Louisville's Urban Bourbon Trail

No thoroughbred farm tour or visit to the distilleries on Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail is complete without a few pit stops on Louisville’s Urban Bourbon Trail. Start your exploration of Louisville’s coolest Bourbon bars at Proof on Main. Located in the 21c Museum Hotel on Museum Row, Proof celebrates Kentucky’s Bourbon heritage with more than 50 Bourbons. The restaurant and bar inhabit four restored, historic whiskey and tobacco warehouses on modern day West Main Street, which was once notoriously known as Whiskey Row. The street’s famed history, dating back even before the first Kentucky Derby, includes tales of major horses races being held in the public streets along the straight line of Whiskey Row.

Today, rather than placing bets, guests are invited to pull up a stool and order a longtime favorite — be it Woodford Reserve, Maker’s Mark or Elijah Craig — or peruse the list, ask a few questions and fall in love with a Bourbon they’ve never tasted before — perhaps Pappy Van Winkle, Booker’s or Old Forester Birthday Bourbon. Before getting that all-important stamp on your Urban Bourbon Passport, discussing plans to attend the Alltech World Equestrian Games 2010 or daydreaming about the hat you’ll wear to the next Derby, be sure to sip your whiskey slow and listen closely... you just may hear those long-ago hooves racing down Whiskey Row.

More on Bourbon—America's Whiskey

While Louisville’s Urban Bourbon Trail was only recently forged, the art of Bourbon distillation blossomed in the second half of the 18th Century when Kentucky was America’s wild, western frontier. Corn flourished in the lowlands and the limestone water, ideal for distilling corn into whiskey, flowed freely. This corn whiskey, an early precursor to what we enjoy today as Bourbon, ran colorless and harsh from the settlers’ stills. It didn’t begin to look like or taste like Bourbon until the Reverend Elijah Craig, a pioneering Baptist minister who is given credit for inventing Bourbon, began to store and age his “white dog” whiskey in charred oak barrels at his still in Bourbon County, Ky. Thanks to the additional aging that occurred when the whiskey barrels were shipped on flatboats down the Ohio to the Mississippi to their final destination of New Orleans, the whiskey took on its now characteristic reddish hue and intriguing complexity of flavor and texture.

In New Orleans, the Kentuckians traded their whiskey and the lumber from their flatboats for horses and gold. The horses they herded back up the Natchez Trace to Kentucky soon thrived on the bluegrass and were the start of the state’s famed thoroughbred industry. Over the next century, Louisville became not only the commercial and transportation center for the Bourbon industry but also home of the Kentucky Derby, the world’s most famous horse race. So it’s only fitting that now, on the first Saturday of every May as the three-year-old thoroughbreds — many of whom took their first halting steps in a bluegrass pasture — race for the roses, more Bourbon is consumed around the world than on any other day.

Classic Mint Julep