Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail: A Pilgrimage To The Maker’s Mark Distillery

by Dave Seminara on

I’m not much of a bourbon connoisseur. In fact, before a recent road trip to Kentucky where 95% of the world’s bourbon is made, I had no idea what distinguished bourbon from regular old whiskey. But when in Rome, do as the Romans do, so I decided to visit the Maker’s Mark Distillery, reputedly one of the best stops on Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail.

The distillery is a 25-minute drive, along a windy country road that dips and turns along a pastoral landscape from Bardstown, a distinctive small town named the “most beautiful small town in America” by USA Today this year. Along the way we passed some pitch-black Maker’s Mark warehouses that resembled a disused prison complex and one of them reassured us that we were just three miles away from some sweet Kentucky bourbon.
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The distillery is set across a large complex that makes for a nice walk on a sunny day. There are a host of buildings, each painted dark brown and adorned with shutters the same shade of red as Maker’s Marks distinctive red wax bottle seals, which are hand dipped on the premises. (You can buy and dip your own bottle in the gift shop.)


The tour used to be free, but it now costs $7, which is still a bargain considering the fact they offer guests a chance to sample three bourbons and learn about a product that’s a deeply entrenched part of Kentucky’s culture.

The Samuels family, which founded Maker’s Mark, and scores of other Scotch-Irish distillers, fled to Kentucky from Pennsylvania after George Washington imposed a whiskey tax in 1791, sparking the Whiskey Rebellion. The whiskey tax went uncollected in Kentucky, then a frontier state, as no one had the will to enforce the law or prosecute those who ignored it.

Our tour guide, Jacqueline, told us that a nearby lake served as the base for the product.




“Why are there so many successful bourbon distilleries in the state of Kentucky?” she asked. “Here in a six county radius, we happen to sit on top of a very rich limestone shelf, that limestone filters our water making it iron free and calcium rich. Perfect for distilling whiskey with.”

And what makes bourbon different from regular whiskey?
To call it a bourbon whiskey it must have at least 51% corn, in the recipe – Maker’s Mark uses 70%. It must also consist of only grain, yeast and water, with no artificial flavors or colors; it has to be aged for at least two years in new, charred, oak barrels; and it has to be distilled at no more than 160 proof, barreled at no more than 125 proof and bottled at at least 80 proof.

Many of the technical details went over our heads, but we enjoyed having the opportunity to dip our hands in the vats in the fermentation room and were stoked to have a chance to sample three of their products: the 90 proof Maker’s White, which is only available at the distillery (thank God), regular Marker’s Mark and Maker’s 46, which Jacqueline described as “bourbon on steroids.”


We were instructed to taste the Maker’s White first and for good reason – the stuff is nasty.

“I like to look at all your faces as you’re tasting the Maker’s White,” Jacqueline said. “I can tell if you’ve had moonshine before, you know the Maker’s White isn’t that bad.”


But the Maker’s Mark and the Maker’s 46 were complex, with long, sweet, smooth finishes that lingered on the front of the tongue for a long time. I felt like I was still tasting them well after my insides were already warmed and my mouth felt a little numb, as though I’d just gotten some Novocain at the dentist. But on the way out, rather than getting a toothbrush and some floss, we were given a nice piece of chocolate – a sweet ending to our introduction to the world of Kentucky bourbon.



[Photos by Dave Seminara]

The New New Orleans: 5 Things To Do On Freret Street

by Micheline Maynard on

Here are community leader Greg Ensslen’s top suggestions for visitors to get the most out of a visit to Freret Street.

1) Attend a fair. The Freret Street Market takes place the first Saturday of each month at the corner of Freret and Napoleon (look for the tents in the big parking lot). There’s food, live music, vendors, and it’s easy to shop even if you don’t have cash. Vendors accept tokens that can be purchased at the market’s main table. There will be two markets in December, including Freretstivus, a holiday theme fair on Dec. 8.

2) Have a drink. Cure, the artisanal cocktail bar credited for the revival of Freret Street, opens each day at 5 p.m. Happy hour runs from 5-7 p.m., with classic cocktails for $5 and half price bottles of wine on Thursday. The mixologists will concoct something exactly to your taste. (I brought a bag of grapefruit from the Crescent City Farmers Market and wound up with a refreshing drink.)

If you’d prefer something non-alchoholic, the High Hat Cafe makes its own tonics, lemonades and other sodas. Satsuma lemonade features real orange slices and fresh mint. Company Burger serves its own style of punch, made with iced tea, lemonade and orange juice.

