GOING WHERE THE SPIRIT TAKES ME
Fear and loathing on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail
Cloud, 2019
I was in a diner, somewhere close to the childhood home of Hunter S Thompson, when my hangover began to take hold. And as I’d just lost a staring contest with my coffee, I doubted I had the means to fight it. But I needn’t have worried. Suddenly, as though summoned, a delicately put-together busboy appeared at my table, radiating pity like a Marian apparition. He inquired with a downy burr, “Want a refill? With something extra in it? Would sir like a Kentucky coffee?”
That, my friends, is Louisville for you. The birthplace of bourbon whiskey has been reading minds for as long as it’s been scrambling them, and that’s 200 years and some change. My first evening there had been a long one. I had seen off the night, put the morning in a headlock and made threats against the afternoon before I got to bed. I forgave myself, though. I was overexcited. Louisville felt like a homecoming to key parts of my personality, which might sound a little mystical, until you consider… the city has given us Old Forester, the Kentucky Derby, Muhammad Ali and the aforesaid godfather of gonzo journalism, and I’m a lush, a gambler, a retired brawler and a writer with a weakness for what are politely called “adventures”.
The trip had been on the cards for a while. Foretold on actual cards, in fact. About five years ago, in a tavern in Muskogee, Oklahoma, I played a few hands of pinochle with a defrocked Baptist preacher (he never revealed how the cloth came to be whipped from his back, and I was in no hurry to find out). After parting with my third 20, I was ready to drink up when he put his hand over mine and whispered: “Soon you will be in Kentucky, where whiskey forms like dew on the outstretched tongues of true believers, and I can see you’re a convert, son.” It’s not every day a scene from your life belongs in the Great American (Country) Songbook.
Declared by Congress in 1964 to be America’s only “native spirit”, bourbon – a whiskey made from at least 51 per cent corn and aged in new charred-oak barrels – is having a high time of it right now. Sales are up for the tenth consecutive year, and exports appear to be setting records simply to have something to break. Kentucky is the main beneficiary of this boom, of course, as it produces 95 per cent of the world’s bourbon. The spirit decants about $8.6 billion each year into the Bluegrass State’s economy and employs, in some way, shape or fashion, close to 18,000 people.
I had driven to Louisville to join the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, a network of 16 distilleries in central Kentucky that connects the city to Bardstown 40 miles south and Lexington 90 minutes east. I figured it would good to toast the brown stuff’s revival while people’s glasses were still in the air. Known locally as “the Amber Triangle”, this heartland country is, essentially, the Napa Valley for the hard of drinking, except it’s less manicured than the Napa – there are vistas that would stop getaway drivers in their tracks
Louisville is looking especially well on bourbon’s resurgence. It has always been a handsome city – a pick-and-mix of Victorian gothic, Richardsonian Romanesque, early Chicago School and Beaux Arts buildings – but till recently it had the stifled air of a shuttered museum. In 2016 Angel’s Envy, Downtown’s first full-production distillery, opened on Main Street, and within three years six distillers had set up shop nearby, breathing life back into Whiskey Row, the historic centre of the bourbon industry, an elegant block of 19th century warehouses with shopfronts and cast-iron facades (which, unthinkably now, had been slated for demolition in 2011). Life has returned to the city, in the way it does in the early 21st century, with all the pricey trappings of gentrification in the largely manufactured taste of its newest arrivals: commissioned street art, upscale coffee houses, farm-to-table dining, galleries, lofts, even a freshly minted neighbourhood (NuLu) in which to show them all off. But, for all that, there was a discernible pulse about the place, even on a Wednesday afternoon in October in sidewalk-denting rain.
I based myself there, but I was on the road most days. As my hands weren’t fit to point at a steering wheel, never mind hold one, I had a driver, an old friend who I hadn’t seen in a decade. Helen, a lifelong Kentuckian, waited till we met to “break it to” me that she had stopped drinking, the thing we always did together, and that it wasn’t up for discussion. I felt awful, like some classic enabler, a cold blast from a broken past. But she waved my guilt away as so much ego blather. “Honey, I live under my own influence these days. It’s good to reconnect. I like a road trip, and I have a book to read. Keep your breath out of my face and we’ll both be fine.” I never quite lost the guilt, though. Most times, with her ECT hair, insects trailing ink across her forearms and lips curled around a Mountain Goats lyric, she looked perfectly content, but she eyed some bars – and the warring couples in their parking lots – with a scowl so heavy it threatened to drag her face under.
