“Kentucky’s Mash Appeal.” That’s how the Kentucky Distillers’ Association billed the bourbon and whiskey options from the Kentucky Bourbon Trail that were offered at a Derby Eve soiree at the Governor’s Mansion on Friday night. There really were 87 - although you had to know the password to taste the good stuff (Wild Turkey Tradition, I’m looking at you). KDA President Eric Gregory, above, kept things flowing. I took the opportunity to sample Corsair’s Quinoa Whiskey. Chewy! 

Other craft distilleries from the new Kentucky Bourbon Trail Craft Tour were also represented, including Limestone Branch in Lebanon, Ky. - that’s distiller Steve Beam, right, talking to the KDA’s Adam Johnson.

In addition to healthy pours, the bar offered some intriguing cocktails. I sampled the Pressing Charges, a drink featuring Heaven Hill’s Larceny. Here’s the recipe:

1.5 oz. Larceny

.25 oz. PAMA Liqueur

.5 oz. Sweet & Sour

2 oz. Lemon-Lime soda

Stir and serve over ice.

Take one down, pass it around …

When I visited Minneapolis, Minn., for a conference a couple of weeks ago, I expected to find cold, snowy weather - and I did. What I didn’t expect to find was a great bourbon bar. But that is exactly what I did find - and it was all thanks to social media.

Several weeks ago, I posted a blog entry about pairing bourbons with Girl Scout cookies. A fan of cookies and bourbon in Minneapolis saw the post and tweeted it to a friend who happened to be in Louisville for a conference. I tweeted them back, mentioned I’d be in Minneapolis in a few weeks, and that’s how I found myself having a couple of bourbon flights with them at Butcher and the Boar.

Butcher and the Boar, which just celebrated its first year in business, has a menu devoted to corn-fed pork and, as Mpls St. Paul magazine put it, “the other great attainment of corn: bourbon.” This place has 60+ brands, including its own bottlings of Knob Creek single barrel and Buffalo Trace small batch. If you plan to have dinner, make a reservation. Or enjoy a few drinks in the beer garden (yes, it’s heated), which also has a full bar. Thanks to my Twitter friends for introducing me to Butcher and the Boar. See? Social media really can be social.

Also in Minneapolis, I tried an intriguing cocktail at the Loring Kitchen & Bar. How could I not order something called the Berry Baptist Bourbon, especially when the description read, “Full of hell, fire and damnation. No refunds”? The drink mixes Buffalo Trace bourbon with Bordeaux-infused cherry juice, jalapenos and “spicy water” - red pepper flakes in warm water. It was spicy, but mostly on the front; my lips tingled, but the bourbon and cherries tamped down the fire and gave the drink a sweet finish. It was curiously refreshing and warming. I didn’t even mind the brisk walk back to the hotel.

If you’re heading to the Yum! Center for the Pink concert tonight, consider making a stop before or after at the new Down One Bourbon Bar, 321 W. Main St. Created in a space that was once a parking garage, it’s a cozy place to have a drink, one that with a few tweaks could be elevated to something really special.

The first thing you’ll see as you descend the stairs from street level is the “whiskey window,” featuring many of Down One’s more than 100 brands. On the menu, they are cleverly arranged by “epochs.” The First Generation, pre-Prohibition section (1792-Oct. 28, 1919) includes brands like Ancient Ancient Age, Early Times 354 and J.W. Dant. Second Generation, post-Prohibition (Dec. 5, 1933-1980) offerings include Baker’s, Blanton’s and Wild Turkey 101. The Modern Era (1980-today) includes Angel’s Envy, Bulleit and Noah’s Mill.

Down One also offers a full complement of cocktails. I tried the Manhattan, which is made with Down One Single Barrel (the bar’s proprietary bottling of 10-year-old Knob Creek), Amaro and chocolate bitters, with a chocolate-doused cherry ($10).

The bar at Down One is distinguished by art glass salvaged from the Brennan Building on South Fourth Street that once housed the elegant Art Nouveau-style Vienna Restaurant.

When the building was demolished in 1982, a Down One employee told me, owner Al Schneider loaded up the glass windows in his pickup truck and saved them. The Al J. Schneider Co., developer of Down One, has also used the Brennan glass as “skylights” in a private speakeasy room that you enter through an old telephone booth.

