[Nick Laracuente:]
I was really excited to come home to Kentucky and spend my career here. I live in Frankfort, it's a beautiful capital city. As soon as you start to get outside the confines it's just rolling hills. We got horse farms all around here, lots of beautiful rivers, scenery all across the state. So it's beautiful, but the most beautiful thing to me in Kentucky is everything that's underneath all of that. 

"So you want to go down into the pit? Come on."

[Bartender:]
Welcome in. How are you all today? You guys want some more drinks?

[Scott Clark:]
Nick works at the Kentucky Heritage Council and also does projects related to the history of bourbon. 

[Nick Laracuente:]
My name is Nick Laracuente, I'm the Bourbon archaeologist.
Bourbons amazing because of there's multiple layers lots of people like the authenticity, the high quality of the product. But there's also deep history.

[Bartender:]
I'm pretty sure that it's an Internet fact that we have more barrels of bourbon than people in Kentucky. so when you come in you talk about bourbon and there's more history about Kentucky on this shelf and there isn't any book you're gonna find on the shelf and it takes better any book I've ever had yes

[Nick Laracuente:]
So when I came to Kentucky as a professional archaeologist, I found that they do archaeology more or less in private. So what I brought with me from the University of West Florida was a concept of public archaeology.

[Applause] 

"We're heading to the Jouett distillery site, which means that we're gonna hike through the woods along the stone fence here in the middle of Woodford County."

I came into bourbon archaeology a little by accident. I came up here and I realized that the Bourbon Trail and all of these defunct distilleries at the time, they have layers of history that archaeologists weren't looking at. I knew that since distilleries intersect so many aspects of human society that I would be able to dedicate the rest of my career to just looking at distilleries. 

So part of what we do here is the big puzzle trying to figure out who is here, what they were doing. 

[Scott Clark:]
There was a moment in time that Nick had a vision about telling the story of bourbon using the skills as an archaeologist. Right when the world was really discovering bourbon again. 

[Nick Laracuente:]
I think you could say my bourbon archeology career really took off when I started the Jack Jouett archaeology project to look at the long-forgotten distillery of a Revolutionary War hero. 

"You see how it's filling up with water? We think it's a spring house, a place for people kept things cold, but we're not sure yet."

[Music] 

One thing led to another, and the next thing I know Buffalo Trace is calling me. 

[Bartender:]
You know, I heard a little story today, and apparently over at Buffalo Trace they were doing some renovations and they uncovered Colonel E.H. Taylor's original fermentation area.

[Music lyrics:] 
"Time it keeps tickin', that's another story told."

[Nick Laracuente:]
So we did an excavation of this whole storage room that had never really been looked at before, and we found two different foundations of old distilleries that have been buried and forgotten about. 

"We cut into these. I just dropped into a little void."

But we also found these fermenting bats from a later stage.

[Music lyrics:] 
"Well, time it keeps ticking, there's another story told."

[Nick Laracuente:]
As we were digging down in the vats, that's when it started finding the scraps of copper and cooler artifacts. This is an incredible find. 

So we ended up turning it into an indoor museum -- catwalks over this large pit where you could look down and see these foundations in a place that we're calling Bourbon Pompeii. 

[Music lyrics:] 
"But we did it for the stories we could tell. But we did it for the stories we could tell."

[Nick Laracuente:]
Last but not least, this is a cool part here this is the fermenting vat, vat seven, that they decided to reactivate right and start distilling a bourbon that has not been seen since about 150 years ago. 

We've been able to recreate even down to the specific strain of yeast that was last in contact with these copper artifacts we excavated. Then they'll be put into a charred white oak barrel, hang out in a warehouse for about eight more years, and then we'll have to raise a toast to archaeology preservation and bourbon. 

In Kentucky, if you're known in the bourbon world, you are a rock star.

[Bartender:]
Yeah, this is Nick, this is the Bourbon archaeologist, man. Guys, we don't get a lot of celebrities, other than me, okay? 

[Scott Clark:]
Nick's a character and then everyone knows Nick because the guy who's telling the story of bourbon.

[Music]