We covered a lot of ground, getting to nine distilleries within the Triangle. Each had something distinctive to recommend it. In Louisville, a former stand-up whose uncle was a moonshiner gave me a tour of the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, which was disconcertingly child-friendly, like a Disneyland for budding dipsos; the new-this-year Rabbit Hole Distillery, whose tasting room has the best views of the city; Angel’s Envy, with its cathedral-like main building, which sits over an alley that was once used for racing goats; and Old Forester, which stayed in production during Prohibition by supplying pharmacies under licence, and makes its own barrels on site.
Heading south, we took in the Jim Beam American Stillhouse, in Clermont, and Maker’s Mark, the oldest working bourbon distillery on its original site, in Loretto. The guide at Beam took exception to a few of my questions; the ones concerning the distillery’s three warehouse fires in as many years and the toxic runoff they created. The maker of the world’s number one selling bourbon trumpets the purity of its limestone-filtered water – and recently teamed up with the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest to establish a natural water sanctuary – so it prefers not to be reminded of its pollution of Kentucky’s rivers and massacre of thousands of crappie, walleye and black bass. I reported back to Helen. “See, drinking like a fish will kill you,” she said.
On the way to Lexington, we were guests at Woodford Reserve, an Aaron Copland symphony in oak and stone, from its 500ft barrel run to its lobby, which had vast soft leather couches, with a view of the rain, for Helen to read on (Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, “for the sailors”); Buffalo Trace, which also produces the Old Van Winkle and Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve labels in collaboration with the Van Winkles (whiskeys so elusive there are apps and websites dedicated to tracking them down… at between ten and 20 times their recommended retail prices); and Castle & Key, a brand-new distillery of incomparable ambition set deep in the woods and housed in a tenderly restored “medieval” fortress and its outbuildings (they were built in 1887 by the bourbon industry’s founding father, Colonel EH Taylor, and had their own railway line). And now, in Marianne Barnes, it has Kentucky bourbon’s first female master distiller.
After three tours, I had the business of distillation down pat. After five tours, my lips were moving in time with the guides’. There are only so many ways of describing the process, after all. But I don’t mean to suggest that touring distilleries gets old. They are places of sensual rapture. The smell of the mash vats mulching the air; the barrels sighing in their rickhouses (and the angels reeling from their “share” among the rafters); the refulgent pot and column stills, resembling lead instruments in fantastical orchestras, and almost all made by the same Louisville company, the Vendome Copper and Brass Works.
And they are also places of magic – a peculiarly resilient form of magic, too; one that resists all attempts to explain it away. At the close of each tour, there was a tasting of between two and five whiskeys, and each time I put my lips to one, everything I had learnt about its creation replayed in my head, except words that I thought had been hacked into my grey matter suddenly took on a mysterious quality, like an incantation dipped in liquid smoke. The spirit of bourbon is raised by such spells (and – sidenote – I’m all too aware that the language in which they trade wraps a cloak of connoisseurship around the shoulders of many an alcoholic, me included).
We drove all over Kentucky. Shrugging off the prosperous air of the Trail’s tobacco barns, horse ranches, bluegrass pastures and creek-ribboned stands of old oak, we followed its undulations as they rolled southeast into the coalfields of the Appalachian Mountains. There, poverty, meth labs, black lung, opioid abuse and dry counties occasioning drunken drives home ensure the average resident barely makes it to the age of 69. Its landscape of levelled peaks, buried hollers and lagoons of poisonous slurry is dotted with ghost towns, and many of their neighbours are fading fast.
On the way back to Louisville, we stopped at Corbin, where Colonel Sanders, ran his first restaurant at the back of a gas station. A former sundown town, where, as a matter of policy, blacks weren’t welcome within its limits after dark, Corbin has a lot to live down, but it’s not making much headway – according to the last census, only six African-Americans called it home in 2000.
