Biking the Bourbon Trail, Day 1

For S's birthday this year, we headed down to Kentucky to ride bikes on the Bourbon Trail (his idea, and a great one)!

We found a cute little B&B outside of Versailles, Kentucky.  Driving the road to it was every bit as lovely and adorably Kentuckian as one could have hoped.

We arrived Friday night, and headed into town for dinner at Ricardo's Grill & Pub.  We had some tasty local beers, and made sure to eat our vegetables!

Fried green tomatoes (better than the ones at Juniper) and fried banana peppers!

We awoke Saturday morning to a hearty breakfast consisting of a cinnamon roll, fruit, eggs smothered with cheese, and homestyle potatoes.

Then we set off on our bicycles headed for the Four Roses distillery.  Along the way, we crossed the new bridge over the Kentucky River, just next to the old Young's High Bridge, which is now used as a bungee jumping location.

After struggling up the river valley on the other side of the bridge, we finally made it to Four Roses, just in time for a lovely outdoor tasting of three of their bourbons:

We turned our bikes around and headed right back the way we'd come, only this time we stopped at Wild Turkey, which we had ridden past on the way to Four Roses.  Their setup is a tour/tasting combo, so of course we did that.  We had a new tour guide, so the tour needed a little bit of work, but it was neat to go into one of the huge warehouses where they store the booze as it's aging.

At both Four Roses and Wild Turkey, we were offered glasses to take with us, but since we were on bikes, we gave them to other tasters so they could have a set of four glasses on their bar at home.

Back on our bikes, we stopped to commune with the local wildlife, headed back past the B&B,  and climbed one last big hill to get up to Woodford.

Woodford did an outdoor tasting, which was lovely.  We tucked ourselves away at the back of the group and enjoyed our two samples and delicious chocolate.  There is a local candy maker who makes chocolate truffles for all the distilleries using their own product, and the little snack was a lovely compliment to the samples.

Of all the distilleries we went to, Woodford was the only one that had any food.  By law, the distilleries are only allowed to serve you a small amount to drink on site; it's an ounce or an ounce and a half, if I'm remembering correctly.  As a consequence, there isn't a lot of reason to linger.  People tend to do a tour, have their samples, and dash off to the next place.  It's a very different experience than going to the wineries here in Missouri, where you pick one or two and sit all day as you sip on their product and visit the cafe for snacks.

Speaking of wine, we ended our afternoon back at the B&B, with a dip in the pool and a bottle of wine that they just happened to have chilled, which was generously offered to us when we mentioned we were thinking about heading into town to look for a bottle.

As the sun went down, we did make it to town -- but instead of wine, we found Blanton's!  It was funny to think that we went all the way to Kentucky, had visited three distilleries that day, and found what S really wanted at a drive-through liquor store on the commercial strip in town.  Ha!  We took our new-found treasure back to the B&B to sip a bit before bed.