You wake, temples pounding, the taste of stale whisky on your lips and the first sight that greets your blood-streaked eyes is thick black bars on the windows, and you wonder what kind of godless state you’ve got yourself into this time. Fear not. The state is Kentucky and in all probability you’ll be wallowing in the Spartan splendour of the Colonial Room in The Jailer’s Arms, Bardstown.

Originally it was The Nelson County Jail, temporary home to many a grizzled old varmint – including Jesse and the James Gang – but now it functions as a bed & breakfast. But, this being America, those words ‘bed’ and ‘breakfast’ take on a whole different dimension. Unlike Mrs Hargreaves’s in Morecombe, you’ll find the ‘County Jail’ t-shirts, Christmas cards and postcards, barbecue sauces; you can even buy a fridge magnet of your room. All this for only 40 dollars a night.

Bardstown is pretty, clean and thoroughly Southern with its picket fences and the imposing red courthouse set slap-bang in the middle of the town square, still flying ‘Old Glory’ in a Merle Haggard kind of way.

This is the home of the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival and it’s time to explore this brown nectar. America, overly-sensitive to the fact that it doesn’t have a history that goes back much farther than last Wednesday-fortnight, tends to over-achieve in the naming stakes – hence the ‘Ancient Age’ distillery on the  Kentucky River, Frankfort.

Their Blanton single barrel is 102 proof and the Gold Label sells for a wallet-wincing $60; it’s particularly in demand in Japan where they are prepared to pay 6500 yen for the pleasure of brandishing this alcoholic status symbol.

Heaven Hill is the last surviving family business in Kentucky whisky. Vice President Max Shapira, sports the horn-rims of Phil Silvers and, in his charcoal three-piece, looks sharp as a mosquito’s toenail. He takes us through all the stages in distillation: 80 per cent corn, 10 per cent rye and 10 per cent barley malt form what’s called a “beer”, which ferments in vast wooden vats and is then distilled in copper colander towers until the “white dog” is formed – a clear, almost tasteless spirit of brain-rotting strength. This is then poured into white oak barrels which have been fired, and the one-eighth-of-an-inch charcoal is what gives the finished Bourbon its characterful colour and flavour. Ah.

At last it’s time for a tasting. From a light four-year-old Heaven Hill through an eight-year Evan Williams to the 18 year-old Elijah Craig, named after the Reverend Elijah Craig, who is credited with being the father of Bourbon. In 1789, the year that Mr and Mrs Washington hung up their his ‘n’ hers towels in the White House bathroom, he set up a little corn whisky distillery in Bourbon county. A fire broke out in the open-rick barrelhouse, and the frugal Baptist used these charred containers to historic effect. Thanks, Rev.

This tasting is common courtesy in Nelson County, but bizarrely enough, 70 per cent of Kentucky is made up of dry counties, so you have to travel outside before you can wet your whistle. All this dates back to Prohibition, a concept of such mind-boggling madness that it’s hard to believe its reverberations are still being felt 60 years on. Although the banning of alcohol had been going on for some years, state by state, it wasn’t until 1920 that it reached its nadir nationwide. The wild-eyed battleaxe-wielding maiden aunt of sobriety, Carrie Nation, had had her way and won her hard-fought battle against “distilled death and liquid damnation”. By the time Franklin D Roosevelt had repealed the law, it was too late for a lot of the whisky companies. Thirteen years of dilapidation of materials, warehouses and all the machinery of the trade had taken its toll and it’s only in very recent years that Bourbon has regained its respect and self-esteem. Before prohibition, most distilleries were to be found in North Carolina, but now it was Kentucky’s turn.

