Programing made possible by Louisville.

Water quality water quality of life.

Louisville Water has over 150 years of experience in the science of water.

Learn the history behind every glass at the Waterworks Museum located inside Louisville.

Water's 1860 Original Pumping Station.

Did you know Kentucky has more navigable miles of water than any other state in the U.S. except Alaska?

Is Alaska still a state.

Whose 90,000 miles of streams and dozens of rivers is.

Also quite famous for some other liquids, those which flow from a barrel, that being beers, bourbons and why.

Many of the world's best known distilleries can be found right here in the Bluegrass State.

And interestingly enough, pretty darn close to many of our lakes, rivers and streams.

We're here to take you on an expedition of the secrets and histories of our intricate waterways while visiting Kentucky's distilleries, breweries and wineries.

I'm Carrie, and I'm Kyle.

And we are two.

Kentuckians who are proud of our state and share a sip of what the Commonwealth has often.

Shown on Kyle.

What's up, Ms.. Kerry?

What exactly are you doing?

Well, it's a beautiful day in Kentucky, so don't hang out by the pool for a little bit, you know?

Well, you do realize that as a pool of wastewater.

You know, now that you mentioned, it does look a little muddy.

Yeah.

So you're saying that stuff floating is.

Yeah.

Well, that's fantastic.

Exactly.

Why are we meeting here by this particular pool?

Well, this pool belongs to the Louisville Metropolitan Sewer District, and I'm going to learn about how they take this dirty water and make it clean again.

While you're doing that, I am going to head to the great city of Louisville.

Louisville, and go to a brewery, I believe called against the grain and learn a little bit about some beer flavor profiles.

I'm going to take a paddle while you do that on Floyds Fork and learn a little bit about conservation.

Conservation is important.

So is Prohibition.

Ah, well, not really.

I think they repealed it, but I'm going to head to the Frazier Museum either way.

I'll tell you what.

When you're done, why don't I buy you a beer at Apocalypse Brewery?

You know what?

That sounds like a wonderful thing to you to do.

And because you're going to do that.

I'll get for you.

Enjoy.

Thank you.

And, yeah, I'll catch you at Apocalypse.

Don't swim in the water before.

Well, I'm here with Stacy Huber, and we're at the Louisville Metropolitan Sewer District.

Stacy, why don't you tell me what is going on back here?

Back here we are treating wastewater at the Foy's Fork Water Quality Treatment Center.

How much wastewater do you get?

There's an awful lot of water in there for its work.

We get about 4 million gallons per day.

4 million gallons?

Where does all that water come from?

It comes from homes and businesses around the police work area.

Well, tell me what you're doing back here to treat all that wastewater back here.

We this is an oxidation ditch.

We use oxygen to remove some of the nutrients from the wastewater so it can eventually go out clean.

Wow.

We're now the secondary clarifier is whenever the water leaves, throw over there or the solid lake from up there, they come down here, settle down, and all the clean water goes out over weirs.

Oh, wow.

So it is a lot more clear here.

Yeah.

Now, what do you do with all of the waste that you remove from the water?

The waste that we remove from the water and from the plant we trucked to Moores for men to be made into fertilizer.

Wow.

Yes.

We are the ultimate recycler.

So tell me what happens when the water leaves this part of the plant.

When it leaves here, it goes through a tertiary treatment, which is part filters and then out through the B to the receiving stream.

We just always walk.

Wow.

So it goes right back into the river again.

Wow.

Can I go see that?

You can.

Actually.

There's someone down there waiting for you.

Well, this looks like a beautiful, clear stream, but it's coming out of a pipe.

Right.

So this is the line that leaves the plant affords for at our treatment plant.

Okay.

And so it spreads over these ripples and then hits the stream here at points for.

Well, the water looks.

More clear than the river does.

But in a lot of ways, the water coming out of the plant is cleaner than the water in the creek itself.

So you have that whole treatment process as you saw the water coming into the plans, very dirty.

And then by the time it leaves, it looks like this.

What is a simple thing that everyone can do that can make your job easier?

