This Neighborhood Bar Picked an Incredible Bourbon
Bedford Food and Drink
This Neighborhood Bar Picked an Incredible Bourbon
There are plenty of ways to find good bourbon.
You can chase allocated bottles. You can spend Saturday morning standing in an ABC store line with 47 other people pretending you all just happened to arrive at the same time. You can read reviews, follow bourbon groups, hunt dusty shelves, or trust some guy on the internet who insists everything was better before people discovered Buffalo Trace.
Or you can walk down to the neighborhood bar.
That brings us to Bedford Food & Drink — and Tucker.
Bedford is a neighborhood bar and grill, but there’s a little more to the story than that. Tucker grew up in the neighborhood. A few years out of college, he came back to the community he knew and, for the past three years, has been running a bar and grill serving the same neighborhood where he grew up.
And somewhere along the way, he developed a pretty damn good bourbon selection.
We noticed.
So when we learned Tucker had gone beyond curating the bottles behind the bar and actually selected a barrel of bourbon to carry the Bedford Food & Drink name, there was really only one thing for Tortured Bourbon to do.
Drink it.
For research purposes, obviously.
Bedford Gets Its Own Bourbon
The bottle is Bedford Food & Drink Bourbon Whiskey, a private barrel selection from Wilderness Trail Distillery in Kentucky.
And this isn’t just a young barrel with a custom sticker slapped on it.
It’s a 7-year-old wheated bourbon, bottled at barrel proof and selected specifically for Bedford.
That’s where private barrel selections become interesting.
Bourbon barrels may begin life with the same mash bill, enter similar warehouses, and spend years aging under similar conditions, but that doesn’t mean they’ll taste identical when somebody finally pulls the bung.
Wood is different. Warehouse locations are different. Temperature cycles matter. Individual barrels develop their own personalities.
So when a restaurant, bar or retailer chooses a private barrel, somebody eventually has to taste through the options and make a decision:
Which one are we willing to put our name on?
For Tucker, that question was particularly literal.
Because BEDFORD FOOD & DRINK is right there on the label.
No pressure, kid.
Wilderness Trail Was a Pretty Good Place to Start
The whiskey itself comes from Wilderness Trail Distillery, which has developed a strong reputation among bourbon drinkers for doing things a little differently.
Wilderness Trail built its whiskey program around a grain-to-glass philosophy and uses a sweet mash fermentation process rather than relying exclusively on the sour mash method more commonly associated with Kentucky bourbon.
But distillery pedigree only gets you so far.
Eventually we have to drink the damn thing.
That’s where Heather and B come in.
So… Is It Any Good?
Oh, yes.
This wasn’t one of those tastings where we spent 20 minutes desperately searching for increasingly creative adjectives because neither of us wanted to admit the whiskey was just fine.
The Bedford barrel delivered.
The seven years of aging bring maturity and depth while the wheated bourbon profile keeps things approachable and balanced. At barrel proof, there’s plenty of intensity, but this isn’t proof simply for the sake of proof.
There’s flavor behind it.
We worked through the nose, palate and finish, went back for another taste — because we’re dedicated professionals — and eventually arrived at a score that doesn’t show up particularly often around here.
10/10.
Tucker nailed the pick.
The Bourbon Is Only Half the Story
And that’s what made this episode a little different for us.
Yes, we found a bourbon we loved.
But we also got to tell the story of a neighborhood place.
Independent neighborhood bars and restaurants have something the giant chains can’t manufacture. Bedford isn’t a concept created in a corporate meeting somewhere and dropped into a shopping center because demographic research said the ZIP code needed another restaurant.
There’s a local connection.
Tucker grew up here.
Now he’s running a place here.
He’s built a bourbon selection for the people walking through his door, and eventually decided to put the Bedford name on a barrel he selected himself.
Then two idiots from the neighborhood showed up with cameras and microphones.
The circle of life.
Neighborhood Bourbon Done Right
Bourbon culture can sometimes become obsessed with scarcity.
What’s allocated?
What’s impossible to find?
What bottle did somebody score for MSRP that now sells for four times as much on the secondary market?
There’s nothing wrong with hunting bottles. We’ve certainly done enough of it.
But sometimes the interesting whiskey story isn’t hiding behind a glass case.
Sometimes it’s sitting behind the bar a few minutes from home.
The Bedford Food & Drink Wilderness Trail private barrel is exactly that kind of bottle.
Seven years old. Wheated. Barrel proof. Personally selected for a neighborhood bar.
And most importantly:
Really freaking good.
Tucker didn’t simply pick a barrel and put Bedford’s name on it.
He picked a damn good one.
Watch Tortured Bourbon
Because somebody has to do this work.
We suffer through bourbon so you don’t have to.
