The introduction records a 2020 Kentucky bourbon boom—nearly seventy distilleries, more than two million annual visitors to thirty-nine tour sites, and 8.5 million aging barrels in 2019—while the author explicitly warns that tours, hours, fees, and listings change and require current verification.
Locator type: Section
Reader locator: Introduction, “Read This First!” — industry growth and tourism snapshot
Pagination: The supplied reflowed edition has no verified printed-page mapping; use the named passage above.
Source section: Introduction: Read This First!
The author frames the third edition as a current travel guide and states both its market observations and its volatility boundary.
Useful as a time-stamped industry snapshot, not as current 2026 data.
Status: Verified
Verified against the rendered local PDF on 2026-08-27. The record is a concise paraphrase; time-sensitive, attributed, disputed, or technically simplified material retains an explicit qualification.