Wild Turkey Distillery Tour

The Bourbon Trail runs (generally) between Lexington and Louisville with many of the distilleries in the same town or quite near each other. We visited the Wild Turkey distillery, which makes bourbon. Bourbon is federally regulated having some specific requirements – must be made with at least 51% corn, stored in new barrels, and can’t have any additives. Bourbon is a type of whiskey. Whiskey is NOT federally regulated.

They don’t make bourbon in the summer. The tour guide gave us a verbal explanation of how bourbon is made and took us inside one of the several warehouses where thousands of barrels of bourbon are aged. Each barrel holds 53 gallons of bourbon. Some barrels are aged 6 years, 8 years, 10 years, and others 12 years. The bourbon is transported in tanker trucks to the bottling facility in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

The gift shop is full of Wild Turkey swag, bourbon, and there was even a turkey caller. They don’t have a tasting area so there we didn’t get any samples. They did have chocolates – bourbon balls – so we had a taste of that. And, we had bourbon when we got back to the condo. 🙂

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