Nov
25
Howdy Junior’s Bourbon Hall. Today I started the annual pilgrimage to Kentucky for Thanksgiving week. A lot of people head to the woods to hunt deer I head south to hunt bourbon and hit Churchill Downs for Thanksgiving with the family. The next few posts will be about this trip so come along and enjoy. Today left bright and early to get to a tasting and a blending at Wenzel Whiskey. Thought for sure I left in plenty of time for the 6 ish hour trip. First time in many of my trips ended up hitting severe slowdowns three different times that added an hour to the trip. Instead of getting to Wenzel’s plenty early to grab lunch arrived with 10 minutes to spare. Arriving at Wenzel’s it is in a back ally and in a 175 year old building. You walk through a double glass door to a nice lobby with a bar. Off to your left you will see a large room with tables and that is where you do the tasting and blending experience. Greeted warmly by the person working and working with us on the experience. Sat down to start the experience to 4 snifters of whiskey sitting in front of you a graduated cylinder, (back to high school chemistry), and 3 tasting glasses. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0Ku6ejDv6z4 The experience starts with a history of the building and the owner Henry Wenzel. A German who landed in Covington built the building the experience is located a bar and a home. The building was a bottling building that Henry used to bottle everything he needed for his bar. Go to the tasting to find out more but, Henry died an early death and his wife ended selling everything to support herself and five kids. So now Wenzel is a place for buying barrels and you come in and perform a blending to bottle your own. This is a great one off bottle for you to take home and enjoy. After the history lesson they give you the proof, age, and state the whiskey that is in front of you came from. You don’t learn anything else. You then take sips and taste each of the four whiskey’s in front of you. We were also told they were all standard bourbon mash bills. Previous Next Since they buy barrels what we had today probably won’t be what you get when you go. That is the best part once you are done it is yours and nobody will copy it. Now you are done tasting they come back in and teach you how to blend to create your best bottle of bourbon. Some of the tips are start with your favorite and pair it with each of the others on a 1:1 basis. Taste and see how you go. Good whiskey mixed with good whiskey doesn’t always make a good whiskey. Also bad whiskey with bad whiskey doesn’t always make a bad whiskey. They give you plenty of bourbon to mix and match many different blends so blend away and pour our the bad and drink the good. This does take patience as you are blending in small graduated cylinder and really start with 1 ml at a time. You get plenty of time and bourbon to blend many times. Key note is to write down what you are doing so you can recreate. Once you have all of your blends done and you find your perfect bottle you need to get the blends to add to 10 or 100. So you might blend three bourbons and you will need them to add to 10 ml. From there you write this down and you can use one, two, three, or all four of the bourbons in front of you. I ended up using three of the bourbons to create my bottle. Take your bourbons with the number of milliliters adding up to 10 and write that on the card. You then give that to the person running the experience and they have a formulas to get the blend to either the 750ml or 375ml bottles. You get a label so you can add your name of the bourbon and then you write down the proof and ABV. This process took me about 35 to 40 min of mixing cleaning and tasting. You really do want to clean the dropper each time so you are not getting mixes of bourbon. Also clean the graduated cylinder to ensure you are starting from scratch. Along the way you are sipping and tasting and having fun with who ever is with you. While they fill the bottle of blend you just created you can sit at the table and enjoy the bourbons you have not fully used or you can go and watch the blending process and the filling. They have a contraption to measure the ABV so they tell you that and you multiply by two to get the proof. Overall it is a great experience as you get your hands dirty in creating a great blend. If I knew this chemistry stuff would have lead to being a blender or distiller maybe I would have paid more attention in chemistry glass in high school. I did have to look up some of the terms as I forgot must be that GenX brain working. I would do this again as you get to taste a nice batch of bourbon that will change each time. I ended up getting a 375ml to taste and share and a 750ml to display on my bourbon shelves. Leave a comment or ask a question that I will answer Junior
