Everything we make in the soy sauce line starts in the same place. One base, brewed in Louisville over twelve months and finished in bourbon barrels.
This structure isn't an accident. It came out of Matt's trips to Japan, where every brewery he toured had a traditional shoyu and then a set of variations extending from it. He came home and did the same thing. The full account of those trips is worth reading if you want the backstory.
Here's what each bottle is and where it earns its place.
Bluegrass Soy Sauce: The Original
Bluegrass Soy Sauce is the foundation, and it's the one to own first.
Five ingredients, all sourced in the United States. Non-GMO soybeans from Marion County, Kentucky soft red winter wheat, solar-evaporated sea salt, aspergillus oryzae yeast, and limestone spring water from the same Bardstown source the distilleries use, all aged in reclaimed Kentucky Bourbon Barrels.
It tastes meaty, brothy, and briny, with a leathery quality underneath and a subtle sweetness that comes out of the oak. Use it anywhere you'd use soy sauce. It's especially good on sushi and sashimi, where there's nowhere for a sauce to hide, and it does steady work in dressings, pan sauces, and marinades.
If you only ever buy one bottle from us, buy this one.
Imperial Double Fermented: The Deep One
Imperial Double Fermented Soy Sauce takes eighteen months instead of twelve.
The method is straightforward, but patience is the hard part. Normally a fresh koji goes into a brine of salt and spring water. For this one, we skip the brine entirely and use finished Bluegrass Soy Sauce in its place, add a new koji, and let it ferment for another six months.
What comes out is considerably deeper and richer. The usage is the same as Bluegrass, so nothing about your cooking has to change. It's the bottle to reach for when a dish is built around the soy sauce rather than seasoned with it. A dipping bowl, a glaze, a broth where the sauce is doing most of the talking.
Bourbon Smoked: The Country Ham One
We were already set up to smoke spices, so smoking soy sauce was a short step.
Smoke is umami, and layering it onto a sauce already full of umami compounds the effect. That means restraint matters here, and we're careful not to take it too far. Bourbon Smoked Soy Sauce keeps everything Bluegrass has. The meatiness, the brothiness, the funk. This just adds an emphasis of smoke up top.
Matt's daughter tasted it when she was eleven and said it tasted like a country ham sandwich. She was right, and that's still how we describe it during tastings. Good in soups and ramen, and excellent in small amounts on grilled meat or sushi. A few drops will do more than you expect.
Small Batch Bourbon Ponzu: The Bright One
Small Batch Bourbon Ponzu is the outlier in the line, and the one people are most surprised by.
Traditional ponzu is built on yuzu, which isn't grown much in the States. Ours came out of an efficiency problem. We were hand-peeling around 400 lemons at a time for another product and using only the peel, so we started pressing the rest for juice. So, cold-pressed lemon became the citrus.
Traditional ponzu also uses sake. Ours uses 100-proof Old Forester.
The result covers a lot of ground. Sweet and salty from the soy base, vinegar acidity, heat from cayenne, funk from fish flake, and brightness from the lemon. It's a dipping sauce first, and it's also worth trying on grilled fish and vegetables.
Tasting Them Side by Side
The differences are easier to understand in one sitting than in four separate meals.
The four-bottle gift box has the whole line, which makes a side-by-side straightforward. Pour a small amount of each, taste in that order, Bluegrass first and Ponzu last, and the lineage between them comes through clearly. We suggest tasting the sauce with cucumbers or strawberries to fully experience the flavors.
You can also come do it here. We're on Story Avenue in Louisville, Kentucky, and the tour ends with a tasting of every sauce in the line. Details are on our visit page.