But as right as Down One gets these delightful details, it falls down on others. The ugly chairs, apparently salvaged from the old Executive Inn, mar the otherwise posh atmosphere. And while the menu offers an interesting twist on bar food - particularly the Three Little Pigs sandwich ($7), which combines roasted pork belly, pulled pork and bacon with mustard barbecue, slaw and pickles - the presentation in plastic baskets and paper seems jarringly cheap. Upgrading to actual plates is a small touch that would make a big difference.

Overall, though, Down One is a welcome addition to Louisville’s Bourbon Row.

So I’ve been hearing a lot this week about a new trend on the Chicago cocktail scene: the Vaportini. It’s a device invented by the owner of Red Kiva, a cocktail lounge in the West Loop, that evaporates flavor-infused spirits so you can inhale your cocktail through a glass straw, rather than drink it.

“Think of it as something between warming a brandy snifter over a candle and freebasing Knob Creek bourbon,” NPR wrote in a story about the Vaportini.

NPR quotes scientists as saying that since inhalation is an efficient way to deliver drugs to the brain, you might get intoxicated pretty quickly using the Vaportini - except that it also contains so much water that the effect would likely be diluted.

Jake Malooley with Time Out Chicago tried out the Vaportini and declared the experience unsatisfying. “Part of why we drink beer and cocktails is for the taste — it’s cold and refreshing. The Vaportini eliminates a lot of the sensual elements of the cocktail experience,” he told NPR.   

I haven’t tried it, but that was my initial reaction. Part of what I enjoy about cocktails, particularly bourbon cocktails, is savoring them slowly, and feeling the warm essence of the alcohol wash over me. Inhaling a Manhattan through a straw doesn’t sound appealing at all.

Breathe in the entire NPR story here, and then tell me: Would you try the Vaportini?

Last night I spent some time playing around with ingredients for a Valentine’s Day cocktail. I knew that I wanted to use bourbon, of course, and I settled on Four Roses Single Barrel, which has a bit of a bite to it. I also wanted to include chocolate, because chocolate and bourbon pair really well. Godiva Liqueur filled the bill. I tried adding some Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur as well, but the resulting drink was way too sweet. The solution? Replacing the Luxardo with a few dashes of Woodford Reserve’s new Spiced Cherry Bitters. This new product (more about it soon) gave a hint of cherry flavor while its spiciness added complexity to the chocolate.

I call this cocktail The Valentine because, as my husband noted, it has all the elements of the holiday: roses, chocolate and a kiss of cherry.

The Valentine

2 oz. bourbon (Four Roses Single Barrel)

1 oz. Godiva Liqueur

4 dashes Woodford Reserve Spiced Cherry Bitters

Combine ingredients in a shaker filled with ice. Shake, then strain into a rocks glass filled with ice. Enjoy.

We are finally having a spot of winter-appropriate weather here in Kentucky, including some sleet earlier this week, which got me to thinking about ice. Sometimes, ice is bad - when it coats your steps, for instance. Sometimes, ice is good. It can keep your drink cold, for instance. But that can also have a down side. The first few sips are terrific, with the ice smoothing out the fire of your bourbon. But then the ice starts to melt, and the last few sips are a watered-down mess.

Enter the giant ice cube. The classic cocktail craze, and the bourbon renaissance in general, have engendered a whole new interest in ice. Some bars take great pride in chipping the ice for their drinks from a big ol’ block of it. Others serve their drinks over molded ice spheres - the Old Fashioned at St. Charles Exchange, for instance. I’ve seen devices you can buy to make these spheres at home, but they were cost-prohibitive. A few years ago, Maker’s Mark sent its ambassadors a mold to make a sphere, but I could never get the thing to work just right.   

Then, just before Christmas, as I was browing the shelves of my local Liquor Barn for last-minute gift ideas, I came across the silicon ice-cube tray shown above. It promised to make six extra-large, easily removable ice cubes that would enhance my drink without diluting it. All for about $8.49. I bought it, filled it and stuck it in the freezer. The other night, I easily removed a big cube and poured my bourbon over it.

And sure enough, it made an appreciable difference. The cube cooled the drink quickly, but it melted very slowly, helping to “open up” the bourbon but never diluting it. Like so many things in life, including bourbon, we can thank science for this phenomenon. Big ice cubes melt more slowly than little ones because of their surface-to-volume ratio. A sphere would melt even more slowly than my big ice squares, but I’ll trade that tiny difference in melting time for the difference in ease of preparation. And the big ice cubes still look pretty cool, too.  

