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“Fair enough. I haven’t given a ton of thought to how many kids I want. I figure that’s a discussion best had when I actually have a wife.”
“My brother and Sera are going to end up like my parents. I bet they have three kids in three years or something insane like that. This baby already makes four in their blended family.”
“They seem happy.”
“It was a beautiful wedding.”
I glanced over at her, suspicious.
She started laughing. “I swear, I didn’t mean anything by that. I was not making any sort of flirtatious reference to what happened between us.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you did.”
That was the truth. If it was wrong, I didn’t want to be right.
Faith
Entering the distillery, I was immediately assaulted by the heat and the smell of yeast. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but not to feel like I’d been dropped into the world’s biggest bread maker. I tugged at the neckline of my baggy T-shirt to get some air circulating.
Ian was explaining the fermentation process to me. I couldn’t keep up with all his details. I nodded, but I only managed to grasp about a third of what he was saying.
“Ian geeks out on fermentation,” MacKay said. “Just ignore him.”
“No, I want to learn how all of this works. I had no idea this was how bourbon was made, to be totally honest.”
“It all starts with the yeast,” Ian said. “It’s rumored Jim Beam was so worried about his starter yeast that he took it home with him every night and put it in a safe.”
“Jim Beam is a real person?”
“He was, yes. The Beam family started making bourbon over two hundred years ago.”
“We’re at five years. Almost there,” MacKay said. “Let’s get out of here. I’m sweating.”
“Let me just show Faith the lab.”
It really was a lab. Right on one end of the room. It was a glass box that clearly had the world’s greatest air conditioning. We were only in there for a brief minute, but I appreciated the blast of cool air. A woman was on a stool in a lab coat looking at slides. I assumed it had something to do with yeast, but again, I was a little hazy on the details when Ian went into chemist language. He introduced me to the woman working and we said a brief hello and were on our way to the next part of the process.
The distiller was like a giant steel tube jutting up through the ceiling of the building, but housed in its own little special room. I eyed it a little nervously. It felt like that thing could blow at any given moment.
“This is the bottling room,” Ian said, as we continued on into a warehouse space. “These machines wash the glass with bourbon, then fill them with bourbon. We can’t wash them with water or it ruins the balance of the flavor.”
Ian was a decent tour guide. He was enthusiastic and knew every detail of the process. MacKay hung back and let his brother do the talking, which I found interesting. Even though the distillery had been MacKay’s brainchild and primarily his financial investment, it was clear he valued his brothers’ input and hard work. I appreciated that MacKay didn’t seem to have a huge ego.
I had wanted to ask him how he’d gotten his injury and what exactly the injury entailed but it seemed like a sensitive subject. He’d offered more details now than he had previously so it felt like I needed to let him open up to me on his own timeline. Not that it was my business, but I was curious.
The bottling room also contained barrels that were being filled before they were moved to a warehouse to sit and age. Ian showed me what the charring looked like. It was fascinating that burnt wood could make liquor taste better. Or that a few hundred years earlier people had been so desperate for booze they’d experimented until they’d found something that worked. Now it seemed the process had truly been perfected.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting in the storage facility across from the main distillery building, but it really was just a warehouse filled with barrels. “How many are in here?”
“Between our three buildings, ten thousand barrels,” MacKay said.
“Wow. I’m impressed.” I genuinely was. That seemed like an unbelievable amount of bourbon.
“It’s not bad for a startup. But a couple of the big guys in the industry are cruising toward a lifetime twenty million barrels.”
“That’s a lot of barrels.” A mind-boggling amount of barrels. “What about the trees? Aren’t you going to run out of oak trees at some point?”
“It’s heavily regulated and we support replanting,” Ian said. “Barrels are reused in other ways.”
