Casual

...Or was it the velveteen hills and gently pitched hollows...

...Louisville's has a Woodford Reserve Bar & Grill, since a real Kentuckian wouldn't think of washing down his Buffalo wings with anything other than a premium small-batch bourbon...

...There are 44 bourbons on the menu of the elegant Seelbach Hotel's Oakroom, where Al Capone dined next to secret doorways concealed in the walls, which he used to escape the feds, and perhaps irate waiters when he ordered Scotch...

...From the moment you touch down in Kentucky, you can't forget you're in bourbon country...

...But with similar Distilled Spirits Council junkets scheduled to explore Scotland's Scotches, France's cognacs, and the rums of the Caribbean, an exception is surely in order...

...It's more noticeable even than the gently pitched hills and velveteen hollows...

...Nothing suits my fancy more than drinking other people's whiskey...

...Most airports have Sbarros or California Pizza Kitchens...

...And in the Oak-room, if we didn't get enough bourbon in our warm-up Maker's Marks, we made up for lost time with our Old Forester-marinated spoonfish, our Knob Creek Crème Fraîche, our Russell's Reserve bourbon cream Caesar salad, and our sourmash bourbon biscuits topped with bourbon-marinated berries...

...If I work the story hard enough, who knows...

...As an ethical journalist, I have always had an ironclad policy about taking free-bies from sources: I won't unless they suit my fancy...

...As my sources, or rather, my patrons, would wish me to point out, it is not the Distilled Spirits Council's fault that I got a little too close to the story...

...Being flown to an exotic locale on some interest group's dime only to be sequestered in panel discussions on European monetary policy seems a cruel tease...

...Ever since Prohibition, the chastened industry has been prattling on about responsible drinking, so much so that when I encounter one of their flacks, I'm not certain if I'm supposed to interview him, or hand him my car keys...

...They take it in them...

...It's like they took good whiskey, and burned it...

...As we debated just how many of KFC's 11 secret herbs and spices one needs to name to become a Kentucky colonel, Gary jigged his way through a spirited round of "O'Reilly's Daughter," the lyrics of which contain lots of mature themes and adult language...

...After a tough day of drinking our way across bluegrass country, from the Jim Beam to Maker's Mark distilleries, we left work behind in Bardstown's Bourbon Bar...

...I think I gave away my amateur status when I suggested that a $200-a-bottle Distiller's Masterpiece had a nice peonies nose, with subtle hints of Jovan Musk and a finish longer than Alan Keyes's fingers...

...My boss Fred Barnes likes to say that the most dread words in journalism are "first in a series...

...Kentuckians, it turns out, don't just take bourbon with their meals...

...But when the liquor lobby, aka the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, recently promised a bourbon tour of Kentucky, complete with distillery visits, plentiful tastings, and quaff-able care packages, the question wasn't whether I should go but how long I could stay...

...Surrounded by so many professional mixology writers (I'd been invited, I was told, to cover the "policy angle," though I never quite found it), I was a bit intimidated at the tastings...

...MATT LABASH...

...I didn't notice...

...It has many of my favorite things—chairs, and lots of free bourbon...

...In other words, drinking it is infinitely preferable to talking about it...

...The bar is ranked 44th in the world by the London Independent and I can see why...

...Here, there is not much appetite for drinking anything other than "the water of life," as bourbon translates in its Gaelic antecedent...

...I'd rather do something more fun, like clean my hairbrush or tend to my tapeworm colony...

...Then there were after-dinner drinks in the Seelbach's bar...

...But selling print journalists on the salutary effects of distilled spirits (which have been shown to cut heart disease and diabetes) is about as difficult as selling fat girls on the glories of Edy's ice cream...

...At the Seelbach, rooms come with complimentary bourbon bread mix...

...I've tried a lot of Scotches, and I don't understand them," says Eddie Russell, Wild Turkey's manager of maturation...

...But I have always subscribed to Walker Percy's bourbon-drinking aesthetic, namely, that bourbon should be used "to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons...

...There our jovial British colleague Gary Regan, who wrote the book on bourbon (titled simply The Book of Bourbon), jumped behind the bar to fix us up with bourbon sidecars and Manhattans...

...I might be due one final junket, this one to the Betty Ford Center...