Most of my evenings were spent in Louisville, which is a fine drinking town with a bar for every kind of drinker. Its patrons understand that bars are public places, a night out is, in large part, a group effort, and strangers are generally welcome. The city shuts late, when it remembers to, and in some of the higher-end establishments you can order bourbons that never make it to the liquor stores.
I was eager to talk to the natives about where they live, about matters close to their heart. Which can go wrong, of course. The heart is a volatile organ, and people who claim to wear theirs on their sleeve often end up wrapping their fist in that sleeve later.
I came by proof of that in the Hideaway Saloon, on Bardstown Road, in The Highlands district, where Gonzo Fest, “a words and music celebration of Hunter S Thompson”, has been held for nine years. I was on a Hunter jag, having spent the day at the Churchill Downs racetrack, which was lampooned by the writer in The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, and I was feeling frisky.
I was playing pool – spots, two up, winner stays on – when an unpatched biker in his early fifties, with fresh tats and a groomed beard, put some money on the table and asked me what I’d been doing with my time in Kentucky. I gave him a rundown, and he nodded along congenially enough until I got to Corbin and KFC.
“Hope you ain’t gonna write anythin’ negative about the Colonel,” he said. “That man was a war hero, and we’re very protective of him here. He’s like everyone’s papaw. Pick on him and you’ll have a lot of people putting up wanted posters with your picture on’m.”
He looked at me like I’d been sent to defile all that was meaningful to him. I wondered how he had avoided the facts of his idol’s life. I assessed the risk of putting him straight – he was big, and had plenty of anger to call on, but his size, which had run most of the way to blubber, looked more of a disadvantage. Also, I figured that, since I was in Kentucky, I’d have been able to see his firearm if he’d been carrying. So I unbuttoned my lip.
“Buddy, Harland Sanders was never an officer in the US Army. Unless he served with Sergeant Pepper and Major Tom. ‘Kentucky Colonel’ is a just a title handed out by your governor for services to the state. Shirley Temple was made one. You don’t have to be ex-military to get it. You don’t even have to be from Kentucky. Sanders was from Indiana.”
I called a pocket, dropped the eight-ball and prepared for the worst. The head barman put four quarters down in front of me, and levelled: “Time to go. Can’t have you upsetting my regulars.”
I took my punishment, such as it was, and left, relieved that I’d decided against mentioning Sanders’s support of George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who stood as an independent in the presidential election of 1968, and that the Colonel’s name came up – along with J Edgar Hoover’s and John Wayne’s – when Wallace was casting around for a running mate.
I had better luck at The Holy Grale, a Highlands gastropub in a former Unitarian chapel, where I was given a thoroughly well-meaning sermon on the local craft beer scene. But all the talk of lambics, saisons and goses made my head spin for objectionable reasons. How the vocabulary of everyday drinking has put on weight, in all the wrong places. I remember a distant time when it was possible to sit down with a beer to talk about something other than hop types, yeast pedigrees and flavour profiles. Now farmhouse ales are brewed with oyster mushrooms (“for the umami”) and paired with kimchi fries, and the culture nods along to our consumption of them as though it were jazz.
Happy to return to bourbon, and gab about the world beyond my glass, I made for The Silver Dollar, a bar inspired by the California honky-tonks that fed and watered dust-bowl migrants and gave us “the Bakersfield sound”, a blueprint for much of the outlaw country that came in its wake.
I let an Elmer T Lee Single Barrel pop me on the kisser just as Merle Haggard’s I Won’t Give Up My Train left the station. Country is narrative music, it tells stories, and it didn’t take long for my fellow sippers, dutifully hunched over like characters in mine, to start sharing theirs.
The conversation turned to boxing, the heavyweight division’s Golden Age; in particular, Ali, Louisville’s “greatest” son (who founded a cultural centre in the city a year before he died). “I saw Ali take Ernie Terrell apart in Houston in 1967,” said Greg, a mining engineer who had been giving me gold-panning tips over an Old Weller Antique 107. “He’d just changed his name from Cassius Clay, but Terrell wouldn’t call him Ali, so Ali fought as dirty as I’d ever seen him, gouging and spitting, and shouting ‘What’s my name?’ each time he got a shot in.”
