BOURBON COUNTRY

By Kinza Shenn

Photography by Sam Dearden

An unsteady romance and grain alcohol make a heady mix in this exploration of that most American spirit.

The summer of 2022 was lit up by a two-day romance with a boy from Kentucky. Jack was a drummer from Louisville. He had an aura of stillness and tattoos on his biceps that paid tribute to America and his dad.We kissed and watched the moon shine on a lake, and truly saw each other, then said goodbye and barely talked again. After he had left London, the distance between us made contact seem aimless, but my feelings lingered. Some weeks later in August I was messaged by an editor I had never spoken to asking if I would write a travel story about bourbon in Kentucky.

So, this piece is called: “Kentucky. Or, How I Saw God’s Face in an Email.” Or maybe, “Kentucky Medicine”, because in the wake of the summer fire, the trip was a tonic that rose up like steam, and lifted me, and moved through me like a warm breeze. I am not referring to the bourbon, though as I write, the parallels with both inebriation and the actual process of distilling whiskey call out to me in this image. I know this now, for I am several hundred pages and half a dozen distillery tours deep into becoming London’s seminal bourbon scholar.

Left: A view over the Kentucky River from the back steps of a fermentation building at Frankfort's Buffalo Trace Distillery, which houses the recently excavated Pompeii site.

There was once very little I knew as being Kentuckian, except for the things the state’s name prefixes, like the Derby and fried chicken. Also, there was the underground rock scene, shaped broadly for international audiences by the spectre of 1980s Louisville math-rock progenitors Slint, who were scrawny 20-something-year olds when they recorded one of rock’s most pioneering and nuanced albums, Spiderland (albeit in Chicago), a record both screamy and whispery, dissonant and recursive, and at times, swollen, like it was recorded through wet concrete foam.

I somehow meet Sam, the photographer for this project, at Heathrow, despite his wearing a baseball cap and flannel in the middle of an American Airlines check-in hall. Aside from cosplaying as a Kentuckian, Sam is also a metalhead who does not smile when people make jokes during small talk, and yet I will find is caring in his own subtle language. Over a bowl of porridge, some of his first words to me are: “Slint is from Kentucky.” He says this assumingly, as though the effects of this haunting music are recognisable in my features. That is to say, we are now noetic cousins.

There is no time to catch a show during the trip, but the genre’s flat hum will come to soundtrack long sleeps down the highway, reading local poets, and pale pink dawns on the Kentucky and Ohio rivers, where I liked to run. But when it is quiet, especially when it is quiet, some enchantment of the Bluegrass State will naturally come forth through the atmosphere and into you. Kentucky: whose storied landscapes still breathe through its ancestors.

“I watch the fireflies among the trees, which, you told us once, were dead people lighting cigarettes.” (“Souvenirs”, Tony Crunk)

While Jack had moved to California after his return from London, he occasionally returns to Kentucky. In an exchange of texts, he shares that, by chance, he is home over the last weekend of my trip and will try to borrow a car to come see me in Lexington or Covington. Meanwhile, I am landing in Louisville, watching the sun cast over the highway in a glitter of cars as it sinks to a vanishing point. The city is architecturally incoherent. There are shotgun bungalows and grander buildings with neoclassical facades carved from limestone, Kentucky’s abundant resource. There are glass giants and college football fields that make miniatures out of Premier League stadiums, and there is red brick, and there are flyovers, vampiric-looking churches, water and extremely American federal architecture. The trees are bouncy and voluminous as if they use good shampoo.

I am here to drink bourbon and eat great food, a task that the immigration officer found troubling to believe could be a real job. So, friends, I recommend Doc Crow’s if you ever find yourself hungry and thirsty on your first day in downtown Louisville. It is wallpapered with millions of dollars of whiskey, and feels like home, or rather, a nostalgic idea of home. Catalogued in its 54-page A4 spirits menu is one of the largest whiskey expression counts in the country, which are formula variations within a given bourbon brand. You can also eat deep-fried onions here, on a slice of bread with a side of deep-fried bread, which was one of the best things I have tasted in recent memory.

