My first stop on the Bourbon Trail! As part of a longer road trip from Richmond, VA, to San Diego, CA, I took a slight detour for a couple of days through the Trail. After a bit of a weather delay, made it to Lexington around 1p and my first stop was Town Branch. As one of the 11 you have to visit to complete the official Bourbon Trail, I was PUMPED. I had never been to Lexington, never been to Kentucky and had never tasted Town Branch either so all in all, the feels were all there.
The facility is in an odd part of town in that it’s IN town. You drive through a neighborhood, turn a corner and you’re at the parking lot. We opted to not do a tour and just start the day off with a tasting. It was here the guy behind the counter gave us a lesson in the proper way to drink Kentucky bourbon, also known as the “Kentucky Chew”. Check out this video by master distiller and great grandson of Jim Beam:
I will say that I hadn’t really thought my Bourbon Trail experience through completely by the time I got here. I thought they were all going to be like the craft places I have found in my travels, but it hit me quickly that the big 11 I was supposed to meet are going to be highly marketed. Polished, pretty, lots of money pumped in, BIG focus on the gift shop. So I decided to embrace it, but was now on the hunt for things that I couldn’t find at my local store.
Had a great walk-around tour of the place, but didn’t stay too long as we had a number of places to get to that day to make it through my list (18 distilleries in 3 days!) so onward we went…
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