stripping out grain flavor.

You're moving more into a vodka category.

That's not what we want with bourbon.

We wanna hold on to the grain character.

So one of the rules is you gotta be 160 or less coming off the still.

E, entry proof going into the barrel.

You have to be 125 proof or less.

F, fill proof.

In the bottle, your proof has to be 80 or above.

G, genuine.

There are no additives allowed.

So, everything is

what Mother Nature provides.

No flavor, or no color, or nothing should be added to bourbon.

It's a natural product.

If you add any color or any flavor, it becomes a whiskey.

All that color must come from aging in that new charred oak barrel.

You're only as good as what comes off the still

and what comes out of that barrel

and goes down that bottling line.

[Steve] Okay, quiz time.

Who was the first person who took that un-aged white whiskey

and turned it into bourbon that we know today?

In the 1800s,

a Baptist minister by the name of Elijah Craig

used old barrels previously containing fish and pickles

to store some of his newly distilled whiskey.

But in order to get rid of that nasty fish smell,

he charred the inside of the barrels,

making a discovery that would forever change the history of bourbon.

Or, wait...

Maybe it was the, uh...

The poor farmer from Bourbon County, Kentucky.

Who after his barn burned down,

he was forced to use some surviving but very charred barrels,

to transport his whiskey

down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

Sloshing around.

Or wait, maybe it was the Lexington grocer.

Uh...

Upon seeing the popularity of cognac,

a spirit aged in toasted oak casks,

put an order in for his usual corn whiskey,

but this time however, he requested

that it be sent in barrels burnt upon the inside.

That's it.

Or, maybe it doesn't really matter.

Somehow bourbon found a way.

[Marianne] We are on our way to Walnut Grove Farm.

And we're actually headed to the home farm,

which is where their family first settled

back in the 1800s.

Which is incredible.

They're gonna be providing all of the corn for my bourbon.

[narrator] This is Marianne Barnes.

And she is the first female master distiller

since Prohibition.

This is also the Marianne Barnes

that Forbes magazine named

one of the top 30 business people under 30-years-old.

In 2015,

Marianne and her business partners

launched a brand new distillery

called Castle & Key.

Setting up shop in the long abandoned Old Taylor Distiller.

Today, she's come to the Kentucky-Tennessee border

to get some corn for her first batch of bourbon.

[Marianne] Corn is a historical ingredient for bourbon.

It goes back to the roots of when bourbon started in Kentucky.

When the settlers first came out here,

they were still making rye and barley whiskeys.

When they hit this part of the United States,

they encountered the Indians.

The Indians had been exposed to the Spanish.

The Spanish had introduced the Indians to corn whiskey,

moonshine.

And what they did is they started mixing corn whiskey

with the rye and barley whiskeys

and that's how the taste of bourbon got started.

[Marianne] By law, your bourbon has to be at least 51% corn.

It is the most important ingredient.

It's the star of the show.

You're getting a lot of your flavor from your corn.

Not only just because it's that percentage,

but it's a very flavorful grain.

Corn actually identifies bourbon,

because of the flavor that it imparts.

If you taste any whiskeys the world over,

you'll notice that bourbon is very unique,

especially in its sweetness.

And that is derived from the corn that is used to make it.

That corn is what's gonna give it a lot of sweetness.

A lot of the mouth feel is gonna come from the corn.

And so you deliberately bring

bourbon off the still at a lower proof.

And that retains some of the natural properties of it.

[Potter] It's just a very robust flavor.

And what that does is, it can go through maturation,

it can go to the barrel.

And so it's gonna come through

whether it's four-years-old, or 23-years-old.

Corn really does last over those years.

You can still get it, you know, 18 or 23 years later.

[Marianne] And a single bottle of bourbon, depending on your recipe,

will have somewhere between two and two-and-a-half pounds of corn.

It's really important to take care of the soil and earth.

Soil that's gonna feed the plants that eventually go into bourbon.

You know, corn grows for four months

and it's pulling from the earth.

The oak trees that eventually go into the barrels

that are gonna contain your product for four years

have been drawn from the earth for upwards of 40-50 years.

Every season that has come and gone,

every change in the environment,

you will eventually taste in a glass of bourbon.

In a lot of ways it's like drinking history

and experiencing nature in a completely different way.

[Don] There's a lot of science involved

in anything that you do in farming.

But once you get past the science,

there's still an art.

Just like anything else. Just like fine furniture.

The guy that's making the furniture

knows he can look at the grain of the wood

and know which way it needs to be put together

to make a beautiful piece.

And farming's the same way.

You have the craftsmanship that really is just...

You just gain over a lifetime.

There are always an even number of rows per ear.

And in this case, these are 14 a round.

In other ears, sometimes we see as many as 16 or 18.

And I think it's because we had an excess of water this year

that actually has hurt our yields a little bit.

They'll still be above average yields.

You can tell how many bushels you're gonna yield per acre?

-That's fascinating. -You can make a pretty good estimate.

We're sitting next to a field of non-GMO white corn

that has been grown specifically for

our Bottled in bond core bourbon brand.

In four years, this 45 acres of white corn

will be about 250,000 bottles of bourbon.

[Freddie] We encourage people to take pictures.

We encourage them to ask questions.

It's a touchy-feely tour.

We tell 'em to touch the barrels.

You know, kind of look at it.

We go into the bottling house.

You get a chance to hold a bottle

and kind of like take some special photos.

Come over this way. Let's head this way.

[narrator] You've already met Freddie Johnson.

Now, what he hasn't told you

is that he's a third generation employee

at the Buffalo Trace Distillery.

His grandfather worked here, his father worked here,

and now he works here.