The city’s advertising for bourbon makes any search for iconography akin to playing Where’s Wally? on easy mode. Or perhaps it has transcended the man himself in its proliferation and become a decoy, a proverbial landscape of Maker’s Mark bottles in limited-edition, red-striped sweaters that Kentucky is lying somewhere behind.

Kentuckian pride in bourbon is rooted in heritage and family because virtually everyone seems to have an ancestral connection to the industry, and some association with the bottles from as early as childhood. It is also rooted in America, and perhaps the rare perspective that arises from truly being the singular best in the entire world at something. Any potential cognitive dissonance embedded in this notion is magnified in a state like Kentucky, whose population is spread quietly across small cities, mountains and rolling green hills, its identity often canned into a Southern stereotype.

Whiskey became popular in the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the westward expansion when the cost of delivering ingredients for rum and gin was too much for eastern settlers to transport over the Appalachian mountains. It was farmers who first made whiskey, which could be produced with backyard pro-duce like rye, barley, wheat and eventually corn, which defines Kentucky bourbon today.

Bourbon elaborates on other whiskeys by an ageing process in new, charred oak barrels that infuse distinctive caramel notes. By the 19th century, Kentucky was making some of the best, and its mastery was supported by the landscape’s offerings. The water was filtered of iron deposits – which leave a tang – by limestone. The hot summers built pressure in the barrels, intensifying the ferments’ infusion, while the cold winters propelled a reversal of the process: the low temperatures condensing the whiskey back to liquid, now imbued with the oak’s sugars. Kentucky’s canal systems, and later its positioning on one of the transcontinental railroads, set it up as an epicentre for trade and for selling its product across America, at which point the spirit permeated the culture of the nation.

I woke up the next morning in a state of peaceful disappointment that fell off like a robe when I got out of bed. We left for Bardstown. Small and very pretty, it has a high street on which a quarter of the shops appear to exclusively sell hand-knitted wares. Sam and I wandered aimlessly, landing, finally, in a store merchandised with crystal-embellished trucker caps, fake Louis Vuitton cowboy gear and a leather jacket painted with the Stars and Stripes. The sun was beating down. A pickup truck passed down the street towards the roundabout, a love letter written on its window in whiteboard pen. The light went green before we could reach it. 

We were welcomed to Bardstown by a woman from the local tourism office, also called Sam. She had left the town for northern Ohio after graduating, but ultimately returned to her old neighbourhood. She describes the experience of feeling invisible in an alien city as somewhat unsettling. It is an idea I heard many times during our trip. Almost every person I spoke to in Kentucky seemed to have left and returned, coming home to retrieve a recognition and belonging that was lost in the individualism of large cities. There is something straight-up nice about people caring who you are or smiling at you on the street. The Kentuckian porch captures this way of life, each one personalised with the intimacy of a bedroom, hung with chairs that face outward in a gesture of willingness to make oneself available to those passing home.

This feeling of warmth and inclusion may be due to my whiteness. Fortunately, I was able to talk and listen to people making their own spaces for non-dominant social groups in the state’s major cities. There is Lamont Collins, whose passion is in educating and inspiring African-American children to pursue their dreams. A room in his Roots 101 African-American Museum in Louisville is papered with photographs of children dressed up as firefighters, make-up artists and doctors. Down the hall, there is a casket memorialising Breonna Taylor, which was carried to the museum by local students through Jefferson Square Park. In a diverse Louisville neighbourhood, Trouble Bar has an affordably priced menu to resist gentrification, and the self-proclaimed witches who run the space infuse their bourbon with crystals. They say the place is feminist and queer-friendly “because we aren’t assholes”. There is also Fresh Bourbon, a newly founded distillery and the first to be African-American-owned, based in Lexington, and the Kentucky Black Bourbon Guild creating industry scholarships and safe spaces to access learning.