It’s a warm, late September evening and an invitation has arrived to attend a cook-out and tasting at the home of Booker Noe, Bardstown’s Buddha of Bourbon, and grandson of Jim Beam. It is a house you could not easily miss. A huge, white mansion with pillars in the porch and the obligatory flags at half-mast. A pretty and accommodating Kathleen takes us proudly through several very fine, small batch Bourbons, courtesy of the Jim Beam organisation. Basil Hayden’s first: a light-bodied, smooth eight-year-old and, at 80 proof, a pussycat in such wayward company. Baker’s is aged seven years and hand-bottled at 107 proof, using a 60 year-old yeast process, making for a mellow, ruminative tipple, preferably taken with a splash of spring water. Anything called Knob Creek might bring out the gigglesome schoolboy in this Englishman but, snickers abated, this one proved to be more mature than the drinker.  A darker, sweeter, 100 proof nine-year-old that hangs mustily around the back of the nostrils – fine, but no match for the crowning glory of the tasting: Booker’s.

Emeritus Booker Noe is a huge man in his mid-sixties, cast in the mould of Tennessee William’s Big Daddy or, indeed, ol’ Colonel Harland Sanders himself, and his Bourbon is straight from the barrel, 127 proof and eight years old, uncut and unfiltered, and definitely not the whiskey to gulp back. Dilution is essential. At 50 bucks a throw, this is not the brew for Bowery bums. But, hey, we have to pay for our pleasures. and Booker’s is surely the finest sourmash you ever will taste.

The Southern Breakfast is a wonder to behold: wild mushroom omelette, fried potatoes, rocket salad, strawberries, honeydew melon and a petunia – and all on the same plate! Suitably stuffed, the road to Nashville awaits and the tasting of Tennessee whiskies.

The Opryland is more a city than a hotel, with 5000 rooms and a new wing under construction for an extra 1500. The ease with which you can get utterly and completely lost is apparent as bemused residents, pouring over their hotel maps, bump into each other in desperate attempts at finding the lobby. The first thought upon entry to the immense atrium is that this place loves water – hell, it’s darn near drowning in the stuff. There’s a river that weaves around the inside of the place and in the Cascade Conservatory and you can experience The Dancing Waters, who sound like a ballroom dancing duo from Auckland but are, in fact, powerful jets that shoot up through the floor and which, with the aid of computer technology, are illuminated by a barrage of lighting effects.

And just as you’re thinking “yeah, well so what” this lone moustachioed figure appears on a balcony pounding pompous arpeggios on a baby grand while a massive scarlet spout shoots a hundred feet into the air and you find yourself thinking that the Opryland is the Kitsch Kapital of the World.

It’s seven o’clock and the telephone’s mugging my dream. “Hi, this Porter Wagoner with your early morning wake-up call. Y’all have a nice day.” Shucks, I’m humbled. An icon of Country Music has got up especially to awaken lil’ ol’ limey, tea-bag me. But, wait: “hi, this is Porter Wagoner etc.” Damn. A tape.

It’s an hour and quarter to Lynchburg, home to – no, silly, not David or, indeed, Kenny but – the Jack Daniels distillery. The wryly laid-back Carl is our tour guide, a walking sandwichboard of sew-on patches, buttons and homespun philosophies. Outrageously, the world’s best-known sourmash whisky is housed in a pretty hollow in a county that’s been ‘dry’ for 86 years. One Friday per month the staff get given a free bottle; they call it ‘Good Friday’. Followed by ‘Bad Saturday’, I’ll warrant.

The principal difference between Tennessee whisky and its Kentucky cousin is the filtering process at the final stage. Bourbon doesn’t see the need for this purification, whereas JD and other like George Dickel, another exceptional single-barrel, are filtered twice through sugar maple charcoal, As Carl leads the way through the powerfully pungent smell of the ‘beer’ fermenting he makes a useful suggestion: “Walk slow an’ breathe deep – sometimes I do the tour all by m’sel’”.

The story of Jack Daniels, the man, has an almost biblical resonance. He was the young apprentice to Dan Caul, a Lutherian preacher who started making whisky in 1866 but, deciding that he’d prefer to follow the Path of the Lord, he sold his still to Jack for $25, who moved it five miles over the hill near to the creek. The story goes that some years later a somewhat inebriated Mr Daniels decided to do his accounts in the early hours of the morning, couldn’t call the safe combination to mind and, in a blind rage, kicked the safe door. Two weeks later he was dead from a blood clot.

Even after seven days, soaked Bourbon and its history, this seems like a suitably contemporary parable for us all. Here endeth the lesson.