Trust me when I say, this guy knows bourbon.

And today, he's agreed to teach us a thing or two

about the art of tasting.

Well, we've had a chance to look around the distillery,

and now it's the time that you've really been waiting for,

and that is to see what that product is gonna taste like

after it's been in the barrel for a while.

This is your White Dog, Everclear,

Georgia Moon, White Lightning.

And this is what goes into the barrel,

and this is what the settlers used to drink back in the day.

Got it?

Word on the street, if you haven't been dead more than two weeks,

this'll bring you back.

-[laughter] -Okay, now.

You're gonna cup your hand like this.

I want you to smell off it.

You'll notice it smells very soft and buttery to the nose.

Now, I want you to smack your hands together.

Smack 'em.

Rub 'em real briskly.

Now, cup and smell them again.

Really strong of alcohol now, right?

So now the dog is awake.

-Okay? -[laughter]

All right?

I know the strength of this whiskey.

Let them breathe.

Let them breathe. All right?

When I say "You, sir," you say "Farm."

[all laughing]

When I say, Bourbon," you say, "Corn."

Smack your hands again.

Rub 'em real brisk.

Cup, smell 'em again.

Corn.

How about that?

What's the dominant ingredient in bourbon?

-Dotty? -[woman] Corn.

Exactly.

And if this had been straight rye whiskey, it would've smelled like rye.

If it had been scotch, it would've smelled like barley.

I now know the strength of your whiskey

and the dominant grain you've used to make it with.

Let 'em breathe again.

Fly, my friends. Be free.

Let 'em breathe.

Smack 'em again.

Rub 'em real briskly.

Cup, smell 'em again.

Now they smell like bread, like yeast.

So now I know the strength, I know the dominant grain,

and I know the kind of yeast that you used.

So that's the way the old moonshiners found out about whiskey

before they ever let it touch their lips.

Cool?

[dog barks]

[buzzing]

-[barks] -We talked about this.

It's gonna hurt you every time you bark.

I know this hurts you.

[buzzing]

[continues barking]

[sighs]

That last one was, "Okay, I'm done. This hurts."

[narrator] That guy who hates dogs so much

is named Paul Steele.

And he lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Paul's into bourbon.

Really into bourbon.

So much so that he decided to turn his basement into a speakeasy.

[Paul] It escalated really quickly.

We moved into the house about three-and-a-half years ago.

And this was just an unfinished basement.

And then, my wife's father got ill

and he passed away relatively quickly.

So we acquired a bunch of family pieces

from my dad and Paul's grandparents.

As a way to honor them and kind of hang on to those memories,

we were able to keep some stuff,

and that's the only place we had room for it, was our basement.

This is his. This light is his.

He was a metal worker. He made these.

Most of the stuff on the walls

are from his barn.

And that made it take shape really, really quickly.

[narrator] In that first year,

Paul's bourbon collection went from a single fifth of Jefferson's,

to 370 unique bottles.

This, along with regular tastings that he hosts,

has made Paul a bit of a folk hero among aficionados.

So tonight we are having a little,

more or less party, get together.

Celebration of life.

That sounds like someone died. No one died.

We are having, uh...

a little party at the speakeasy.

We do this probably three times a year.

They've got a great selection.

I mean, it's not a huge store, but,

this is the only place in Nashville that sells

Heaven Hill...

...by like the gallon.

Sometimes they have stuff in the back.

Might be worth asking about.

Is that all the bourbon you got,

or you might have one in the back?

Is this the 22, or the...

Yeah, 22.

I will definitely be picking this up.

Yeah. So I am very happy.

Picking up the limited edition. Four Roses, Elliott's Select.

[woman] We always hire a bartender to work all of our parties.

And typically, it's just kind of your normal bartender.

But this time really we want the mixologist of Nashville.

And so we were just kind of looking around and researching

and finding out who that might be.

We found some stuff online about this guy named Jonathan Howard.

So I'm following it up, finding him on Instagram, I think.

He came up with some special drinks to make for us tonight.

[Jonathan] When I'm making a drink, especially the bourbon,

I think there's a lot more that is to be said of the spirit

than just stirring it in Old Fashion or stirring it in Manhattan.

Both beautiful drinks, but I like to go with,

you know, honey, which is gonna bring out some of that...

some of the honey qualities of the whiskey, 'cause they are there.

And then lemon juice.

Just something that's really easy and good to drink

and they're just balanced or really pretty.

You know, I like drinks like that.

I like taking sort of the spirit

no matter what it is,

and saying, "Okay, this is what's always done with it.

I would rather do this."

[Paul] Bourbon is much needed in today's climate.

Everyone is always busy.

If you ask how someone is doing,

good, they're busy.

And because bourbon is not meant to be shot,

you know, it's meant to be enjoyed,

I think bourbon is going against the grain of society

and returning to where we all come from.

So I just think intrinsically,

bourbon is a great pause button.

And that to me is

direly needed in today's current climate.

I'm Elon Musk and I'm making cocktails

in Enoteca in Lexington, Kentucky today.

[laughter]

I'm Seth Brewer and I am making a cocktail for you all

at Enoteca in Lexington, Kentucky.

Today we are making the Winner's Circle.

It is a Maker's Mark cocktail.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna pour in one jigger

of our Maker's Mark.

We are then gonna use three quarters

of an ounce of Gents ginger syrup from here in Lexington.

Three quarters Jack Rudy Elderflower Tonic.

And three quarters

Giffard Pamplemousse rose pink grapefruit liqueur.

Just a little shake.

And we will top with a bing cherry

that has been marinated in that same Giffard Pamplemousse pink grapefruit liqueur.

And there you have a Winner's Circle.