And the water in Floyds Fork cleaner?

Oh, some simple things to do.

Pick up after your pets don't litter.

You know don't.

If it's about the rain, don't drop a bunch of fertilizer there and lawn chemicals out in your yard.

And so those are some really simple things that you can do that have a big impact on the quality of our water.

And then on the sewer plant side, this don't flush things that aren't supposed to be flush.

So like whites and other items, make sure they end up in the trash and not down the drain.

So this water looks clean enough to drink.

Can I get some and give it to Kyle?

Oh, I don't know if I would do that.

Well, maybe I'll get some.

Let's just not.

Okay, that's fine.

All right, let's go back.

We're going to go get a drink in this place.

I mean, seriously.

Well, unfortunately, College 1921, it's prohibition.

So normally, I'd tell you you're out of luck, but we happen to be in our spirits of the Bluegrass Prohibition and Kentucky exhibit, and we've got a speakeasy.

So how about a straight Kentucky bourbon?

Well, you know, nothing wrong with that, although we may be arrested.

No, no, no, wait, wait.

We can drink it.

They just can't make it right.

That's actually right.

And how you got it?

That's none of my business.

But they're not illegal during prohibition to actually consume it.

Tell me a little about what's going on here with this fantastic exhibit and how that plays a role in our heritage.

Yeah, well, this is this is here at the Frazier History Museum.

We like to consider ourselves where the world meets Kentucky.

We can't meet the state of Kentucky without meeting the story of Kentucky bourbon.

You know, a big history here.

And a lot of it was coming from Kentucky before Prohibition.

And then that happened.

What in the world did folks do when they said, sorry, you can't make any more of this stuff?

There's a reason for it.

Consumption was, you know, off the charts.

You think we drink a lot now?

Like in 1870, Americans were consuming four times what they consume right now.

So that led to the advent of the temperance movement.

And the temperance movement started going to work.

People were basically over consuming.

They were drunk all day.

So it wasn't.

What was it carry a nation that was.

Carrie Nation bigger overseas, right over there and behind us over there, kind of a scary looking lady.

Wasn't writing.

The story.

She would go into different saloons and she would say, good morning, sirs, destroyers of men.

So and she would start bashing the place with a hatchet or an ax.

She did it like 30 different times.

She got arrested every time they let the buzz kill.

Yeah, they actually burned.

She was born here in Kentucky.

She did most of the damage in Kansas, but she was born here in Kentucky.

And so they would arrest her.

They'd say, Don't do it again.

And she'd say, okay, I'm sorry.

And then she'd go back out and go to the next.

A lot of people don't understand that.

At the end of Prohibition, even the temperance movement was lobbying the government to get it repealed, to get it turned over because it didn't work.

There were so many unintended consequences.

But organized crime, as we know, is because of prohibition and Al Capone is featured in here.

He used to spend some time here in Louisville and the Rathskeller, the Seelbach Hotel, and play poker in that room saloon.

It's not real.

To say.

Sorry.

What's the deal?

I mean, why were people pouring their bourbon and their stuff out in the streets?

I mean, couldn't we have done something with.

It to improve it?

It sure would have been nice, but they had to pay taxes on it if it was still in the warehouse when prohibition went into effect.

So that whiskey, which couldn't have been shipped overseas, was often poured into the sewers, perhaps.

All right, we've got this prohibition thing going on.

And then that bar on the heels of prohibition was the Great Depression.

Absolutely.

You're saying maybe there may have been a little connection between.

Well, no question about the economies in America and the stock market.

Think about grain futures.

Think about soy futures.

Think about all the different industries that are connected with farming in the United States at that time in the 1920s.

So all of this is connected.

And and of course, it led to a lot of poverty.

So we came back out.

People get married, but we still have some even today.

Right.

Some things.

Certain memories, the lingering effects.

Yes, You can look in Kentucky at the ratio of counties.

There's dry counties, there's wet counties, and then what we call moist counties, which have a local option about whether or not to allow alcohol sales in their county.

You know, and in some counties like Jefferson County, even on Sundays, there are certain aspects of buying alcohol.

