When you think of the Mississippi River’s smell, notes like caramel, vanilla and fruit aren’t typically the first ones that come to mind.
But standing on the river’s shores in Hickman County at the far western edge of Kentucky, those sweet scents emit from two moored barges.
If the aroma doesn’t give it away, the black fungus growing on top of the shipping containers might. Baudoinia compniacensis, nicknamed whiskey fungus, thrives on ethanol that evaporates during the aging process from bourbon and whiskey barrels — like the ones housed on these barges.
The Ingram Distillery is harnessing the power of the mighty Mississippi to aid in the aging of its bourbon and whiskey on board the only floating barrelhouses in the United States. The barges are around a quarter of a mile from the company’s main campus, which sits atop a bluff overlooking the river just a few miles away from its confluence with the Ohio River.
“There's a lot of difficulty in this, but the reason we go through all that effort is because it is worth it in the way the product comes out in the end. And we want people to experience that, to understand our passion,” CEO Hank Ingram said.
This spring, The Ingram Distillery launched tours of the barges housing around 6,000 barrels to let the public see the process that sets it apart from the more than 100 other distillers in Kentucky.
The idea of the floating barrelhouses, Ingram said, was born out of desires to pay homage to bourbon’s historical ties to the inland waterways system — and to see whether bringing these barrels onto the river would elicit flavors that other distilleries don’t get from typical rickhouses.
“Bourbon used to move by water back in the early days, and really, in this quest for commercialization, we moved it to hilltops. They got stored in these big warehouses,” Ingram said. “Did we lose something from the bourbon by taking the river out of the process?”
Kentucky bourbon industry should be ‘eternally grateful’ for river connections
At a bourbon tasting in 2014, Ingram said he was told a story of how 19th-century Kentucky distillers shipped their products inside of barrels on flatboats from the Bluegrass State down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to sell at major ports like New Orleans — a trek that would take months. As he tells it, that time on the river had a noticeable effect on the whiskey.
“As it made this journey along the river, that whiskey began to work with the barrel. By the time they get to New Orleans, open this barrel up, they realize pretty quickly this whiskey has taken on a whole new flavor than what they had put into the barrel originally. So this time spent on river really created a product that we know today,” Ingram said.
Stephen Yates works at the Frazier Kentucky History Museum in Louisville leading group bourbon tastings and tours. He said in the early days of statehood, Kentucky developed a reputation for having quality whiskey products thanks in part to its supply of limestone-filtered water, which acted as a natural purifier that removed iron and impurities. While parts of other states like Tennessee and Georgia also had access to these limestone aquifers, Yates said Kentucky’s advantage over these states was access to a water highway system.
Kentucky’s booming bourbon industry should be “eternally grateful” for the state’s access to more than 1,500 miles of navigable waterways that, Yates said, gave early distillers a way to get their products to new markets in the days before railroads.
“The product would go down the Ohio, down the Mississippi, to New Orleans. Some of it would stay down there, and people would drink that, and some would get shipped across the Atlantic,” Yates said. “People start talking about the water and how much better it was for whiskey, and so people started wanting it. [Kentucky distillers] sent it over, it was well received, and then it was wanted in greater demand.”
Ingram also has a family legacy in the river transportation industry stemming back to his third great-grandfather, who he said began using boats to move lumber out of sawmills in 1865. His family name is a familiar one to those who operate on and around the Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee and Cumberland rivers: The Ingram Barge Company was founded in 1946 by Ingram’s great-grandfather. The company, now led by Ingram’s father, operates one of the largest fleets of its kind on the country’s inland waterways system.
“Given this family background, I thought, ‘Well, who better positioned to return bourbon back to the place that first made it popular,’” Ingram said.
That connection is evident at the site of The Ingram Distillery’s barrelhouses, which are moored at one of Ingram Barge Company’s loading sites in Columbus — a town in Hickman County where, as of the 2020 census, less than 150 people called home.
The science behind river aging
While the process of aging spirits on the Mississippi honors historical industry ties and Ingram’s family connections, he said it does more for the whiskeys than just providing a nice backstory.
After obtaining an experimental permit in 2017 from the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the distillery compared barrels aged on land for six months to barrels it aged on barges with two different types of covers.
“What we noticed is there was this softness and just more character on the barrels that were on barges than the barrels that were on land,” Ingram said.
The Ingram Distillery touts three main factors that it says sets its aging process apart from aging in standard warehouse-like buildings: high humidity from the river, more extreme temperature fluctuations inside of the steel barges, and motion inside of the barrels caused by the ebbs and flows of the Mississippi River.
Most distilleries age their bourbon and whiskey inside of charred oak barrels for at least two years — and sometimes much longer — to give the spirits time to absorb flavors from the wooden staves.
Brad Berron, research director at the University of Kentucky’s James B. Beam Institute for Kentucky Spirits, said water and ethanol from inside of the barrel evaporates as whiskey ages.
“By taking out some of the water, taking out some of that alcohol, all those leftover flavors start concentrating in a really cool way and create some really interesting changes to the whiskey as it ages as well,” he said.
Berron has studied the impacts humidity levels can have on the maturation process. He said high humidity environments, such as those around large bodies of water like the Mississippi River, can affect how the final whiskey and bourbon products taste after they’re done aging.
“I would expect high humidity to have an impact on how quickly you're concentrating the flavors. So you're going to, more or less, lower the concentration of the alcohol in that barrel, and oftentimes that leads to really interesting flavors coming in,” he said.
Ingram said the barges can experience large temperature swings. Even the two levels inside of the barrelhouses can experience wildly different temperatures on the same day. In the summertime, Ingram said barrels on the top of the barge can reach up to 130 degrees — but barrels at the bottom floor may only reach 90 degrees. At night, the temperature throughout the barge drops to around 75-80 degrees.
“It's driving complexity into the product, it's creating barrels that age differently, even from their neighbors, and therefore we have a very wide variety of flavor profiles,” he said.
Motion from the Mississippi River essentially sloshes bourbon and whiskey around inside of the barrels, which Ingram said forces more contact with the charred wood — leading to what he described as more barrel influence in the finished product.
While Berron said there hasn’t been much published research exploring how — or if — motion of liquid inside of whiskey barrels impacts maturation, the theory is rooted in established science.
“We know for sure, based on engineering principles, that as you move liquid around, you're going to be able to pull more material out of that wood. So you should expect to see more extraction of flavors from that wood faster, because you're moving that liquid around,” Berron said.
All of this science and history is what Ingram hopes visitors on the new public tours take away from their experiences.
“You see a bottle on the shelf, you don't necessarily appreciate the craft that goes into creating that product and putting it there. It's almost taking it for granted,” he said. “We are scientists at the end of the day. You take the science, and then after that, it becomes an art form, the mixing, the blending, that's really art. You get to blend both of those in this place, in Columbus. And that, to me, is just, you don't see that happen all the time.”
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.
