TRAVEL: Our Quick Guide to Bourbon Distilling

Just enough to help you hold forth at a cocktail party, but not so much as to make you a Bourbon boor.

Inside of a “rickhouse,” aka “rackhouse” or names given to barrel-aging warehouses. This one was taken at Buffalo Trace in Frankfort, KY.

All bourbon is whiskey, but not not all whiskey is bourbon. That’s because federal law holds distillers to specific standards before they can call it “bourbon.”

Those standards include:

1. Bourbon’s recipe must include 51 percent corn (wheat or rye and malted barley are bourbon’s other ingredients,in varying amounts).

2. The distilled alcohol, aka “white dog,” has to be aged in new charred oak containers, for at least two years.

3. Unlike a wine appellation, such as Champagne, Bordeaux, or Chianti eponymously named for their regions of production, bourbon can be made anywhere in the U.S.

4. Bourbon has to be barreled at not more than 125 proof.

5. Bourbon must be bottled at no less than 80 proof.

6. No added flavors or colors.

Bourbon gets its color and distinct flavors from the caramelized sugars in its charred oak barrels.

Kentucky owns two natural advantages when it comes to bourbon making.

One is its limestone aquifers, which filter iron that would otherwise discolor the bourbon. It also adds calcium and magnesium, key to a good bourbon. The other is the weather. The temperatures during the region’s distinct four seasons forces the barreled “new make” or “white dog” to seep in and out of the barrel staves, thus imparting its distinctive flavors.

Bonus bit: Early colonists used their corn to distill spirits, which then became a primary means of barter exchange. Our earliest free market bearings proved a powerful economic incentive for advancing the art and science of distilling.