While back visiting Kentucky for the holidays, I took my soon-to-be father-in-law and one of my best friends for a drive through the Bluegrass (physiographic region) to visit my favorite bourbon distillery.

I've taken friends and family on tours of this distillery more than half a dozen times. The distillery tour helped me grow some fondness for Kentucky by learning the history behind a beverage that truly shaped its history since Euroamerican settlement. I even did some archaeology work on the grounds of the distillery when I first moved to Kentucky almost a decade ago. I built a deep appreciation for their bourbon when I was still learning the ropes of drinking booze for the actual flavor of it. If Buffalo Trace hadn't become my favorite distillery then, it has certainly become so now.

So we met up with Nic Laracuente at Buffalo Trace. Laracuente is the Section 106 Reviewer for the Kentucky State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) and director of Bourbon Archaeology, a volunteer public archaeology venture to explore the innovations and cultural impacts of bourbon.

Laracuente took us on a behind the scenes tour of the Bourbon Pompeii site, the moniker given to a recently excavated portion of the facilities in Frankfort, right on the banks of the Kentucky River. Here's the background story - Colonel E.H. Taylor acquired an already existing bourbon distillery in the 1800s and wanted to replace it with a more modern, industrialized distillery. That facility, Old Fire Copper (OFC), burned down in 1863 and was replaced by an expanded facility in 1873. This building supposedly used riverboats and a pier mounted to the river side of the building.

It was a great, rare experience for us and you can see it for yourself if you have the chance to go tour the Buffalo Trace distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky. The Bourbon Pompeii site is an interesting example of a free, open to the public, archaeology museum that also bridges the public-private sector. It is admirable that Buffalo Trace has demonstrated leadership and a commitment to historic preservation through supporting this project, and it has clearly paid off in visitor attendance.