Almost every distillery tour follows the same format. First, you’re led by a display of raw materials. Then, the guide takes you around the fermentation tanks and by the still. But the magical part is what comes next. Once the whiskey is collected from the still, it’s put into barrels and stored in cool, shadowy warehouses called rickhouses. The air here smells of the vanilla and oak and grain from the spirit that’s evaporated. And since most rickhouses aren’t even wired for electricity, you almost feel like you’ve stepped back in time. Whatever comes from here will taste like pure wonder.

In reality, the spell was cast long before you stepped foot into these whiskey-scented buildings. Labels, websites, and other bits of marketing work together to paint pictures about things like generations of distillers, specific grain blends, or the surface details of aging. And within those first steps of any tour, a guide spins a narrative made of half myth and half fact, incorporating widely accepted statistics like the percentage of each barrel that evaporates each year. Despite the lack of published evidence to back such information up, these whiskey standards are often repeated as fact, especially by PR reps, bartenders, and enthusiastic consumers.