Naughton’s Nonsense

Bourbon is an American form of whiskey made from (pursuant to U.S. trade law) at least 51% corn, or maize — typically about 70% — with the remainder being wheat and/or rye, and malted barley. It is distilled to no more than 160 (U.S.) proof, and aged in new charred oak barrels for at least two years — or perhaps longer. The two years maturation process is not a legal requirement for a whiskey to be called “bourbon,” but it is a legal requirement for “straight bourbon.” However, in practice, many bourbon whiskeys are aged for no less than four years.

Bourbon must be put into the barrels at no more than 125 U.S. proof. Generally, it is then adjusted to 80–100 proof and bottled. Some (mostly non-U.S.) jurisdictions do not allow alcoholic beverages with over 40% alcohol content to be sold. However, the recent trend among distillers has been to return to higher proofs, and even “cask strength” bottlings.

Source: Wikipedia

Over the last several months some friends of mine and I have been hitting the Bourbon Trail. We are planning on putting together our own little one day bourbon tour. So far we have been to Woodford Reserve, Four Roses, and Wild Turkey. Woodford Reserve, and Four Roses have definitely made the one day tour list. Wild Turkey although a in a beautiful setting just did not make the cut.

Woodford Reserve has an entrance fee of $5, but is well worth it. The fee gets you a tour of the facility along with a video, some wonderful tasting tea, a handful of bourbon balls, and last but not least a tasting that includes a card of tasting tips. The entire experience takes about two to three hours. There is also a bourbon history exhibit in the visitor’s center. The setting is idealic and the guides are very knowledgeable and friendly. Woodford is a must for any bourbon tour.

Four Roses is a free tour and a surprisingly wonderful tour. The distillery is built in the Spanish Mission style. There is a video presentation, the tour (which includes various tastings of the distillate), and then finally a tasting of the product line. Four Roses has more of a industrial corporate feel to it than Woodford, yet the visit is well worth it.

The beautiful surroundings of Wild Turkey make it well worth a visit. However, it probably will not make our one day tour list. Turkey definetly has a large industrial production feel to it. The tour is free and includes a video, unfortunately there is no tasting. I would definetly take someone to Turkey, but only if we were pressed for time or they we huge fans of the brand. There was nothing special or particularly informative about the tour or video. For the size of operation it was a little bit disappointing.

I will continue to update you on my tours as they happen. For now though I would like to say how surprising it has been to me to see the vast differences in approach, not only to making the bourbon, but also to corporate mentality and the face the distillery puts on for the public. I look forward tomore visits and finally putting together the one day tour.

I heard a good story at church yesterday concerning a five year old boy in our parish. Recently it was the boy’s Saint’s Day and his parents were struggling to find him an appropriate gift that would either teach or have religious significance, but not be inappropriate for the age.. They finally settled on a Veggietales DVD. They wrapped it up and gave it to the boy who was very excited to be getting a gift. The boy opened it with great anticipation and pulled the DVD out, and his head fell, as tears began to well. And he said “I hate this video”. The parents completely shocked and taken aback asked the boy if he was expecting something else, and what that might be. The parents expected to hear the usual matchbox cars or remote control, however were pleasantly surprised when he turned to them and said he wanted a blessing cross to hang on his wall and to use when he plays priest.

As I heard this story I was completely humbled. It is amazing how much we can learn from the children God has given us. They can even teach us what is and is not an appropriate gift for a Saint’s Day. Everyone is given to us for our salvation, especially our children.

Well after a long hold out I am finally switching to Firefox. My biggest complaint about Firefox has been the UI particularly in the form widgets. There are a couple of things you can do to take the ugliness away, such as using Firefoxy or downloading a G4, G5, or MacBook optimized version. Those help but it still breaks in certain places because it is not a native Cocoa app. Well I have decided I am willing to live with that until the supposed native Cocoa version 3 comes out. My other current pet peeve is that Firefox does not use Apple’s Spelling Service. Most of my other issues I was able to fix with either a plugin, or a Greasemonkey userscript. The main reason I switched is that at work Safari started to randomly crash and got really annoying. Well I started using Firefox at work to minimize the crashes and noticed that Safari was not rendering all the content on certain sites, in particular, the interface to my Wordpress blogging software. So I switched. Well now I am looking for three plugins, and am hoping someone out there will be able to point me in the right direction, or be really cool and step up and write the plugin (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). The first is a simple drop down arrow in the search pane that allows you to see your search history. The second is a plugin like DownloadComment for Safari, this plugin adds the url of the site to the Spotlight comments of a downloaded file. And lastly I would really like for Inquisitor to be ported to Firefox.

On Tuesday Nov. 7 2006 my Corolla went to its end. This was the first car my wife and I purchased together, and we were not even married yet. I was in desperate need of a car and I found the Toyota, however I was about $500 short of the $1700 sticker price. So she (my girlfriend, now my wife) loaned me the $500. It had 80K on it when it was purchased in 1996. It left us with over 210K on it. It served us well and need very little maintenance till the very end. In the end it needed over $1000 in brake work. More then I was prepared to put in it. I will miss that car a lot, it was fun to drive and we have a lot of memories in it. It took us on our honeymoon, brought us to Kentucky, and served very reliably and faithfully for many years. I know I am being a bit over sentimental, and that it was just a car, but I even feel a little guilty for taking only $50 for it, and selling it to someone who is going to use it in a demolition derby. Well hopefully it will serve this person well one last time.

Well I decided to let my DotMac membership run out. This was a hard decision given that I was using this service to host my pictures, and sync my calendars, address book, and bookmarks. Well I have found a cool app that allows me to easily post my pictures. The app is called Galerie. I have used it to move all my pictures to the same server that my blog is on. The best part about Galerie is that it is freeware. It uses standard HTML, CSS, and javascript to create the picture galleries. Anybody who posts pictures on their site in a slideshow or gallery fashion should check this app out. I am still looking for an elegant/free solution to sync my data. I have tried using MySync, but have benn unsuccessful. I am hoping Spanning Sync will prove to be useful, but it is still under developement. If any of you has any suggestions, please let me know.

This is a song written by Melanie Johnson for the band I run sound for “The Bats”.

Stuff.mp3

The podcast can be subscribed to at http://blog.cnaughton.com/?feed=rss2&category_name=podcast

Well for those of you who got to hear it yeah for you, for those who did not so sorry, but Melanie asked me to remove it because it was actually co-written and she is unable to secure permission for the post.

Well thanks to Apple’s Automator and CESoft’s Quickey’s I was able to accomplish in a day and a half what had taken me almost a year and a half. I finally finished the Feast and Fast calendars. They should be complete as far as the information from the OCA’s website is concerned. I even have the movable feasts and fasts through 2012. So if you use an application that can handle the ical/icalendar file type (.ics) such as iCal or Mozilla Calendar (http://icalshare.com/faq.php for more apps) please feel free to subscribe to them, and let me know if there are any problems, or if you would like me to add a particular feast or fast.

Today the Aviation Museum of Kentucky (http://www.aviationky.org/) received an F-14 Tomcat Naval fighter jet, and I was there to see all the excitement.

If you would like to see the rest of the images in full glory please go here:

F-14 Slideshow