I have set two goals for our Road Trip Almost Without End: don’t spend a night sleeping in the car, and have 10 minutes a day that are pleasant. They don’t have to be consecutive.

We did stumble right out of the gate as I reserved a tasting at Bulleit distillery and a tour and tasting at Barrel House Distillery and making careful use of the map app to determine driving times and with allowances for lunch and potty breaks picked when to leave our house in the morning and the times for the appointments. Apparently my mastery of addition is not as firm as I thought since we discovered when we pulled away from lunch we would be arriving half an hour late. Oops. They could squeeze us in an hour and a half later, but we canceled to make the other tour. I shouldn’t have to make such hard decisions on vacation.

My addition was not completely off so we were able to arrive well before the second tour time and spent many pleasant minutes in Lexington’s distillery district. One goal down.

When we checked into our nearly deserted hotel we discovered that the A/C in our room didn’t actually cool. The front desk suggested we unplug the unit and press the reset button on the plug. That didn’t work the first or second time we tried it, so they moved us to another room which we could tell as soon as we opened the door had a functioning A/C. Whew. We just felt bad that we had made the old room unclean. Still, both goals achieved!

At this point I’m happy because we’ve set a pretty low bar for the trip.

On the other hand, tomorrow is just a long drive through West Virginia. Pretty scenery will have to suffice.

They cook the grains for the Bourbon in the vat on the right, the still is on the left, the distiller and the bucket he collects the distillate in is in the center. The desperado look is all COVID since he also gives the tours and that’s his mask. Very high tech operation.
After fermentation is done the leftover grain is picked up by a cattle rancher. So you really should enjoy your bourbon with a nice steak or prime rib to get the full effect.
Paperwork and bureaucracy are the bane of all our existences, even a craft distillers. (I’d say they are a mom and pop operation but the two people that run the place are too young to be anybody’s parents.). They write everything down and keep track of almost everything. But not necessarily everything, as Andrew mentioned they have to report everything to the government that goes into the cooking vat, including the drops of corn declumper, but not if it gets added to the fermentation vat. Nobody asked what that might be. Somethings are just best not to know, especially if you are going to go taste them in a few minutes.
This is my kind of sign asking you to do what you already know you should. As seen at The Break Room where we enjoyed a light dinner of giant pizza slices.