HE SAID

Eleven of us. Some I’d known for years, some I barely knew going in — and by the end of the weekend it didn’t matter which category you started in. We mostly met at Bob’s house at 8am on Thursday: Charlie flew to KY from Charlotte, Dan drove down from St. Louis, the rest of us piled into a 15-passenger van after a grocery store run for supplies. Whoever was driving announced upfront that we weren’t stopping for the full seven hours — which is how somebody ended up packing one of those hospital travel bottles, just in case. We did stop. Nobody had to find out how that would’ve gone. One unlucky guy in the back spent the whole ride with a hard plastic seam right in the worst possible spot, and made sure the rest of us heard about it every time we hit a bump. Everyone divvied up costs as we went — tastings, the van, food, gas. I came out around $600–700 for my share, and that’s before the bourbon I bought for myself.

This is the “in-between years” pillar we don’t talk about enough — not couples, not family, just a group of guys carving out a long weekend for each other. You don’t get many chances to do this once life gets busy: careers, kids, the calendar filling up with everyone else’s priorities. So when the chance shows up, you take it.

The best part of the whole trip wasn’t even a distillery — it was the drive. Hours in a van with a rotating cast of conversations, bad jokes, and no particular urgency. It took me straight back to college road trips with buddies, except now I was one of the older guys in the group instead of the youngest. Didn’t matter. We fell into an easy rhythm fast, and by Saturday night it felt like we’d been doing this for years.

The house did a lot of heavy lifting. A five-bedroom man-cave built for exactly this kind of trip — poker table, golf simulator, multiple bars, an outdoor fireplace, more TVs than we needed, and a kitchen that could actually handle eleven guys cooking and eating together. You genuinely never had to leave if you didn’t want to.

On the bourbon itself: Buffalo Trace became our anchor stop, hit early both mornings for their allocated bottle releases — one bottle per person, per allocated release, while supplies last. Worth building the whole morning around. Castle & Key surprised me with how good the actual tour was — a genuinely cool, castle-looking facility, well worth the visit. Woodford Reserve backed it up with a slicker, more modern operation and a solid rundown of the actual bourbon-making process.

But the real find was Whiskey Thief — a microdistillery that, on arrival, looked more like a farm than a distillery. We were skeptical walking up. Then we met the guy running it, clearly obsessed with what he does, and got samples poured straight from the barrel — unfiltered, uncut, some pushing 128 proof. He warned us we’d see little black flecks floating in the glass, and called them, without missing a beat, a “Kentucky snow globe.” Nothing else on the trip came close. It was the kind of stop you don’t expect to be the highlight and then can’t stop talking about on the drive home.

Four Roses was the low point, and I’ll say it plainly: beautiful architecture, bourbon that just didn’t work for me. Nice building, disappointing pour. Getting there wasn’t much better — it sits far enough out that Ubers take forever, and one of ours showed up with breath so bad the whole car reeked the second he opened his mouth. We cracked the windows, stopped answering him, and had him nicknamed Mush Mouth before we even got out of the car. Factor in the wait time if you’re not driving yourselves — and maybe keep a window down.

Food was solid but unremarkable — good pub fare at Amsden Station and Ricardo’s Grill and Pub, plenty of Guinness. Nobody came for the food.

Nights at the house were their own kind of good. What started as a friendly dealer’s-choice poker game didn’t stay that way for long — the guys who loved Texas Hold’em kept steering it back every time the deal reached them, and I went out on an all-in hand in the one game I can’t stand. Movies for whoever’d had enough cards for one night. Low-key, no plan, exactly what you want after two days of tastings.

What was Al’s feedback?