%Gallery-170745%3) Eat something. Choices are expanding every day, but Ensslen considers Company Burger a don’t miss. There’s Dat Dog for gourmet hot dog lovers, and Midway Pizza, an art gallery/pizza parlor with (no surprise) a fully stocked bar. High Hat is kid friendly, as are many places along Freret.

4) Find a bargain. The Junior League of New Orleans operates the Bloomin’ Deals Thrift Shop, which has been a fixture on Freret since 1960. It has a bridal boutique, where all dresses are under $500, which is open one Saturday a month. The shop’s selection ranges from table ware to clothes and furniture.

5) Walk the neighborhood. Like Freret Street, the surrounding neighborhood is in a state of transition. Some homes are still undergoing post-Katrina renovation; others are still boarded up; some are spanking new. It’s a good example of what happened to a typical New Orleans neighborhood as a result of the storm. Just be respectful of homeowners’ privacy – although it’s likely people will be happy to chat.

For more on the New New Orleans, click here.

[Photo credit: Micheline Maynard]

Kentucky BBQ: Bring Your Own Squirrels, Raccoons, Possums And Porcupines

by Dave Seminara on

In Kentucky, you can get a porcupine hickory-smoked for five bucks. A squirrel or a frog will set you back just $2.50. I had no idea that one could kill an animal and then bring it to a place that would smoke it for a fee until I road-tripped to Kentucky last week with my family.

I travel because I’m curious by nature and I like to know how people live in other parts of the country and the world. But America is huge and it’s easy to get lulled into the notion that you have to leave the country in order to experience another culture. Within an hour of arriving in Kentucky last week, I was reminded of how very wrong that assumption is.

Owensboro is only 360 miles due south from my home in suburban Chicago, but the people who live there inhabit a very different world than the one I live in. In Evanston, my adopted hometown, people with extensive record collections and cars made in Scandinavia pay $4 for fancy cups of coffee and $3 for croissants at the weekly farmers market and shell out big bucks for organic treats at either of two Whole Foods locations that are only a half- mile apart along Evanston’s Chicago Avenue.



In Owensboro, people who get their groceries at Wal-Mart and drive pickup trucks can hurl a dead animal onto their trucks and bring it over to the Old Hickory BBQ restaurant, where the good people who run the place have been hickory-smoking meats since 1918. I know we were in a very different place from listening to the rush hour traffic report on the radio: the only traffic tie-up involved a deer carcass.

Old Hickory BBQ was our first stop in the state after spending much of the day driving south from Chicago and it was a perfect introduction to one of America’s most distinctive, and for my taste, interesting states. Coming from Chicago, where you have to clear out your 401k to get a sandwich in some places, everything on the menu appeared to be ridiculously cheap- sandwiches were around $4 and platters including two sides were about $8. The place was moderately full but if it were transported to Chicago with the same prices, there would be a 9-hour wait to get in.

Kentucky’s BBQ specialty is mutton but I was most interested in the burgoo, a stew native to the region that is usually mutton-based. I went up to the take out counter, where many of the BBQ specialties are on display, and Jordan, one of the kitchen staffers, gave me a taste and offered to show me the restaurant smokehouse after our meal (see video below).


I loved the burgoo and everything else I tried and was elated when the bill came. $22 for our family of four, or less than we sometimes spend at McDonald’s. And as soon as I stepped into the smokehouse, I was overcome by the glorious smell of smoking meat. Jordan yanked open one of the smoke chambers and gave us a little tour of the meats people had brought in for 24 hour smoke sessions.

“Here are some pork butts,” he said. “Over there we’ve got some deer hind quarters.”

He said that he’d seen people bring in just about every type of animal you could imagine: squirrel, possum, porcupine, raccoons, frogs, and goats among others. And he confirmed my suspicion that Owensboro wasn’t much of a hotbed for vegetarians. I’m not a hunter and I tend to limit my meat intake but I would have loved to have strung up a hammock in the smokehouse and just enjoyed the seductive smell of grilled meats for hours.

The following night, while staying in a cheap motel in Beaver Dam, forty minutes southeast of Owensboro, and I got another taste of the hunting culture. The hotel’s free breakfast starts at 4:45 A.M. to accommodate the hunters, who filled the place to capacity on the first Saturday night of the deer-hunting season. It turns out that Kentucky has a huge deer population and hunters converge on the state from far and wide. We heard them chattering excitedly in the hotel corridor at 4:15 A.M.