Only after 1 p.m.. And then there are some counties like Franklin, where you can't buy packaged sales even on Sunday.

So these are some of the lingering effects of prohibition.

One of the things that Carrie Nation would be really proud about is the responsible consumption and the alcohol industry.

Today, everything is labeled and everyone is pushed to practice moderation and safe practices.

The bourbon industry is a thriving, incredible economic stimulator for our state today.

But there were more than 300 distillers before Prohibition.

And remember, there were only six that had a license to sell medicinal whiskey during prohibition.

And so a lot of those distillers did not go back into business after the Depression.

So we're really fortunate here that we can look at the history, but also mind that for what's relevant today, what are those lingering effects of prohibition?

So come back and learn it some more about Kentucky's history.

We loved it and I'm going to figure out how to do this more with.

Hi, Steve.

How are you doing?

Welcome to point.

Four.

Well, thank you.

It is certainly a beautiful day to be on the water.

It is.

It just relaxes you and it's the best place to be in Jefferson County.

I think while you have been paddling this water for a while, why don't you tell me what makes it so special?

Well, first of all, the history, John Floyd, that's where it gets its name was a settler here in this area in 1770.

And that time and, you know, this is just a wonderful area.

It's an area that we have a chance to save.

And so we started it about 24 and a half years ago.

And Mary Bingham and I started what's called the Future Fund.

And the purpose of that was to have one creek that we could pretty much save from its entirety.

And it comes in from Oldham County and goes out to Bullitt County and all the way down to the Ohio River, to the Salt River.

And so it's a wonderful creek and it gives us the opportunity and we've worked very hard to put land around it, which protects it, but also gets people out of the area.

And that's what's called the parkways.

And so the huge fence part of the parklands is, is Metro Louisville.

And so we're trying to encourage people to come out and experience the creek and get on it, walk.

It's efficient and it's a wonderful place to be and they just need to come out and see it.

Awesome.

Well, tell me it has probably changed quite a bit since John Floyd was here.

We've tried to maintain the history in the area.

We tried to maintain the agriculture so that we still produce our own farm.

You know, there are tomatoes and our melons for downtown Louisville, for the restaurant.

And so it gives us the opportunity to not just have agriculture, but we have recreation down to the parkway.

You can bike, you can fish, you can hike just whatever you want to do.

Here we are in canoes and kayaks.

So it's a wonderful opportunity.

But again, you know, even though there are a lot of people in this area, there's a lot of the natural beauty that's still here that was here 200 years ago.

Well, I think John Floyd would be proud if he were here today.

I think John Floyd would be pretty happy with our initiative.

But he would say we've got a ways to go yet.

Well, let's do a little bit of paddling.

All right.

Let's go.

To Sam.

We're in a very special place right now above the chaos where the magic happens.

How did Against the Grain come to be.

Around 2010?

My partners and I were brewers in the Louisville brewing community.

We kind of noticed that it was a very grayscale environment, not a lot of excitement, not a lot of unique things happening.

So we decided to bring color to that unique flavors, unique branding quality that's unsurpassed.

You know, we're really excited about what we've done.

We formed our company in a very unconventional manner.

We do things in a very unconventional manner and our beers are very unconventional.

So we really live and die by that against the grain moniker.

So the things you're going to find with us are going to be very much outside of the box.

We don't really brew styles.

We brew flavors.

We have a new facility that's manufacturing where we do a core line of beers that are really great.

And then here at the pub it's all R&D.

So we're doing everything that you can imagine.

I think right now we have on a mean so beer made of honey.

Pretty amazing.

The Kentucky honey.

Yeah, of course.

Well, this is beautiful.

We love being up here.

Else do we need to talk to you to find out any more about this?

I think.

I think you guys should talk to our marketing maven.

Kenny.

Let's go find him.

Sounds good.

What I've been told is that you're this marketing maven, this person who knows all of these things and about what it is to be against the grain.

Sure.

Tell me about it.

Well, really, I prefer to call myself a storyteller.

