Louisville, KY 40202 502.584.2114 website
Evan Williams is a brand of bourbon you’d recognize throughout the Midwest, and the longstanding distillery has a retail spot and tasting room in downtown Louisville’s legendary Whiskey Row. This spot is renowned as the first stop on Kentucky’s beloved Bourbon Trail, and the tasting room offers a chance for a tour of the history of the company and the city where it resides, as well as a chance to taste the many varieties of bourbon that you can try today from the distillery Evan Williams first founded in 1783. Bourbon is a proud Kentucky product, and the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience is a must if you want to really understand what the famous spirit means to the identity of the Bluegrass State.
The experience is something like a museum; you step back in time and see the history and reenactments of how Evan Williams bourbon came to be. But the spot is also an active distillery, where you can observe the actual process of whisky being distilled as guides step you through the process that creates bourbon and what differentiates it from other kinds of whisky. The process, if you didn’t know, takes many years, and it will be a long time before we’re able to taste what’s going through the distillery today.
The tasting is the most interesting part though; guides walk you through the tasting of several kinds of the whisky, with the common Black Label variety with its pleasant , the sharper Single Barrel variety and the almost spicy Green Label. The age of a bourbon is where the magic lies, of course. The black label that is so well known is a 35-year whisky. But Evan Williams works its magic all the way up to Blue Label, which is aged 35 years in a charred barrel and tops 107 proof. A bottle of that will run for close to $300. It’s no joke.
The bourbon trail is an experience that gives many tourists a look into Kentucky history, and as a part of that, the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience is a great opportunity to learn a lot of things you’d never guess about a spirit that many, many of us enjoy. Whether you’re determined to land in every last distillery in the Bluegrass State, or you’re just visiting, the Evan Williams experience that anchors Whisky Row is a must to really get what makes this state tick.
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