Each year, almost 120,000 mint juleps are served at Churchill Downs on the Kentucky Derby weekend.

The quintessential drink is comprised of bourbon, simple sirup and mint.

It's no secret that the bourbon comes from Kentucky, but did you know the mint is also from the Commonwealth?

Here's more on that from the Central Kentucky Mint Farm.

Here in Nelson Family agriculture, we grow about one or two acres experiment and we're the sole operators for the mint juleps and the Churchill Downs and Kentucky Derby.

Every single box that goes there, every single sprig.

Well, we raise about six tons.

It's a very versatile crop.

It's a it's cold hardy and it doesn't like the heat.

It doesn't like our hot summers, which it kind of works out perfect for for the derby because, you know, this is the this is its time to shine.

Fill up my hand with rubber bands and I get my knife sharpened and I go out to the field and start cutting it.

It has to be cut to like 6 to 8 inches for it to fit in our boxes.

And there's no machine that would do that.

Once it's about sits in your hand, about perfect size and your fingers can touch you, wrap it with a rubber band twice.

Then we put in a tray, we.

Bring it in and we are we're putting a newspaper around it that we've that we folded.

And that newspaper is going to wrap around a dozen bunches.

And it's basically basically going to act as a moisture holder for however long that stuff's going to be be cold or be kept.

Once we wrap it in tight, we're packing it in a wax cardboard boxes and we're we're dipping it, getting it basically hot or cold as a as the term, I guess.

But then we're and we're going to color from there as long as you long as you keep it cool and keep it wet, it'll keep for weeks.

But we don't like to hold on to it that long.

We like to, you know, get it in cut and chipped out within a few days if possible.

I'm sure there's some other guys that grow on a very small scale.

But no, I don't know that anybody's doing it to our capacity.

And there's people growing, you know, there's bigger growers in Mexico and Florida and California, but they all of our customers would much prefer to get it here if they can.

We've been told our variety is more aromatic, going to get a better flavor to it.

Mint julep is equal parts bourbon and simple sirup and and spearmint.

And obviously generally they take and model up a little bit of it and then put a sprig in and as well kind of you kind of break it up and it kind of lets the flavor out or whatever.

But my little brother's better at it than I am.

He makes a pretty good one.

It's pretty cool.

It's satisfying to know that we're the the sole provider of it if it if it's being used there.

It came from us.

Well, it's not derby without a good mint julep.

Churchill Downs uses around £1,000 of freshly harvested mint each derby weekend.