Bourbon on the Brain

Here’s a little mashup of bourbon background, along with a look at Chef Ouita’s bourbon odyssey and why you’re invited to join her for our first-ever virtual bourbon tasting on June 12.

Let’s begin where bourbon does –

Take a drive through the Bluegrass on an autumn afternoon. Watch for wide swaths of harvest gold, sandwiched between black creosote fences and rolling green paddocks. Those swaths are cornfields, stretching to reach a deep blue sky.

With sweet corn season long over, you might think these stalks are finished too. But look closely and you’ll see mature ears of drying field corn, each dented kernel cradling a nascent drop of Kentucky’s native spirit. Because this is where bourbon begins.

Before Kentucky was a state, white settlers were required by law to plant a patch of corn to stake a land claim and any excess corn became raw material for making whiskey. 

Kentucky-produced corn whiskey eventually came to be called bourbon. Today 95% of all bourbon – and 100% of all bourbon worth drinking, according to any Kentuckian – is made in the Bluegrass state.

Our home county of Woodford claims to be the birthplace of bourbon. There’s certainly plenty of evidence that it was perfected here.

Back in the 1800s on land that is now Woodford Reserve, Dr. James Crow developed techniques for refining bourbon at Oscar Pepper’s distillery, and lent his name to the finished product. 

His scientific approach revolutionized bourbon distilling; and after his death, Old Crow continued to be the gold standard of bourbon, and an outlier as well. Because even as Kentucky’s bourbon industry barreled ahead, quality often suffered until enactment of the 1897 Bottled-in-Bond Act.

Championed by US Treasury Secretary George Carlisle and his fellow Kentuckian Colonel E.H. Taylor, the act set standards for aged spirits, particularly Kentucky bourbon. Consumers who bought whiskey with the new label knew they were getting the real deal – a pure product, produced in a single distillation season by a single distillery, matured in a US-bonded warehouse for a minimum of four years, and bottled at 100 proof.

A decade earlier, Col. Taylor had built a distillery along Glenn’s Creek, intended as a bourbon destination, complete with sunken gardens and castle-like walls and turrets. Col. Taylor’s showplace has since been restored to its former glory and is home to Castle & Key, where Marianne Eaves became Kentucky’s first female master distiller (post-Prohibition), followed in 2023 by Woodford Reserve’s Elizabeth McCall.

It was at Woodford Reserve that Chef Ouita Michel really flexed her culinary bourbon expertise. Upon being named chef-in-residence in 2009, she intensified her focus on how bourbon and food could be elevated together, continuing an endeavor begun several years earlier.

When I came back to Kentucky in 1993 from New York, it was before what I call the ‘real bourbon movement’ had started. Back then chefs were opposed to bourbon accompanying food. I remember how there’d always be someone at the bar of the restaurant where I used to cook, fork in one hand, eating my dish; glass of bourbon in the other. It drove me insane; I thought they couldn't possibly taste the food.

My thinking began to change when my husband Chris and I opened the Holly Hill Inn in 2001. Part of our business plan was to use local products and of course that meant bourbon, too. When you’re profiling a single spirit, you want to make sure that everything you bring out tastes good with that spirit.

In addition to creating dishes like Scallops au Woodford for Woodford Reserve’s bourbon-centric culinary program, Chef Ouita and then-Master Distiller Chris Morris tasted their way through hundreds of flavor components to build the bourbon flavor wheel.

Over time, our brains learn to discern and identify these different flavors. It’s a culinary puzzle that I love to share. I want to show people that drinking a great spirit while eating something can really elevate the dish’s flavor – not mask it, but actually intensify it.

Chef Ouita designed the Holly Hill Bourbon Tasting Game with exploration in mind. The game includes flavor components that help elicit and intensify bourbon’s flavor compounds in different ways. With Chef Ouita as your virtual tasting guide, you’ll learn how to enjoy bourbon differently, and more fully. 

I’ll help you develop palate memory. How does bourbon taste with orange, with chocolate, with a toasted hazelnut? Bourbon is a very complex spirit, which makes it fun to play around with. Nothing is going into your glass except bourbon, so we’ll exercise and expand our palates with the game components and how we taste them and the bourbon together. It’ll be a real eye-opening experience!

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