We're all about sharing our good times with the world, and we tell a ton of stories, whether that be through the labels on our hands to coming into our pub and hearing and interacting with the servers and staff here, we've actually humanized the commodity that we make here.

So there are six styles of beer that we do all the time.

They are smoke hop, wind session, malt and dark, and we've actually taken those styles and turned them into characters.

We go, Yeah.

The idea behind all of these characters is that it's not just the style.

We want someone to be able to pick up the can and oh, that session.

So I know I'm going to like this because it's going to be a light beer and vice versa.

They see hop on the cans.

They don't have to read what the style is.

They're going to know immediately that it's going to be a hobby.

They're talking about all these characters.

Really.

You need to talk to Jerry Nagy, one of the owners, and Jerry.

Knows these people.

Knows him very, very well.

He's got like, here.

Yeah.

All right, Jerry.

So I've been told that you are the man behind the mic here at Against the Right.

I see.

I mean, even now I'm sitting here drinking a beer.

You've got a special cup, You're drinking some brew that we never have.

Yeah, this is a, this is a special brew.

It's called Black Coffee.

It's delicious.

Keeps them going throughout the day.

And it really does complement.

We learned a little bit from some of your colleagues about the magic and the mystique behind this place.

We haven't talked to anybody about what goes in to making this fantastic beverage, and it seems that you've got some experience that.

Tell me about I mean, how long you've been doing it when you get started.

Oh, oh, I got started when I was in high school, actually.

I saw a beer making pit in the field in Scream magazine.

And, you know, as a high school student, you're always looking for some good way to find beer.

And so, you know, why not make it So I ordered it, then turned out I was okay at it.

I was better than average at it and turned in a life of poor choices into a career.

But this was the only other thing I could probably do, was take that, you know, there is a brewing that I've done at home.

I went and got an apprenticeship at a place in Detroit, Michigan, and started working there.

I turned out I really love the job using all the tools that I've learned throughout the years to produce something that's interesting and new all the time.

And that's what's against the grain, is I used all the ten years of experience.

I had eight years of professional, boring parents before we started doing anything right.

This has really been fun.

People have got to check out against the grain and I appreciate you guys.

Okay, No problem.

A winner.

Oh, yeah.

Come on.

Seriously.

Well.

David, we just came off the Ohio River on to very Grass Creek.

Tell me a little bit about this waterway.

Well, first, welcome to Bear Grass Creek.

It's urban paddling, you know, urban paddling in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

And very Grass Creek is the main urban stream here.

And Louisville rains about 67 square miles remain for the Murray, for the middle fork in the South Fork.

And we're on the main stem.

Actually.

This is a reconstructed part of the stream in 1851, they dug a new stream.

This is it right here.

And so the old bear, Grass Creek, used to come out down by Second Street, right by Joe's Crab Shack.

And so Bear, Grass Creek has been manipulated and changed and over the years in many, many different ways.

Yeah, right over here.

You can see to see the old cut off wall.

And so 1851 they started digging this to basically drain downtown Louisville.

Over here on the right side, every piece of land in an urban area has history.

And this was the most heavily developed area of all of Louisville.

More people lived here per square inch than anywhere else in Louisville.

And the 1937 flood came along and wiped it all out.

After World War Two, They came in and this was the city dump for probably 50 years, and we just used the creeks as our sewers.

This is what's called a combined sewer overflow.

And so if you have your pipes fill up with storm water, there's no room for the sewage.

And what happens is it backs up into people's houses and people made the decision to, instead of having your sewers back up into your house, they created Outfalls and it's 137 of them in our community.

You know, in some ways you can look at it and you sort of say, you know, for almost three quarters of a million people, there's not much litter.

And so, you know, I would I'd think it'd be more litter now.

A lot of it gets washed downstream to Paducah or to the Gulf of Mexico.

And so because that's where this water goes now.

All right.

So.

David, what is this structure behind me here?

Well, this is the nasty bare Grass Creek pumping station, which is the beginning of the floodwall for the city of Louisville that protects us from the Ohio River floods.

Oh, I think I was supposed to do an interview here.

I thought somebody was here to interview me.

