STILL LIFE

On a road trip down Kentucky's bourbon trail, Emily Bingham uncovers the story of her home state's famous spirit, one strong sip at a time.

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GROWING UP IN LOUISVILLE,

I knew about bourbon. I played my first game of spin the bottle with a grade-school classmate who was named after his family's brand, Very Old Barton. Yet, by the time I started drinking hard alcohol (too young), my idea of a delectable cocktail was a very strong vodka tonic with two wedges of lime.

It turned out I wasn't alone. In the early 1970s, sales of vodka surpassed those of America's native spirit for the first time. Facing a shrinking market, bourbon makers of the 1970s and 80s wandered into other industries. My friend's family, along with many other distillers, cashed out to conglomerates. By the early 90s, the unimaginable had occurred. "Even Kentuckians had stopped drinking it," Susan Reigler, who has authored six books on the spirit and has been called the "headmistress of bourbon," told me.

Bourbon's course through the body, from lips to throat to chest to belly, can feel like lava, an effect known as a "Kentucky hug." Even Rob Samuels, managing director of Maker's Mark, has conceded, "You almost had to work hard to like it." And for many, the spirit's classic cocktail-the aromatic and potent Old-Fashioned-came with too strong a whiff of the Old South. As a graduate student in history during the late 1980s, I watched white men use bourbon as a way of brandishing their power. At an academic conference, an eminent scholar informed his junior colleague-Catherine Clinton, now a prestigious historian in her own right that to fit in she needed to drink bourbon. Not a fan? Not a problem, he said. She would get used to it if she brushed her teeth with the stuff for a week.