[Bob] After the Civil War, bourbon was hot.

The peace dividend was paying off.

People wanted to enjoy distilled spirits.

The opportunity was so good that you had people come to the table

that wanted to shortcut the whole system.

They didn't want to build a distillery

and sit on the stuff for a couple of years.

They wanted to make a quick buck.

[Marianne] You didn't really know where your whiskey was coming from,

or who made it, or who might have

tampered with it before you tasted it.

Before you went to the bar and got a drink,

or before your doctor prescribed it to you.

Bourbon was in such a high demand

that there were these rectifiers who were making bourbon overnight.

They'd add either a neutral spirits,

or they'd add rubbing alcohol or water.

And since the color was lighter,

they might put a little tobacco spit in there

to get the color back up.

Maybe the bite wasn't there,

so they'd add just acid to it.

They would look the same to the naked eye.

And the packaging sort of betrayed that trust, really.

That original social contract,

of what I put on this label is what is in this bottle, was being broken.

People were literally dying.

That's where the name "Death Drink" comes from.

It was that rectifier era.

To the consumer, they would go in

and they would see two bottles of bourbon.

One would be authentically produced,

according to standards that are

more or less the same as how we make bourbon today.

The other was bogus. Hocus pocus.

It could be neutral grain spirit

with food coloring and sugar.

That started to tarnish the reputation of whiskey.

[Zoeller] Colonel Taylor was a banker from Frankfurt, Kentucky,

who eventually got into distilling.

And anything he did, he did first class.

He was very proud of what the distillery looked like.

Very proud of the product he made.

And he wanted to make sure that that product got to the consumer.

In 1887, Colonel Taylor built a limestone castle to house his distillery.

In a way, it symbolized

protection for his bourbon from an industry that

people back then really couldn't trust.

So he worked for ten years

on the Bottled in Bond Act of 1897.

[Bob] Bottled in Bond Act was the first

truth in advertising law in United States.

Now, think about that.

Didn't start with food, didn't start with medicine, didn't start with fuel.

It started with whiskey.

He brought trust, and transparency,

and authenticity, and that respect

and that relationship between the consumer and the distiller.

This was a revolutionary moment.

After the Bottled in Bond Act was passed,

consumers could walk into the store, pick up a bottle,

see "Bottled in Bond" on the label,

and they would be assured of the quality that they were getting.

And this changed the story of bourbon forever.

[Steve] What does it take for a bourbon

to be considered Bottled in Bond?

Well, a couple of things. But first,

I want to shout out to Colonel Taylor.

I love what you did with the law.

Okay. Um...

Yeah, Bottled in Bond.

Couple of things. First, the whiskey must be the product

of one distillation season,

one master distiller,

and one distillery.

Second, it must be aged

in a federally bonded warehouse

under U.S. government supervision for at least four years.

And third, it must be bottled in glass at 100 proof.

Like you're even gonna put it in a plastic bottle.

So, next time you're at the liquor store,

grab yourself a bottle of bonded bourbon

and rest assured,

you got the real deal.

Like you think is this...

Is this bonded bourbon?

No.

This is in plastic.

Hey, Petey, you're gonna say hi?

You're not gonna say hi today? All right.

Petey is a blue-fronted Amazon.

We've just acquired him recently.

His long time owner passed away last year.

And birds live to be about 70-years-old.

So Petey is about 35.

And we'll have him for the rest of his life.

[narrator] This is Nick Laracuente,

and he's an archaeologist.

No, he doesn't have a fedora.

But he does have a parrot.

And a snake that he's not crazy about named,

of all things, Gabrielle.

Him and I, we don't get along too well.

I married into... Married into him.

[narrator] But he does love bourbon.

So much so that he and a team of volunteers

spend their nights and weekends

scouring the woods of Kentucky

looking for what remains

of some of the nation's first distilleries.

And what they found thus far has been pretty amazing.

In October of 2016,

Nick and his comrades helped unearth what some have dubbed the Bourbon Pompeii.

Long forgotten fermenting vats

at the Buffalo Trace Distillery,

dating back to 1873.

Today they're heading out to a new site

and they've invited us to come along.

[Nicholas] Today we're heading out to the Frazier Distillery.

It's an industrial distillery in Woodford County

built around 1860-ish, I believe.

And burnt down about 1908.

It was rebuilt just in time for Prohibition.

And around Prohibition I think it just went out of business.

Maybe it was salvaged for parts.

But this is only our second day out there.

So let's stage the equipment over in this area.

Put all the tarps and equipment and stuff in here.

Let me get Carl situated and we're gonna let him just run with it.

You're probably gonna hit a lot of rock right in here.

Because there is remnants of a stone wall there.

And it looks like it might have run up even with this thing.

-And so we are inside? -Inside.

We're underneath the mashing floor right now.

Fermenting vats would have been over there.

Still would have been over there.

And don't know how it changed over time.

[beeping]

I'm gonna be down at the end that way.

This is just another piece of metal scrap it looks like here.

Piece of bark.

We found bark. Yes.

A piece of brick.

Oh, look at that.

Coal.

Yeah.

So a piece of coal.

-That's a good thing. -That's a good thing.

They were using coal to run the boilers, which were right back here.

[metal detector whining]

[detector beeping rapidly]

As we went down and we started examining an area,

we noticed a lot of charcoal.

Likely from the burning of the distillery.

And then we saw that.

I was like, "That looks odd."

It's a nice rounded shape, and, uh...

As I looked at it, corn has that little distinctive dent in there...

I was like, "Oh, we got corn."

My eyes got wide.

My hair stood up on end and I yelled, "Nick!"

[man] How old are we talking?

This is from the distillery fire.

