We had a visit to the house in Bardstown that Stephen Foster was thinking of when he wrote "My Old Kentucky Home." He never actually lived there. He visited a couple times. The home belonged to cousins, from what I gathered during the tour. It was well preserved. So were the ladies in period costume who were the guides. This cultural interlude did not destroy the day, however.

We visited Heaven Hill and Barton distilleries today. There are a lot of whiskey barrels in warehouses (rickhouses) all over Kentucky. On the heaven hill site there are probably over 400,000. It is estimated that there are six million barrels of aging whiskey in Kentucky. That is a lot of bourbon. That is a lot of inventory these guys have to finance.

This is what the inside of a rickhouse looks like. Each floor has barrels three high in racks. There are other designs, but what you see driving around is warehouses with 5-8 floors. There is a lot of magic and mumbo jumbo about them. They need to have temperature cycles in order to get the whiskey to penetrate the wood and acquire its flavor. Generally, when a barrel is put up it stays in its place. So they mix barrels from different levels (and temperature profiles) to get a batch. I would think that achieving a consistent flavor profile for a particular product would be a difficult thing to do. That is why there are master distillers. A really good one is gold. The Beam family seems to have provided many master distillers to the various whiskey companies over the years.