Catching the light with a tumbler of Old Fitzgerald – 14 years, two ounces, three rocks – Chad, a state park ranger, recalled an Ali bout with a Bakersfield connection, Jerry Quarry, the Bellflower Bomber. “After Ali was convicted of evading the draft and banned from boxing, he sued for the right to compete again as a professional. He approached every one of the ten ranked heavies for a match, and only Quarry was willing to face him. Great fighter, but never won a belt, mainly because he bled like a slasher movie. Kept his cut man busy.”
I called in at the Old Seelbach Bar late one evening for a cocktail with an old friend, the famously bibulous writer F Scott Fitzgerald. I find ghosts are safer company once drink has loosened my grip on the social graces. Mythology has it, and it isn’t about to be dissuaded, that this hotel bar, restored to a Beaux Arts time capsule of the Roaring Twenties, was one of Fitzgerald’s favourite’s and it, and the people he met there, inspired his novel The Great Gatsby.
The concierge and hotel historian Larry Johnson, in frock coat and ascot, showed me around with the elegance of a ballroom dancer, then plonked me on a stool and ordered me a Seelbach*. The guy next to me, who appeared to flinch at the merest hint of human merriment, sighed heavily, like he’d been practising. “I don’t get what’s so special about writers,” he said. “They lie for a living. The better the writer, the bigger the liar.” If he was being playful, his grey, pitted face gave no clue that he was, or had ever been (I took detailed note of his features in case the spirit of play ever goes missing, the worst is feared and the police need a description). I asked him if his wife had run off with a writer, but he took offence at that, drained what was left of his Coors Light and marched off, which meant I never got to find out if she’d like to.
Proof on Main, the bar-restaurant at my hotel, 21C, was excellent value. The hotel doubles as an art gallery, and the bar’s patrons are often exhibitors. A twice-the-size foam replica of Michelangelo’s David, sprayed gold, stands guard outside it. And when I was there, behind the reception desk, a quartet of Judy Fox sculptures of mythical figures as naked children outraged a third of the guests. In the lobby, I got talking to Darius, a friend of the textile artist Ebony Patterson, who was showing there. A baseball fan, he had visited the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory just down the street, “only to be told that there’s a green beetle from China, with no predators over here, that is chewing up the forests of ash that provide the wood for the bats”. I bought him a bourbon, which failed to console him. “I know most modern bats are made of maple, but the Slugger was swung by Ernie Banks and Derek Jeter [legendary shortstops]. It made baseball what it is. Oh man.”
My favourite thing to do in the city was the most sobering. In that hour of splendid idleness between the dying of the light and the coming of darkness, when time itself seems to shrug, Helen and I would walk down to Waterfront Park on the banks of the Ohio River to catch dusk getting ready, a smudge of charcoal tulle in the distance, somewhere over Indiana. Before the Civil War, the Ohio at Louisville was one of the final stops of the Underground Railroad, the secret network of “conductors” (allies) and “stations” (safe places) by which fugitive slaves made their way towards what they hoped would be some measure of liberty in the free states. I would raise my hip flask to their ghosts, which still gather thickly there; still fugitive, too, hoping to pass as mist coming off the water.
* The Seelbach
Adam Seger, a Seelbach bartender, claimed to have discovered this recipe in the mid-Nineties on an old hotel menu. The lost libation was said to have predated Prohibition and had at one time been the hotel’s signature drink. Seger later confessed to fabricating the story to drum up business and make a name for himself, but not before the recipe found its way into Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, a book by the drinks historian Ted Haigh, aka Dr Cocktail.
It is entirely delicious.
Add 1 ounce of bourbon (Old Forester preferably), 1/2 ounce Cointreau, 4 dashes of Angostura bitters and 3 dashes of Peychaud’s bitters into a mixing glass with ice and stir until well-chilled. Strain into a flute. Top with cold Champagne or other sparkling wine. Garnish with a long orange twist.
