Jim Beam

After a visit to the visitors center in the middle of Bardstown, we walked a few blocks to look at some of the 150 - 200 year old homes.  All have been restored and are used as homes or for businesses.  There were 48 listed but I’m sure there are more.

Our next stop was the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History located in Spalding Hall.  This 200 year old building used to be part of a boys school, was a Civil War hospital and now is part of a college campus.  Mr. Getz collected many rare bottles, some still filled with whiskey, Carrie Nation’s hatchet, advertising art, and old copper stills. Information about the various families who have made and are still making whiskey in this area lined the walls.

Did you know that Bourbon is always a whiskey but whiskey is not a Bourbon?  Bourbon must be produced in the USA, be made of 51% corn, free of additives, aged in new, charred, white oak barrels (many come from Missouri!) and aged for a minimum of 1 years.

The tour of Jim Beam’s Distillery started in their small batch distillery since one could easily see the whole process of whiskey making.  First you grind the corn, rye and malt, mix it with boiling water, add the yeast and then cook it for 3 days.  It is distilled twice before it goes in the barrels where it is aged from 1 to 12 years.  Most common bourbon is aged 4 years.  We went into parts of the main distillery where we saw the large cooking tanks and the final product coming out of the still.  In the bottling facility we ‘washed’ our own bottle with whiskey then followed it through the process of filling, capping and labeling before the wax seal was added.  At the end of the tour we had our bottle etched with our name and we are the proud owners of some fine Knob Creek Bourbon aged 9 years.

Jim Beam has over 72 warehouses for their barrels, each holds over 1500 barrels, each barrel will produce about 225 bottles of whiskey.  They have produced over 13 million barrels since 1794.

The single barrel dumped through a screen then “our” bottle moving through the bottling line.

We had two tastings from the numerous blends and flavors of Jim Beam.  I’m not much of a whiskey person but the 9 year old bourbon was definitely better than the 1 year old I tried first.