Kentucky Bourbon Festival
The Kentucky Bourbon Festival (KBF) is a festival held annually in late summer in Bardstown , Kentucky to celebrate the bourbon whiskey . Bardstown and its suburbs are home to four of the top 10 bourbon distilleries in the world. The festival has existed since 1992 and is now around 50,000 visitors a year for six days. The festival was designated by Kentucky Parliament as the state's official Bourbon festival.
Many activities take place at the festival that are also typical for street festivals in other places: concerts, food stalls, rides, etc. Unique to KBF is the whiskey barrel race, in which teams from different distilleries compete against each other.
procedure
The Kentucky Bourbon Festival lasts six days. In 2014, 35 events were held in the official program, plus other events that are privately organized. These include concerts, city tours, a craft market, golf tournament, car show, craft demonstrations, and whiskey tastings. Highlights are the Master Distiller's Auction and the World Championship Bourbon Barrel Relays . At the auction, the master distillers from the various distilleries auction rare and selected whiskeys for the benefit of the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History . In whiskey barrel rolling, teams from different distilleries have to roll whiskey barrels filled with water over a distance and stack them as precisely as possible in a rick that is used in the warehouse to store the whiskey barrels. There are points for time and precision. During the festival, new members will also be inducted into the Bourbon Hall of Fame. The central location of the festival is the Spalding Hall lawn in front of the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History.
history
The first Kentucky Bourbon Festival was held in 1992. Back then it consisted of a single dinner for 250 people and a whiskey tasting. In 2013 there were 52,000 attendees from 46 US states and 15 countries.
Alignment
The Kentucky Bourbon Festival has a very comprehensive program with many activities (golf tournament, poker tournament, car show, etc.) that have little to do with bourbon. Various bourbon connoisseurs then complain that it is more of a normal city festival that Bardstown lets itself be paid for by the distilleries. The author and Bourbon Hall of Famer Chuck Cowdery complains that there are hardly any events for Bourbon enthusiasts, and that they have to organize their events privately on the fringes of the festival. Many of the important events such as admission to the Hall of Fame or the festive gala at the end of the festival are only accessible to invited guests or are very expensive. The whiskey historian Michael R. Veach describes the KBF as a relatively normal street festival that does little to educate people about whiskey and impart knowledge to them.
Remarks
- ↑ a b Bardstown kicks off Kentucky Bourbon Festival September 16-21 , WDRB, September 21, 2014
- ↑ Scott Vogel: Driven to Drink in Kentucky , Washington Post September 28, 2008
- Jump up ↑ Susan Reigler: Kentucky Bourbon Country: The Essential Travel Guide , University Press of Kentucky, 2013 ISBN 0813142709 p. 144
- ↑ Rick Howlett: Kentucky Bourbon Festival Kicks Off Tuesday in Bardstown ( Memento of the original from October 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , WFPL News, Sept. 15, 2014
- ↑ Kentucky Bourbon Festival is September 14-19. , The Chuck Cowdery Blog August 17, 2010
- ↑ Michael R. Veach: Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage University Press of Kentucky, 2013, ISBN 978-0-8131-4165-7 .