-That was what, um, 19-- -1908.

-1908? -Mm-hmm.

So just a little over hundred years.

[narrator] Okay, so they found some bricks,

a couple of nails, and a piece of corn.

Not quite the lost ark you think of

when you hear the word "archaeologist."

But maybe the story of bourbon isn't all glamorous.

Sometimes it's just regular people

working really hard on something they really love.

That's kind of cool.

Every day, thousands upon thousands of pounds of grain

roll into distilleries all across Kentucky.

This is Brian. And he inspects every load of grain

that comes into the Four Roses distillery by hand.

Or more accurately by nose.

[Brian] Every load that comes in here,

is smelt before it's loaded. Always.

That's the very first thing.

If it doesn't pass that,

then there's no sense of letting the rest of it.

[narrator] So here's the question.

After Brian ensures that the grain are free of mold and moisture,

how do they become bourbon?

These are the three grains that we use to produce Four Roses.

Of course, we have the corn, rye and the malted barley.

And this is what it looks like when it's milled down.

We use the corn for the sweetness.

The rye for nice and spicy structured flavors.

The malted barley, it imparts maybe a little bit of flavor.

But we use this primarily for the enzymes

that are inside the malted barley.

From here, they go into the masher.

And the mash begins.

[Potter] A mash bill is simply a recipe.

What are the ingredients you're gonna use,

and in what percentage are you gonna use those

in order to make your whiskey.

This is our cooker.

This is where the mashing process takes place.

We're taking all the grains that are in the process,

we're adding the heat and the water

to gelatinize all the starches within the grains,

so that the yeast can come in and ferment the sugars that are inside the grains.

This is the fermenter room.

The fermenters, that's where the magic happens.

After the mashing, we send that to a drop tub,

it gets cooled, sent to the fermenters,

and then we inoculate it with the yeast.

[Potter] The role of yeast in the bourbon making process

is pretty simple.

We've converted starch to sugar during the mashing process.

And then the yeast eats the sugar

and produces alcohol.

[Brent] We've hand selected five different strains of yeast

that each creates its own different flavors.

Some create spicy flavors,

some create fruity,

some create floral, some herbal.

So each one of these yeasts

creates different flavors through fermentation

based on its strength.

This is our column still, it's made of pure copper.

Four feet diameter, 45 feet tall.

This is where the distillation happens.

[Potter] We do a double distillation,

which is pretty common for most people.

And at first distillation its solid separation.

So you wanna separate out all the grain

from that alcohol water mix.

[narrator] As you may or may not know,

Alcohol comes to a boil at a much lower temperature than water.

So to separate the alcohol from the mash,

distillers heat the mash in the still

and the alcohol is volatilized,

aka, turned to steam.

As the alcohol vapor rises, it's captured.

And when it cools, it condenses back into a liquid.

It's then distilled a second time,

purifying it even further.

This is a White Dog.

This is the final product.

This is about 140 proof.

What we'll do now is, we'll ship this off to our warehousing facility,

it'll be cut to 120 proof and put in a barrel.

In five years this will be bourbon.

[Freddie] If you come to this whiskey business

in your early 20s,

and with everything you know about making whiskey,

you make the very best batch of whiskey you know how to make.

Everything that you've learned,

your family has been able to share...

You make that batch of whiskey,

you're gonna release expressions of it.

But when your last barrel from that batch

reaches its maturity,

you're not 45-years-old.

And that was your first batch.

So you make another batch,

based on everything you learned from your first batch.

By the time you go through that process again,

and your last barrel reaches its maturity,

you're about 75-years-old.

In this industry, what most people don't realize

it is very, very rare

that an old whiskey guy like us

ever gets to taste their third batch

to its final maturity.

That's the legacy you leave for the next generation.

You get to think about that.

You're thinking,

"I'm tasting

what they didn't get a chance to taste."

So here's the deal.

Water is your friend.

Okay?

Limestone water has a special property.

It has a lot of calcium, a lot of minerals in it.

When water passes through this limestone,

it filters out the iron,

which really gives whiskey a bad taste.

So it's a little bit softer and sweeter.

Okay?

You got that in one hand.

And this is your Buffalo Trace.

Now, here's what we're gonna do.

So you've had a chance to play around with the White Dog.

So you've already gotten acclimated to

the smell and what the White Dog is all about.

So now we're gonna let our palate

take over after this White Dog

has been in the barrel for a while.

So what I want you to do for me is,

I want you to take a sip of the water first.

Now take a tiny sip of your Buffalo Trace.

Just a little tiny sip of the Buffalo Trace.

Now come right back with the water again.

But this time, hold a little bit of the water in your mouth.

Okay? And with the water in your mouth,

take another sip of that same Buffalo Trace.

With the water in your mouth.

And just roll it around on your tongue for a little bit.

Okay? And all of a sudden you realize...

Well, I can taste a little bit if the charr,

little bit of an oaky, woody kind of a taste profile to it.

And a little bit of an alcohol burn.

But the finish is kind of smooth.

And each time you go back for your next sip,

reduce the amount of water that you're holding in your mouth.

And gradually you get acclimated down to neat.

Straight up.

What that allows you to understand

how much of a dilution do I want with this bourbon

to enjoy the flavors that I enjoy.

So in the industry there is no right or wrong way to drink bourbon.

Whether it's a flick of water,

two flicks of water,

one ice cube, two ice cubes,

chilled, poured over ice.

Okay? Crushed ice.

All those things are components in releasing different flavors

to the bourbon.

Cool?

All right. So, the right way to drink bourbon

is just the way you like it.

All right.

My name's Jake Sullic. I'm a bartender here at OBC.

