You might begin, as many visitors do, with a distillery tour. Whether you’re coming to town for horse racing, restaurant hopping, bourbon tasting, or all of the above, you can’t go wrong by adding these newcomers to your itinerary. “We’re going to invest in things that are unique and authentic to Louisville.” “There’s a lot of excitement about the future of the bourbon industry and what that means as an economic driver and Louisville becoming a major tourist destination,” says Mayor Craig Greenberg, who took office at the beginning of the year and is the former CEO of 21c Museum Hotels. Even the legendary Stitzel-Weller Distillery, a few miles west of Churchill Downs, has a renewed purpose as the brand home of Blade and Bow (and this publication’s own Garden & Gun Club, which serves light bites like pimento cheese and spicy boiled peanuts alongside neat pours and old-fashioneds). The fresh spin on tradition carries over into modern hotels tucked into century-old buildings, shops that re-envision dusty spaces, and institutions like the Kentucky Derby Museum going high-tech to tell the story of America’s favorite racehorse, Secretariat.

And the hits keep coming, with tasting rooms set to open for Buzzard’s Roost, Bardstown Bourbon Company, and Brough Brothers, Kentucky’s first licensed African American–owned distillery. In 2016, Angel’s Envy became the first full-production whiskey distillery downtown since Prohibition. The Evan Williams Bourbon Experience opened in 2013, followed over the next two years by Copper & Kings brandy distillery and Kentucky Peerless Distilling Co. Kentucky has long enjoyed its tie to America’s native spirit, but the concentration of bourbon-related attractions downtown is a modern phenomenon. The Barbaro memorial statue at the Kentucky Derby Museum inside Angel’s Envy.

The bourbon kings