In my resolutions for bourbon lovers earlier this month, I encouraged you to try out one (or more) of the flavored bitters on the market. Last night I followed my own advice. A quick search on the Google for a recipe using orange bitters led to this cocktail from Bourbon & Branch, a speakeasy in San Francisco (check out their cool site here). I made a few brand substitutions to accommodate what I had in the liquor cabinet, as you’ll see below. The coffee liqueur gives this cocktail a nice dark chocolate essence, sweetened by the bourbon and orange.   

Bourbon & Branch’s Revolver Cocktail

Ingredients

2 ounces bourbon (Bulleit recommended, but I used Buffalo Trace)
1/2 ounce Tia Maria coffee liqueur (I used Kamora) 
2 to 3 dashes orange bitters (I used Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6)
Orange peel for garnish

Directions

Combine all ingredients except orange peel in a mixing glass with ice and stir.

Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and add orange peel.

Makes 1 drink.

It appears that Santa would like a cocktail! I can take a hint. What did you get for Christmas?

Before the holiday hullabaloo set in, my husband and I spent a lovely, relaxing weekend at West Baden Springs Hotel in West Baden Springs, Ind. Its fantastic domed atrium, shown above, was called “the Eighth Wonder of the World” when it was built in 1902. At various times during its history, the hotel also served as a military hospital, a Jesuit seminary and a liberal-arts college before falling into near ruin in the 1980s. It reopened in 2007 following a complete restoration by the Cook Group and it’s gorgeous.

In Ballard’s Bar, named for Ed Ballard, one of the hotel’s historic owners, we enjoyed a cocktail called the Bourbon Bliss that adds both orange juice and Grand Marnier to Woodford Reserve, the hotel’s house brand. I made one at home and it was just as good. (As an aside, I am not a huge fan of flavored bourbons, but orange pairs so well with bourbon that I don’t understand why everyone is cranking out cherry- and honey-flavored bourbons and no one has produced an orange-flavored one. How about it, science?)

In the meantime, here is the recipe for the Bourbon Bliss. Enjoy one this weekend after you’ve finished all that shopping and wrapping.

The Bourbon Bliss

1 ¼ ounce bourbon

¾ ounce Grand Marnier

4 ounces of orange juice

Splash of grenadine

Shake all ingredients and serve over ice with an orange/cherry flag.

As promised, here are more gift ideas for the bourbon lovers on your list.

Mini bottles of bourbon make great stocking stuffers. Most are priced around $6. The selection above can be found at Party Mart.

Candleberry’s Kentucky Bourbon-scented candles will fill the house with the warm aromas associated with bourbon – vanilla, caramel, woodsy undertones – while never becoming cloyingly sweet. 10-ounce candle, around $13.99; 26-ounce, $23.99. Available at Westport Whiskey & Wine, the gift shops at Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark and elsewhere.

Kentucky Cocktail Book ($14.95): Bartender extraordinaire Joy Perrine and local writer Susan Reigler teamed up for this handy guide to cocktails, arranged by season and beautifully photographed by Pam Spaulding. Available at Carmichael’s, Whole Foods and Locust Grove in Louisville.

Consider pairing it with the new Woodford Reserve Spiced Cherry Bitters ($12.95) created by Bourbon Barrel Foods, which provided these tasting notes: “Barrel-aged with aromatic notes of black cherry, anise, vanilla and caramel, with spicy hints of cherry and bourbon oak on the tongue.” Available at most local liquor stores.

Two other books about bourbon to consider:

Beam, Straight Up: The Bold Story of the First Family of Bourbon (list price $22.95) by Fred Noe. If you’ve ever spent any time around Beam’s seventh-generation master distiller, you know that he’s a hoot, and his distinctive voice comes through on every page of this history of his family’s 217-year whiskey dynasty. He covers not only how to make a great bourbon, but how to establish a lasting brand. Available at Barnes and Noble.

But Always Fine Bourbon: Pappy Van Winkle and the Story of Old Fitzgerald (list price $50) by Sally Van Winkle Campbell. You may not be able to find a bottle of Pappy for your bourbon lover, but you can give her this beautiful coffeetable book about the man behind the iconic brand – the grandfather of the author. I found my copy at Party Mart; it’s also carried in the gift shop at Buffalo Trace.

Eat your bourbon in some sumptuous small-batch bourbon truffles from Art Eatables, a new shop at 631 S. Fourth St. “Cocktail Chocolatier” Kelly Ramsey artfully matches just the right type of chocolate to enhance the flavor of whatever bourbon she’s using – and yes, you can tell the difference. Then she hand-paints each one. 4-piece sampler, $9.50.