Today I'm gonna be making a smoked Old Fashioned

using two dashes of homemade Abbott's Bitters,

two dashes of Fee Brothers Cherry Bitters.

Then we're gonna sweeten this with what's called

a fall simple syrup.

It's a traditional simple syrup.

It's infused with cinnamon,

apple peels and all-spice.

Two ounces of your bourbon.

This is a mix of wood chips and barrel charr.

And we got a smoked Old Fashioned.

[Jackie] There is a slaughterhouse right there.

And when the wind catches it just right,

it's like a cloud of death coming over you.

Oh, and at night you drive by, you can hear 'em squealing.

Yeah, it's like... [squealing]

[narrator] I'd like to introduce you to Jackie Zykan.

Master bourbon specialist for Old Forester.

Which is a fancy way of saying she gets paid to enjoy bourbon.

She's agreed to take us out and show us some of the sights and sounds

of Louisville, Kentucky.

Our first stop, a little haunt known as Old Town Liquors.

-Hey, what's up? -How are you?

-Good. How are you? -Nice to see you.

Do you have something new?

I do. We've got this Maker's barrel pick.

So we tried to blend some stabes

where we got a whiskey that was

kind of like an old style whiskey,

real caramely, chocolatey.

[Jackie] It's like if you only ate the outside layers of a Milky Way.

[laughs] I'm sorry.

Always a sniff first. It's not like wine. You're not like...

Like all up in it.

Your mouth open.

In through your nose and your mouth.

Set this on your top lip.

Give yourself a little tasting glass mustache, like...

And you breathe it in,

and then you get everything except the burn.

If you do it straight on, you're gonna fry your nose out

and you're not gonna smell anything.

And then you taste, and you taste again,

'cause the first taste, no matter how good the whiskey,

always tastes like gasoline.

It always does. It's always intense.

-Hey, Jim. -Hey.

Let's see.

Stash back here

E.H. Taylor seasoned wood.

I'm gonna invent the disposable tasting glass.

-Are you? -I am.

-Don't. -[laughs]

Yes, sir.

Man, this is gonna be a really weird one.

-Hay? -I'll give you that.

Is there a weird hay going on?

Hay.

It sounded so bad.

-Thank you. -Take care.

We're at Butchertown Grocery.

A little neighborhood called Butchertown.

It's just outside of downtown Louisville.

We're gonna stop in and say hi to my friend Kyle.

He's a bartender here.

He's one of the best in the city.

Kyle Higgins.

-How are you? -Good. Good to see you.

-Cocktails? Yes. -Of course.

-Would you like to see the list? -Yes.

[Kyle] Well, bourbon is rich.

There's a lot of depth goes into bourbon cocktails.

And there are so many different ways that you can play off that.

[Jackie] Yeah, there's a whole different complexity,

because you're starting with something that already has

a diverse flavor going on,

and you're playing that up.

You're trying to accentuate.

You're trying to wear a green tie with a pink shirt,

'cause it makes the shirt look pinker.

You're not trying to put on a pink shirt on top of a pink shirt.

You're not trying to cover it up.

You're saying, "Oh, it's got vanilla.

What goes with vanilla?"

You're pairing off of flavors that are already in the glass.

It's perfect.

This is my joyful tiered spread's garnish.

[narrator] We ended the night at a place called Meta.

And they're famous for jello shots.

But not just any jello shots.

So originally the idea for doing a fancy jello shot

actually came just as a pure idea.

At the same time, I'm like trying to get my hands on Pappi.

So I was like getting really angry and I was like,

I'm tired of people coming in here

and asking for it.

If I get this stuff, I'm making jello shots.

And then we got it, and I was like...

Well, I said I would.

So I did.

You gotta take your...

Yeah, you gotta do the whole... pinky's out.

-Ready for this? -Yeah, I think so.

Here's how you do it.

Tastes great though, right?

[mouthful] Yeah, it's so good.

Dude...

I just don't think that bourbon is about

sitting around like you're drinking like

really crazy, over aged stuff

that people sit in a boardroom and talk about it.

Bourbon really tops out at its best at around 12-years-old.

Bourbon has always been about fellowship,

and I feel like not only when you age it do you

degrade the spirit in terms of quality,

but I think that you degrade the fellowship.

Because you lose that opportunity to share it with people.

Bourbon is about being with people that you care about

and having fun.

And it's a little bit about love.

That's what bourbon is to me.

[Steve] When you order a bourbon neat,

you're asking for it in its purest form.

Room temperature, no ice, no mixers.

Completely undiluted.

Now, you might like the thought of this,

but if it's just a little strong at first,

don't be afraid to add a few drops of water.

This will help open up some of the flavors

and smooth out some of the rough edges.

And don't worry about

ruining anything.

Your bourbon is bold enough to handle whatever you throw at it.

[swishing]

[narrator] So we've already heard

about the Bottled in Bond Act of 1897.

And for the next 20 years,

bourbon thrived in America.

But then Prohibition came along,

and almost killed the industry.

However, bourbon is resilient,

and it survived.

In 1933, Prohibition was repealed,

and for the next 30 years, the industry rebuilt itself

and once again boomed in America.

[Marianne] So let's fast-forward. It's 1964,

and this is an enormous year for bourbon.

It's finally recognized by the federal government

as America's native spirit.

You can only make bourbon in the United States.

Bourbon now has an identity.

You know, after 1964,

we know where all bourbon comes from.

This is a watershed year for bourbon.

[Zoeller] There were huge distilleries

pumping out immense amount of product.

But after the revolution

that the United States had in the '60s,

the younger generation did not want to do what their parents had done.

[Bob] Amidst the backdrop of the 1960s,

you had shift in cultural preferences.