The guild’s co-founder and vice president Mike Adams is motivated by his own experiences entering industry clubs. “There’s a sense of not belonging when you join these groups,” he says, and recalls assumptions of his ignorance that he has often experienced. The prejudice is reinforced by the industry’s history of marketing its product as exclusively belonging to the middle-aged white man, and erasing the uncomfortable stories of minority actors who participated in its history. He refers to Nearest Green, the enslaved expert distiller who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey, and also asks – who planted and harvested the grains, and built the stills in the 18th and 19th centuries? Ultimately, the $8.7 billion industry is standing upon the forced participation of enslaved peoples. “Bourbon tells the same story as America,” says Adams, “which is that many races, genders, cultures and ethnicities played a role in making it what it is today. Everyone has ancestral equity in this glass.”

I am starting to pick up the distinctions between the different bourbons we are drinking, but I still cannot tell good bourbon from bad bourbon, because we are only drinking good bourbon. At Justins’ House of Bourbon in Lexington, we try 20-year-vintage Pappy Van Winkle, a liquor so scarce and coveted, it is nicknamed the “bourbon billionaires can’t buy”. There are flyers papering windows of local stores in Bardstown, and later Covington, for “Pappy raffles”, which offer small bounties of vintage bottles to the lucky winner. I like it fine, though its subtleties are lost on me. Each swig feels hot and shimmering, and spreads through you in a wide glow, as if the edges of your body turned out to be an illusion after all.

Covington is an old industrial town whose gangster-run casino sprawl of the past century is credited with inspiring the imagination of Las Vegas, and it is our final stop. Many of the storefronts have barely changed over the decades, but its bookstore-coffee shops, bagel bakeries, rock venues and breweries present an appealing lifestyle. I love Covington, and kept saying so randomly, perhaps partly thanks to the Spanish absinthe I had drunk at a store called Revival Vintage Spirits earlier in the day.

Covington is located over the river from Cincinnati, Ohio, so you can easily drift between rural town and vibrant city. Walking the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, which connects the two and famously sings as traffic rides its latticed metal roadway, evokes a state of freedom, and I know that I will miss it, as I will miss the way that I feel good and right here. A sense of knowing is calling me, speaking to some preverbal drive for connection, community. Since leaving, I am convinced that I would like to live in Kentucky, and wonder if, when that day comes, I too might say that I came home.

“On the drive to Maysville, just a handful of cars on the country highways. Out the window I see the gauze of the Milky Way unrolled across the sky.” (“Taking the Train from Maysville to New York”, Jane Gentry Vance.)

Jack reaches out on the last day. His uncle has spontaneously offered up his car during these final hours of my trip, and he wants to drive to Covington so we can meet. I hesitate but ultimately throw caution to the wind because I am here in freaking Kentucky, and slightly buzzed, and clearly God is trying something here. Jack picks me up from the hotel late in the evening, and we drive aimlessly down the highway for about an hour, eventually drifting back to Lexington. Some animal seems to have crawled into the AC and died, and he is extremely apologetic for the smell.

He is curious about what I thought of my time in Kentucky, but I find myself unable to say anything interesting or coherent. Since the start of the night, I have been feeling quiet in some involuntary instinct of self-preservation. Amid the negative space of our sparse messages, I am unsure of where we stand. Meanwhile Jack talks about Louisville, and its intersection of midwestern and southern identities and ultimately describes it as totally strange. “Slint couldn’t have happened anywhere else in the world,” he says meaningfully. I tell him that I see what he means. I think it is a pretty special place, I say. The whole week’s been a gift.

Passing through Lexington, a warm streak of light floods the car as we drive through the city centre. It comes from a large fountain, and Jack wants to circle the one-way roads to try to recapture it. We drive for a while, pulling over to look at the map on his phone where we discover that Lexington is full of beautiful and search-engine-worthy water features. We end up parking and then walking several blocks, past bars spilling out into the heat and nightclubs that seem watertight in the way that their colourful lights are sealed into their rooms. We eventually end up at the fountain. It is lit up in gold and encircling us in the loud sound of water. We do not say much at all before he pulls me suddenly into a hug, holds me close for long seconds, keeps patting me on the back, and asks me to stay with him at his parents’ next week in Louisville, and all I can do is sway. ◉