Farm-to-Fifth Tours at Bear Wallow Distillery
Head to Bear Wallow Distillery in Indiana’s Brown County for a Farm-to-Fifth Tour, Road Trips Foodies.
Tours are offered daily at the distillery, 4484 East Old State Road 46, Nashville, Indiana. See the process used to handcraft Bear Wallow whiskey from local grains: Cooking, fermentation and distillation, as well as oak barrel storage and finally bottling.
Of course, the tour includes a sample flight of whiskeys.
Tours start at the top of each hour: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.. Fridays and Saturdays, and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays. Cost is $10 per person.
Here’s a bit of the history of the distillery, courtesy of their website:
‘After discovering a craft distillery on a foodie road trip to North Carolina in February of 2012 the seed was planted and in March of 2012, Bear Wallow Distillery (BWD) was formed. We became part of the small group that worked for a year and a half to get the law changed in Indiana and were the first new distillery to open in Indiana after the Artisan Distillers law passed in July of 2013. After a year of permitting (Federal and State), construction and equipment installations, we started production in May 2014, finally opening the doors to the public on August 1st, 2014 in Nashville, Indiana.
“We often joke about having the first ‘legal’ still in Brown County because there was, and still are, a lot of illegal stills in Brown County. Bear Wallow is also a real place in Brown County with a real history of whiskey making, in fact, during prohibition, Moonshiners used to hide from the law in Bear Wallow because at that time there were so many bears in Bear Wallow that the Sheriff would not go after them for fear of being attacked by a bear.
“At BWD all we do is make whiskey (currently five different whiskeys (see photo), by hand, in small batches, with grains we get from local Indiana Farmers (100% Indiana Grown). We cook the grains (Mash), ferment the Mash, then distill the Mash to remove the spent grains (which we give to local farmers who feed it to their livestock) then we distill the alcohol a second time in our custom made (in Louisville, Kentucky) old fashioned Scottish Gooseneck Copper Pot Still. Some of our whiskeys go straight to the bottle but most of our production goes into brand new, hand made (in Louisville) American White Oak Charred Barrels to become one of our aged whiskeys.”
(Photo courtesy of Bear Wallow Distillery)