People didn't wanna drink what their dad drank.

People wanted to do something different

from what the previous generation had done.

Bourbon's not cool anymore.

[Harper] They found vodka and they found beer.

They found wine.

The bars, they wanna find what's hot and what's not.

Ans so you saw in the big markets

lot of martini bars.

You saw commercials on TV in the 80s...

I remember two old guys sitting on a porch drinking a wine cooler.

There are many ways to use the bottles in James Premium Wine Cooler.

One lady in Massachusetts even uses it to make bread.

Outside of Kentucky, people didn't know what bourbon was.

I'd go to New York, San Fransisco...

You looked on the shelf, there were no bourbons on the shelf.

[Bob] The bourbon industry tried to adapt,

in the sense that they wanted to make a spirit

that looked more like that consumers wanted.

A clear spirit. Tequila, vodka, or gin.

They tried to make light whiskey.

[Marianne] So they would take this beautifully aged

four to six, to eight year old bourbon

and they wold filter it to the point it was clear,

because they were trying to make it more attractive

to this consumer who wanted a clear spirit.

But what they did was strip out everything that was good about it.

It was a futile effort.

There was nothing that they could do

to attract the consumer to bourbon.

So distillery after distillery started to close.

It was really a sad time for the industry.

There were a number of excellent distilleries

that were sold to large conglomerates

who simply closed the distillery.

Many, many wonderful brands

disappeared and will never return.

The bourbon industry was considered the old folks' drink.

And clear liquids, the vodkas and the rums

and the cocktails and all that had come into vogue.

And what happened was

these old distilleries had

thousands and thousands of barrels of bourbon

just sitting around.

There was no demand for them.

So they just sat quietly aging in warehouses.

When I got out of school in the '60s,

the bourbon industry was dead,

so I moved away.

I got recruited by another company

and that was my life. Okay?

I was in operations and engineering

and did a bunch of pretty cool stuff.

And my dad was so proud,

but he also wished I had worked this distillery.

He calls me up one day and he says...

He says, "I got some good news and some bad news."

And I said, "Okay, Dad, what's the good news first?"

He said, "Well, the good news is I love you."

I said, "All right, Dad, what's going on?"

He says, "Well, I'm terminally ill."

And he says, "I'm asking if you will keep your promise

and take care of me."

And what he was really asking me to do was come home.

But during that period of time,

he said he wanted me to start working down here

and I didn't realize the significance of it

until he started coming down here

and he started talking to me.

And we would do a toast.

Every day I came in from this distillery

we'd do a toast thanking the Lord for another day together.

To share thanks.

And, um...

He would come down here with me sometimes

and say, "Did I tell you about this?"

"Don't forget this."

"How about this?"

"Remember this."

And I realized it's more than me coming back here

and just working at the distillery.

He was passing

all this information down.

So when you're tasting really good bourbon,

and you just let it linger on your palate,

you appreciate how it got there.

And it's not just grains

and a piece of wood.

It's the care

that make it taste like it does.

There are 286 barrels on a truck.

So what we're gonna do is we're inspecting those barrels.

We're looking for any defects

in that barrel.

Most people don't realize the shape of a barrel

has absolutely nothing at all to do

with the aging of bourbon.

It's just so you can move it around.

Full of whiskey it weighs 550 pounds.

[Marianne] 50 to 70% of the taste of what's in the bottle

comes from the barrel.

That will depend on how you distill it,

what your barrel entry proof is,

what your grain recipe is,

how flavorful the distillate is before it goes in.

So it's somewhere between 50 and 70%.

[Freddie] A newly charred white oak barrel

traditionally is gonna be about 70 to 100 years old.

White oak tree is to bourbon

what a grapevine is to wine.

What peat is to scotch.

It's where your tree grows for those 70 to 100 years

that the roots have been busy picking up flavors

from whatever grew around the base of that tree.

So the soil,

clay, decomposing foliage and vegetation

are all factors in that

taste profile of the barrel.

When a cooper builds a barrel,

it's not just a barrel.

There's 30-33 stages in the making of a barrel.

So theoretically,

you can have 33 different trees

in the making of that barrel.

So it's more than just a barrel.

Because each one of staves

brings a component to the taste profile of that product.

[Chad] We use the best white oak logs we can find on the market.

All of those white oak logs

were processed at our individual state mills.

So we're able to control the quality of that.

When it gets to our facility,

we raise all the barrels on our own.

We own our own cooper just so we can do some unique things here.

One of those unique things is we toast every single barrel.

So every single barrel is put on a high radiant heat.

Attracts all of those flavors to the inner part of the barrel

where the whiskey or bourbon's gonna touch.

From there it's gonna go over to the charred fire.

And at the charred fire, that's where it's actually

caramelizing those flavors that were brought to the surface.

[Zoeller] The charr allows the whiskey to get into

the barrel's staves.

And that's where those flavors are.

The longer it's in that barrel,

the more of those flavors it's picking up.

[serene music playing]

[Marianne] I believe that the maturation is really

the magical part.

It's the one part that you can't honestly control.

It just happens how nature wants it to.

Bourbon takes time.

You don't make it today and sell it tomorrow.

You know, you gotta put it in the barrel,

let nature take over,

hot summers, cold winters.

You need both.

In hot summers, the whiskey expands,

goes into the wood.

In winter time, when it gets cold,

it contracts and comes out.

That's where we get all the color

and a lot of the flavor.

So that's where you gotta be patient.

You gotta leave it alone,

put it away in a rack house,

and let nature take over.

You can hold a 18-16 year old scotch

up against a 10 year old bourbon any day of the week,

because of some of the climate effects we have here.

