Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/453014
16 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2.15 JUST SAYIN' the bit brazeiros.com I Russell, who owns the WHY Louisville stores and co- founded Lebowski Fest, is planning to turn Guntown Mountain in Cave City, Kentucky, into Funtown Mountain. Lynn's has been for sale for more than two years. Seems like a perfect ft. "Will Russell should buy Lynn's Paradise Cafe — if Lynn will let him do whatever he wants to the place." over HEARD ( ( ( ( ( ( t was on this past New Year's Eve that CBS News ran a short send-off report titled "The Whiskey Boom's Dirty Little Secret." After letting the viewer know that more than 130 new bourbon and rye brands appeared on the market during 2014, including "so-called hand-crafted bourbons," the segment got to its real point: that such labels are often deceptive because the booze in the bottles may not have been made by the implied distiller but by an Indiana mass distiller named MGP (Midwest Grain Products) Ingredients, which sends out 300 barrels a day to various unnamed locations. All the while the audio was telling us this, the video was showing bottles from several recognizable brands slowly revolving on a table: Woodford Reserve, Angel's Envy, Four Roses Small Batch, Johnny Drum, Baker's 7, Basil Hayden's. Oh, and Templeton Rye from Iowa. Here's the thing: The only vocalized MGP customer in the report was Templeton. The rest? Not a peep, but I guess we could surmise they are customers left off the audio for whatever reason. Or, possibly (wink, wink), CBS put them on the table just to illustrate the nation's whiskey boom, not as brands with a dirty little secret, and if we happened to misinterpret their presence on the table, well, what could CBS do? Nobody said they were MGP customers. Really, though, as many bourbon people would tell you, the contract distiller shouldn't matter that much, despite the fact that Angel's Envy sounds a whole lot more mysterious and sexy than MGP Ingredients. The Indiana distiller just sets up a customer-chosen mash bill, ferments and distills, then sends the distillate to the customer, who takes it from there — rectifying or further distilling it, fnishing it with echoes of other distillates, barreling it, sticking it in a certain spot in the rickhouse and governing its aging and rotational process. That, I'm told, is where the true differentiation among bourbons occurs. But it does rock your confdence to learn that the wonderfully artistic and iconic label in your cupboard might represent a fraud of some kind, even though there's no law saying a label must state the origin point of the bottle's contents. That's totally voluntary for the brand's owner. So when you open that bottle with the fne old family recipe mentioned on its label, don't be too sure its contents were born in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. It might have been Lawrenceburg, Indiana. Stretching the Truth By Jack Welch Illustration by Carrie Neumayer Give me some of that fne old family recipe.