LOUISVILLE, Kentucky—In Kentucky, bourbon is king. The barrels used to make bourbon can only be used once, so in their next lives, they are sometimes enlisted for other purposes, such as making furniture. But their most unique use by far might just be soy sauce brewing.
At Bourbon Barrel Foods, Matt Jamie runs the only soy sauce microbrewery in the United States, out of a warehouse in the up-and-coming Butchertown neighborhood of Louisville. Ingredients are sourced locally: limestone-filtered water from Bardstown (the same as that famous water used for bourbon), soft red winter wheat, and non-GMO soybeans from nearby farms. The Bluegrass Soy Sauce—so-named after Kentucky, the Bluegrass State—is the original product, aged for a year, produced in small batches, totaling about 4,000 gallons a year.