Folks have come here with scotches that may be 30-40 years old,

but there's a huge difference

in aging in Kentucky

versus aging in Scotland.

[Tom] And if you have ever been to Scotland,

you will have noticed that the weather is uniformly dreadful.

About which "uniform" is what I wanna emphasize.

Scotland sits in the middle of the North Sea,

washed by the Gulf Stream.

Weather doesn't move around a lot.

Here, the jet streams swings over and above Kentucky,

so we get extreme weather conditions.

Those weather conditions allow

the shrinkage and expansion of the liquid

and the barrel,

which marries barrel to the liquid

and ages the whiskey.

So it's an ideal environment.

These old warehouses are like golf clubs or tennis rackets.

They have sweet spots.

And when the settlers first built

old warehouses like this,

they understood the rotation of the earth,

they understood basically temperature variations

and effects that would have on whiskey.

The effect of sunlight on the barrels.

Things like that.

And so, when they built these things,

they knew exactly what they were doing.

So when you go into these warehouses,

and you start pulling samples from the different barrels

in different areas,

you will stumble upon barrels that produce exceptionally

smooth, sweet flavors.

[Seth] This is bourbon before it becomes bourbon.

This is the White Dog

before it is aged in barrels.

And that is bourbon.

After the aging, that's what you get.

It's picked up the influence

of those caramelized sugars

and it's picked up all those beautiful brown colors

from the barrel.

All those flavors that we associate with bourbon.

You can't control the seasons.

You can't control how long the summer is,

or how hot it gets outside.

The nature, the composition of the wood

from tree to tree,

it's not gonna be the same.

From season to season, it's not gonna be the same.

So each individual barrel

is gonna have an individual character.

And I think that's pretty magical.

[Jason] Don't anybody look into the bright light.

That's all I gotta say.

I don't need a glove. I'm good.

Oh, man. Oh, sorry!

[narrator] This is Jason Cohen.

And this is his father-in-law, Jerry.

Jason's a furniture maker.

And his medium is used bourbon barrels.

[Jason] White oak is one of the hardest woods out there.

Every piece of the barrel...

I think there's anywhere from 34 to seven pieces in a barrel,

are all gonna be a different size.

Even though it might look the same,

you put two pieces next to each other,

they're gonna have a different curve,

they're gonna have a different width.

So trying to make things with that is extremely challenging.

Nothing's ever the same.

But it also makes it extremely exciting.

This is a mannequin for a liquor company

made out of barrel staves

and metal.

I've always liked to fix things.

I was broken when I was 15. I was in a car accident.

Wasn't wearing my seatbelt with your dad.

Back then, nobody did in the 80s, really.

We got in a car accident,

and I fell out of the window

and ruined the use of my left hand.

This girl I was dating looked at my hand and said,

"You're never gonna work with your hands.

You're never gonna be anybody."

And it just all of a sudden clicked one day,

I need to do something.

And so, ever since then,

I've always wanted just to fix things.

So I started fixing chairs,

and bought a lathe and started turning stuff.

And then I ran into some guy who made soya sauce in bourbon barrels.

And that was it.

I had to make stuff out of these recycled barrels

he kept throwing away.

There's a nice line here.

Another line here.

Here. That's the actual penetration

of the bourbon into the wood.

I mean, that's half the way in

to an inch and an eighth stave.

So it really is taking what's in the wood

out into the bourbon.

My life needed fixing,

and this is what repaired me

was wood working.

I was broken and these things were broken, too,

and now I'm putting them together

and their new form and now they're beautiful again.

[Steve] While bourbon is aging in a barrel,

moving in and out of the stave

during the different seasons,

distillers lose three percent

of their whiskey to evaporation each year.

This loss of volume

is known as the Angel's Share.

So think about it.

After 10 years in the barrel,

the angels will have taken about 30% of your bourbon.

Good for them.

Shh.

[speaking Japanese]

[Marianne] In the mid-1980s, bourbon was at its lowest.

Nobody wants bourbon.

There was a group of guys in the bourbon industry

and they were looking for a way to revive bourbon.

And it all started with a guy named Elmer T. Lee.

Elmer T. Lee was the Master Distiller of H&H.

[man] My grandfather was here for 52 years.

He and Colonel Blanton met on the riverbank behind the distillery as kids.

Colonel Blanton started to work at this distillery

at the age of 16.

And by the time he was 35,

he was the president of this distillery.

During that period of time,

my grandfather and Colonel Blanton had remained friends.

And when Colonel Blanton started to run the distillery,

he invited my grandfather

to come in and work the warehouses.

Because of his working in these old warehouses

Grandad discovered

there were certain areas of these warehouses

that had aging characteristics

that produced exceptionally sweet,

smooth tasting barrels of bourbon.

The honey barrel.

Colonel Blanton would use those barrels of bourbon

to sway political favors

with the government.

So Grandad was here for like 52 years with Colonel Blanton.

Along comes my dad.

My dad and Elmer were in the military at the same time.

They became friends.

And Elmer was looking for something to jumpstart the industry.

Dad had learned from my grandfather

where these old honey barrels were in the warehouses.

And Elmer had Dad go in and pull some of those barrels.

That became the taste profile of Blanton's as we know it today.

Up until this point,

all bourbon was batched together.

So you were seeing 100-200 barrels

mingled together to create a consistent profile.

Elmer T. Lee had this idea of taking a single barrel,

a honey barrel,

something that was very special,

had a unique profile,

and showcasing just that.

Bottling it one at a time.

In 1984, he comes out with a product

that's more expensive than any other bourbon in the market.

Blanton's single-barrel bourbon.

And that's really the shot that's heard around the world.