Tell you what, I'll just do it myself.

I'm Dana Anderson.

I'm the flood protection supervisor for my city here in Louisville, Kentucky.

We're looking at eight flood pumps here.

And in the center section, you'll see our switchgear and motor control center.

And we have capabilities of pumping about 2.5 million gallons a minute for capacity, Louisville and Jefferson County as a whole in the surrounding communities.

We're basically sitting down in a bowl area.

So like back in 1937, the whole city basically flooded and had to recede naturally back into the Ohio River.

So back in the early 1940s, they started the United States Army Corps of Engineers built this 29 mile floodwall, an earthen levy that protects the city now.

So when the river rises up, we can shut off these flood protection systems, close the river off from us, protect the city, and then once recedes, we can open everything back up and move the water back out into the Ohio River.

Right now, the infrastructure is very, extremely old.

We're very undersized in certain areas, and a lot of the combined sewer systems we just can't handle.

Even during minor rains, sometimes a 10th of an inch of rain can actually cause issues.

So you think about all the systems inside the city that we're protecting billions of dollars, all the community people that are here, the infrastructure, the tourism and everything that's there in the city, I mean, it's a great responsibility.

When this was built, it was the largest pumping station in the world.

And then they built on the other end of the flood wall, the second largest pumping station in the world.

Well, for now, the sun is out and now it looks like maybe a solar panel up there.

I Russ Barnett, done with the University of Louisville and I am the director of the Kentucky Institute for the Environment Sustainable Development.

One of the projects here at the park is a water treatment plant on Bare Grass Creek doing research on how can we treat water without using fossil fuels or any chemicals.

What we're doing is mostly using solar power.

We have submerged a pump will pump water up to a storage tank where we're filtering it, letting that settle out in the sediment, and then we're running it through various filters and we're trying to doing research on different kinds of filter.

After it goes through that, we're dumping it into a waterfall that we have constructed, and we're using that waterfall to aerate the water.

So we've actually filtered the water and killed most of the bacteria.

We are able to get about 90% efficiency rate.

Well, now the water quality is improving, right, David?

While the water quality is improving from the past 5000 years, for sure, I would still not drink this water directly.

I would not swim in Bare Grass Creek.

But the water quality is getting better and for the first time in 100 years, making beer out of beer, Grass Creek water.

Well, I think I could really use a beer after this paddle.

Go to Apocalypse grow works and have some beer, grass, blond.

That's what they've named the new beer.

Well, this is incredible.

You have a lot going on in here.

Yeah, a lot of stainless steel.

Yeah, well, there is a lot of water here, and I don't know if you know much about the brewing process, but we would like a gallon of beer.

It takes almost five gallons of water.

Wow.

Just because of the cleaning and the brewing process itself.

So you take the water out of Bear, Grass Creek, and you make beer with it.

Yes.

We have not all our beers that just with one in particular we have.

And that's your beer grass, blond.

Yes.

What we do is when we plan the recipe, we try to make it.

The water itself was the main feature was you can make a lot of beers with a lot of different ingredients and specialty stuff.

But we really wanted the water to stand out.

So it's it's a light, easy drinker.

The hops aren't too high, but you get to taste the malt.

And I think the malt comes through because of the water itself, because of the mineral content.

Wow.

Well, I think we should go get a beer.

I want to try this beer grass, blond.

Oh, absolutely.

Awesome.

It's delicious.

I can't wait to that.

Yeah.

So I see you're making friends and having fun and drinking beer.

That's.

I am.

I got a beer, grass one here.

Like they said I could.

I use a little water.

Really?

Got any water?

I don't care.

Whatever you got, Diane.

Oh, thank you.

I often think.

Of.

No.

Seriously, I appreciate the idea.

Right.

We've been running around like it's crazy.

What's the big deal?

That it's treated sewage water.

It's been treated.

So it's kind of got a lemony flavor.

I think whatever beer they use seriously gave me sewage water to freaking drink right now.

Treated sewage.

Know whatever I know it.

That's enough of this show.

But was we'll see you next time downstream.