Despite the sleep interruption, we didn’t emerge for breakfast around 9 A.M and the breakfast room was empty until a camouflaged foursome came in and began filling up on biscuits and gravy.

“Seems like you guys are the only hunters who slept in,” I said to a bleary eyed young man with a hunters knife hanging in a long sheath from his belt.

“Oh no,” he replied. “We were down here right at 4:45. We went out hunting and we’re back for our second breakfast now.”

“Did you get any deer?” I asked.

“I saw one,” he said. “But she was too young. I just couldn’t do it.”

The young man explained that deer hunters, like photographers, need to be out at dusk and dawn to stalk their prey. I asked him a whole host of dumb questions that anyone who grew up in Kentucky would already know the answer to, but then was able to show off a little of my own newfound knowledge as well.

“You know,” I said. “There’s a place in Owensboro that’ll smoke a porcupine for just five bucks.”

[Photo and video credits: Dave Seminara]

Birth Of A Hotel: Farm To Table Is Here To Stay

by McLean Robbins on

This week, we’ve been busy talking to hospitality experts for our upcoming feature on hotel food and beverage trends. Simultaneously, our featured hotel, Capella Washington D.C., Georgetown, has been preparing their own F&B offerings.
Capella’s soon-to-be-announced restaurant won’t feature a celebrity chef (like their neighbor The Four Seasons, with its Michael Mina restaurant) but it will draw on a major trend in the restaurant world: local cuisine. Much of the hotel’s produce will be sourced from local farms. Guy Rigby, Four Seasons Americas vice president of food and beverage, says that local foods are more than just a passing trend – the use of local foods and high-quality ingredients has become an expectation of the discerning diner.

Trends do play an important role in menu development, however, as shown by the craft beer selections being considered for the restaurant. Hospitality expert Steven Kamali told us that the beer market is nowhere near its saturation point, and, in Washington, beer bars have made waves in the community in recent years, including the opening of the District’s first brewery, DC Brau.

Speaking to the local community will also be a critical part of opening this new restaurant. Located along the city’s scenic C&O Canal, hotel managing partner Bruce Bradley expressed his desire to showcase the restaurant as a place welcoming to the local community as well as hotel guests. Kamali and Rigby also spoke to the importance of this marketing segment, stating that hotels must carefully consider the local market when developing their restaurant concepts.

We look forward to bringing you a larger feature – just in time for Thanksgiving. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, catch up on all of your “Birth of a Hotel” coverage here.

[Image Credits: Capella Washington D.C.]

Finding The Best Ways To Drink Beaujolais Nouveau

by McLean Robbins on

It’s time to gulp down those Gamay grapes. In the United States, many wine drinkers turn up their nose at the annual festival of Beaujolais Nouveau, which started today. Under French law, this wine may not be released until 12:01 a.m. on the third Thursday of November, just a few weeks after harvest of the grapes.

Each year, “new” wines are raced from French towns and villages to Paris and other towns, where signs proclaiming that the wine has arrived are hung outside of restaurants and bars.

The grapes, grown in the aptly named Beaujolais region of France, are light, fruity and floral in flavor, producing an easily drinkable red wine that is served cool or cold (like white wine) and consumed frequently at holiday celebrations.

Due to the quick fermentation process, the wine is generally meant to be consumed within the year, is quite popular overseas – nearly half of the 70 million bottles produced are exported, mainly to countries like Japan, Germany and the United States.

Earlier this year, we traveled through the Beaujolais region, tasting many of the area’s wines, and were pleasantly surprised by the many varieties of wine and grapes grown in the area. Beaujolais Nouveau is a specific type of wine made from the Gamay grape, and, while famous, it’s not the only type of wine grown in the region. In particular, we fell for the Cote de Brouilly wines at Chateau de la Chaize, grown near Mount Brouilly, an elegant varietal that tastes fruit and flowers. Even better … we can get them at our local Total Wine.

Rather than recap our trip, we’ll let you know how you can plan your own journey – there’s an app for that. The Beaujolais wine region has gotten social with an app for Android and iPhone. The app walks interested parties through each of the region’s distinct wines, suggests cafes and restaurants for sipping, shows off special wine deals and events, as well as allows users to save their favorites. If you’d prefer a hard copy, the local tourism office has that too.

[Image Credit: McLean Robbins]