Hi, I'm Keith and I'm a bourbon addict. (I'm also Nicole's husband.) Not in the alcoholic sense (though sometimes I wonder), but in the same way that women are addicted to shoes. I often buy bourbon weekly, even though I can't finish a bottle per week. I've developed a pretty solid collection, but I never have enough. Bourbon is special, you see.
Bourbon is the American spirit. In fact, bourbon must be made in the United States. It has to be made out of at least 51% corn and aged in new oak barrels. There are several requirements for labeling, but those aren't particularly important for the discussion at hand.
The craft of bourbon making is what I find so interesting. Though it has to be 51% corn, most bourbons use a higher percentage than that, and fill in the rest with rye and barley. Some distilleries use wheat in lieu of rye, and some of micro-distilleries are using four different types of grain rather than the more traditionally three. After distillation, master distillers have to decide how long they'll age their product and where in their warehouse to place the newly filled barrel. Most major distilleries use 53 gallon barrels, but some of the smaller distilleries are experimenting with 5, 15, and 30 gallon barrels.
The point of the introduction is that there's almost an infinite variety of bourbon. Distillers can manipulate the recipe, the percentage of grains in their recipe, the age of the bourbon, the location of the bourbon in their warehouse and the size of the barrel it ages in. (The still matters too, but that's a different discussion.) This leads me to desire an infinite amount of bourbon.
This is a picture of my bourbon shelf. If you see a guy in a liquor store in SE Washington staring at the bourbon section, it very well could be me.
