Biking for BOURBON

Fueled by cocktails and camaraderie, four friends explore the Kentucky Bourbon Trail the hard way—175 miles on two wheels.

- Words and photos by GRAHAM AVERILL

The thing about drinking an old-fashioned at 10 a.m. is it's easy to convince yourself to have another, even if you need to pedal your bike 65 miles to get it. I'm sitting with three friends in a trendy Louisville bar tucked into the back of a leather goods shop (that's a thing here), rattling the ice cube in the bottom of my glass and contemplating our next move. It's tempting to stay, but our bicycles and the open road are calling—and I'm getting ahead of myself.

We're riding a slice of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, a ~300-mile route that links dozens of distilleries together through the Bluegrass State. People drive the Bourbon Trail all the time, but I convinced my buddies we should knock out more than half of it on road bikes, pedaling to distilleries and cocktail bars while testing our mettle on lonely backcountry roads. We'll ride 175 miles over three days, from Bardstown to Louisville to Frankfort, then back to Bardstown.

It's a bold attempt, but we're all in our 40s and know the window for this sort of adventure is shrinking as we cruise through midlife. We're giddy to push ourselves and see what we can find on two wheels.

BOURBON AND BABY JESUS

IN BARDSTOWN