[Michael] Jim Bean decided, you know, "We need to do something."

But Booker didn't like single barrel,

because it was inconsistent.

If you're doing a true single barrel,

it's going to be inconsistent,

because it's hard to get two barrels that taste exactly alike.

The way you get consistency is by mixing the barrels.

So he came up with this idea

of small batch.

[Zoeller] If you make it an exclusive product,

such as a small batch,

or a single barrel,

you're creating a category that's not ordinary.

You create something

that will be sought after.

We got Elmer T. Lee and Booker Noe

working on their single barrel and small batch products.

And then we see Bill Samuels of Maker's Mark

and Jimmy Russel of Wild Turkey

that were getting out and spreading the word.

They were going to bars.

They were going into retail shops

and the restaurants and talking to people.

They were sharing the stories of bourbon

and their family history

and making people fall in love with it.

It was a slow process,

but eventually, other distilleries decided

they'd do a small batch, or a single barrel,

or a special bottling.

And the product just started its rise.

So we started getting aficionados

and old bourbon drinkers returning...

all about flavor.

But then we see that leap

from the old guard into the new consumer.

And that happens with the bartenders.

[Potter] People started playing around with how they make an Old Fashioned.

They weren't just pulling out the old bartender's Bible

and making that exact recipe.

They were mixing it up a little bit.

And I think it was very well-received.

And so when you start playing with some of these classic cocktail recipes,

kind of opens the door to do different things.

When I started bartending,

clear spirits, you know,

dominated the back bar.

Vodkas, gins...

Um, more vodkas and couple more vodkas.

That has changed a lot over the years.

Kentucky State Bourbon Whiskey is where it's at.

It's where the excitement is.

Authentic is cool once again.

And that's come back around we want to know where our product came from.

And anything around a product's specificity

does add a gravitas

towards a spirit like bourbon whiskey.

I hope this industry grows,

'cause if it doesn't, we're gonna have a lot of bourbon on our hands

aged 10-12 years now,

'cause we're making a lot of bourbon.

There's four million people in Kentucky,

and the bourbon distillery people has got

over six million bourbon barrels stored right now.

So we got a barrel and a half for everybody that lives in Kentucky stored right now.

We cannot turn the spigot on overnight

and put out a product.

We gotta wait seven to twelve years here

before we get the product to the market.

[Potter] The hardest thing for any distiller

is creating a new product

and, you know, mashing it,

and then distilling it three-four days later

and then going in in the barrel,

and then all of a sudden just...

Oh, I guess we'll wait and see what happens.

You have to have patience.

What we're producing today

it's not available till roughly six and a half, seven years later.

We're looking long range.

We don't look at anything near term,

because one thing we cannot do is buy time.

[Zoeller] Bourbon cannot be rushed.

It has to go in the warehouse.

It has to age.

People have tried to rush that process

and it just can't be done.

I think there's a lot of parallels with how bourbon is made,

how it's drank, how it's enjoyed,

with maybe a lifestyle

that we should be more pursuant of.

[Bob] Bourbon will continue to evolve.

Just like bourbon ages in the barrel,

it's going to continue to improve and refine over time.

Bourbon is eternal.

Bourbon will always be in the state of Kentucky.

But what bourbon looks like tomorrow

will be different than what it looks like today.

It's up to us to embrace that.

[Marianne] I'm currently putting my first batch of bourbon

into these barrels.

And to know that

we trust the cooper that put 'em together,

I trust the farmer that supplied our grain,

I have to trust what we've done in the distillery

is enough to pull all of that together

and create something beautiful at the end of the time

that it takes to mature.

So to think about all that it's gone through

and all that we go through,

there's some correlations there.

You know, the sunny days and the snowy days,

they all add up to be something that

hopefully at the end of the road is really beautiful.

[Frankie] When Dad rolled up the six millionth barrel,

June Van Winkle gave me

as a gift to my dad,

this bottle of 20-year-old Pappy.

So I take the bottle and I open it up,

and I pour a little bit in his glass,

pour a little bit in my brother's glass.

pour some in my glass,

and I go to put the stopper back in the bottle,

and he looks at me and he gives me this weird look and he says,

"What on earth are you doing?"

I said, "Dad, I don't understand."

I said, "This is a really, really good bottle of bourbon.

It's really being sought after."

He said, "I'm aware of that."

I said...

I said, "So what I'm thinking is,

I'm just saving it so that we can do some more toasts later on."

He says, "Never ever do that

with friends and family.

There will always be more old barrels of bourbon being made."

He says, "Look at me and look at your brother."

He says, "We're the fragile part of this whole thing."

He said, "So never ever save old bottles of bourbon.

They're meant to be enjoyed

with friends and family at the moment."

It was the first time that my father and my brother and I

had spent three hours together,

just us.

Talking, laughing,

discussing things that we had done

that we didn't think he knew we had done.

And then we started telling him about things that he had done

that he didn't know that we knew he had done.

We had the best time. We finished the bottle.

Nine months later, they were both gone.

It's not about the whiskey.

It's about the lives you touch and the people you meet.

And the whiskey is a by-product

of a good relationship.

[instrumental music playing]

Hi, I'm Steve, and this is my version of an Old Fashioned,

which I call, um...

Tuesday of Fashion Week.

We need a little bit of corn.

I like, um...

Not much at all.

Yellow corn, or white,

but I prefer that.

Just a little silk.

That...

Some mint.

Ice.

Some bitters.

And bourbon, of course.

And a little bit of red now.

There.

Also, Swedish fish, like it's swimming.

Garnished with sour worm.

Or don't garnish it with the worm.

These are just snacks while you make drinks.

The Old Fashioned, or Tuesday at Fashion Week.