By Richard Thomas Lexington’s old Pepper Distillery is a fixture of some of my earliest childhood memories. When I was in kindergarten, the family farm was just down the road from this historic, long forgotten bourbon factory that was shuttered in 1958. My Dad would frequently drive up Old Frankfort Pike and onto Manchester Street, going past the big, abandoned ...

Many years ago the “old timers” at Buffalo Trace Distillery gathered together and discussed the process for making Old Fashioned Sour Mash whiskey, which differs from the traditional bourbon production method as the mash sours naturally before fermenting. In April 2002, Buffalo Trace decided to recreate this process, and bottled the bourbon nine years later as part of the inaugural ...

By Richard Thomas Although not as famous as Al Capone or Dutch Schultz, if you want to know the intimate story of Kentucky whiskey bootlegging, George Remus is the name you need to know. A successful criminal defense attorney from Cincinnati, Ohio, Remus turned to Prohibition era bootlegging when he saw the money to be made there, and in his ...

By Richard Thomas Some controversy was recently focused on a price hike for a cask strength Bourbon that bears the name of one of the industry’s modern legends: Booker Noe. As it so happened, I was reading a new biography of Booker Noe at the time, The Big Man Of Jim Beam by Jim Kokoris. Flipping through the pages, I ...

By Richard Thomas The very name “Bourbon Whiskey” has its origin in the trade between the farmer-distillers of the frontier Bourbon County, Virginia (later Kentucky) and the merchants and drinkers of New Orleans, and this trade flowed down the Ohio River, into the Mississippi and then to that famous French port city just off the Gulf of Mexico. O.Z. Tyler, ...