Bottoms Up- UK professor uses Final Word to discuss importance of bourbon

By Elliott Hess

Tom Troland has been enthusiastic about bourbon for the last 20 or 25 years.

About 50 people gathered in the W. T. Young Library Auditorium on Thursday night for his installment of Student Activities Board’s the Final Word lecture series — a series inviting professors to speak on topics outside their field or give a mock last lecture. Troland, a UK astronomy professor, talked about his interest in bourbon, which he said he developed when he moved to Kentucky.

“I have never tasted a bad bottle of bourbon,” Troland said as he drank the neck of a bottle of Heaven Hill bourbon. “Almost all bourbons are good.”

During “Bourbon: The Past and Present,” Troland discussed the history of the beverage and how it is made. Bourbon whiskey — whiskey made from fermented and distilled grains — is the ambassador of Kentucky to the world, he said.

Troland said the drink is a major part of the heritage and culture of the state. He has visited half of the 10 distilleries in Kentucky and has gone to some more than once.

“It’s like watching a movie you like twice,” Troland said. “It never gets old.”

Troland said touring the aging warehouses at the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort — where he has his name in a brick on the sidewalk — “smelled like you’ve dived into the (bourbon) bottle itself.”

“To me, that’s heaven,” he said.

Troland also related the alcoholic beverage to his field of study. Alcohol relates to astronomy because in one cloud of gas in space, there is 10 octillion bottles of 200-proof alcohol, he said. This exceeds the total amount of all of man’s fermentation efforts since the beginning of recorded history, Troland said.

Julian Burgert, a history senior from Germany, said he learned more brands existed other than the three types of whiskey they serve in his hometown.

“I didn’t know anything about bourbon before I came tonight,” Burgert said.