“elieve it or not, Maggie, I still do walkabouts,” Freddie Johnson says to me as we are sitting in an empty tasting room in the second floor of Buffalo Trace’s visitor center. “I try to envision even today some of the things that I had discovered when I first started coming around here with my dad and my granddad. And I’m still amazed. It’s like trying to grasp what it really must have been like coming in here without all the tools and technology that we have today and still be able to create a story like Buffalo Trace.” Freddie Johnson was the first tour guide I’d ever had at Buffalo Trace, nearly a decade ago. In 2015, I worked with Johnson and Buffalo Trace to put together a tour geared toward kids, an idea I’d come up with after hearing Johnson talk about growing up at the distillery with his dad and granddad. He’d taught the kids about why settlers chose that location to build a distillery (it was a natural convergence of wildlife trails and a river), taught them about
