Beam, Straight Up

by Fred Noe

  Down deep, parties and practical jokes aside, I don’t think Jim Beam really cared if he was all that popular. What he really cared about was the family business. He wanted to grow it, he wanted to take it to a whole new level. And, by all accounts, he succeeded.

  Like a lot of ambitious people, he had a single-minded purpose, a clear vision about how things should and were going to be, and nothing was going to get in his way. Eyes on the prize. Let me do my job, and you do yours. So, what’s for supper?

  By 1899, business was booming and demand was high. To accommodate it, he built new rack houses to store more whiskey, hired more people to do more work. Everything was going along about as well as could be. Things were moving forward.

  Then, just like that, things stopped, stopped cold. The government decided that liquor was the root of all evil (though they later would decide it was the root of a lot of good tax revenue . . .) and declared that the production and sale of alcohol was illegal. Prohibition set in.

  Now, to be fair, the bourbon industry knew Prohibition was coming. It wasn’t like the federal government just sprang it on the country overnight. The temperance movement had been growing for decades, and individual states had already gone dry. But when something called the Volstead Act was passed in 1919, it still caught everyone in our business flat-footed, and the whiskey industry just shut down.

  My great-grandfather did a lot of things to stay afloat during that time, but one thing he didn’t do was go to jail. He sold the plant, took a few barrels home and stored them in his basement for his personal use, then locked up the barrels in the rack houses and decided to try his hand at some other ventures: operating a coal mine and then a rock quarry in Kentucky, and owning citrus groves in Florida. He was a duck out of water, though. Heart wasn’t in it and it showed on his bottom line. Bourbon was in his blood, so he bid his time, waiting for the Repeal. He bought an old distillery, the Murphy Barber in Clermont, Kentucky, about 13 miles west of his old plant, and attached to that rock quarry. He and the family worked that quarry and waited for the storm to pass. The storm lasted a lot longer than he ever imagined, though. Thirteen years. Most distillers thought it would last five at most.

  Now, a lot of people ask me about Prohibition, ask if we were in the bootlegging business, and they make a lot of assumptions when they do. They assume that we went into the business, that we kept making our whiskey on the sly, up in the hills. They romanticize the period. The truth is, I don’t know exactly what took place during that time. It’s not like we kept records on bootlegging or moonshining. I do know that when we shut down in 1920, we had a lot more bourbon in our rack houses than when we opened up some 13 years later. It went somewhere. Probably north, probably east. My cousin Carl Beam, who was a Master Distiller, said that he remembers seeing a line of shiny black cars outside the plant in the evenings with their trunks open. And the next morning, after those trunks were slammed shut and those cars were long gone, there were a few less barrels in our rack houses. Someone’s pocket was getting fat, but it wasn’t ours. Probably some local sheriffs, or some distant cousins, or some forward-thinking former distillery worker who had kept an extra rack house key. Anyway, a lot of that bourbon went, and it probably went to Chicago.

  The Beams hunkered down during that period, did what they had to do to survive. One cousin went off to Mexico to start a distillery; making whiskey was legal there. Another went off to Montana to make “medicinal” bourbon. That’s right, during Prohibition, bourbon suddenly became government-approved medicine, good for what ails you. A handful of distilleries stayed alive by getting permits to sell their whiskey to drugstores that could then turn around and sell it to people who had a prescription from a doctor. (I would love to see one of those prescriptions: Take two tablespoons of bourbon as needed. This medicine might make you drowsy—or really happy.) I may be wrong, but I don’t think anyone made much money doing that, but every dime helped back then, I guess.

  Prohibition hurt all of Kentucky and people did what they could to get by. Moonshining, supposedly named because it was made up in the hills at night when the moon was shining, became common. The ’shiners made what they could with whatever ingredients they had. The result was a whiskey of dubious quality. Some of what they made was flat-out dangerous; you could go blind drinking a bad batch, and more than a few poor souls did. Buyer beware.

  Once it was made, the ’shiners poured it into Mason jars and bootlegged it out, the law not far behind. There was a famous sheriff from that time, “Big Six” Henderson, who was hell-bent on taking Prohibition seriously. He chased a lot of people around, reportedly caught a cousin or two up in the hills, shut down or broke up a lot of stills in the area. There was a fair amount of pistol waving and shotgun shooting during those years. Exciting and dangerous times. Old-timers have told me that Bardstown was a main staging area for bootleggers; they’d load up and make a run for it. There was a road not too far from the Beam house that led out of town. It was nicknamed “Alcohol Avenue,” and apparently it was a main whiskey thoroughfare. Late at night, you could hear engines roaring as the cars headed off to Louisville and other big cities. The risks were high; if they got caught it was jail for sure, but the rewards—cash money in your pocket—were higher, so they drove like hell.

  It’s a well-known fact that NASCAR, the stock car circuit, got its start during Prohibition. Sounds strange, but it’s true. The very first drivers were bootleggers. Those drivers souped up their cars, put powerful engines in them so they could outrun the tax agents, then learned to drive those hilly back roads at high speeds late at night, sometimes throwing cans of oil out their windows to make the road behind them slick. They honed their driving skills, became masters of their car, knew how to take a country road curve at 80 miles per hour, spin around 360 degrees on a dirt path, change a blowout in less than two minutes. Pretty soon those drivers began racing each other on Sunday afternoons for fun; later on they started doing it for money and another industry was born. Legendary NASCAR driver Junior Johnson was a bootlegger, although he wasn’t from Kentucky.

  In addition to bootlegging, there were other crimes in the Bardstown area during that time. Warehouse robberies weren’t that uncommon. Transporters, or “white mule runners,” would break into warehouses that still had barrels in them, siphon off the whiskey, and replace it with water. No one was the wiser. Most times the mule runners weren’t that polite. They’d just pull up in a big truck, overpower the guards, tie them up, and take what they wanted. A month or two later, they’d be back for more.

  Prohibition had an impact, all right. Before the law went into effect, there were 17 large distilleries operating in the Bardstown area. Kept a lot of people employed, a lot of families in groceries. But when they shut down, hard times hit and most of the distilleries went dark for good. They couldn’t wait out the storm. The families that owned them—good families, friends of my family—just walked away.

  We didn’t, though. Somehow, Jim Beam got us through it and when Repeal came on December 5, 1933, he was ready. He was pushing 70 by then, but he still wore that suit and tie, still had a plan, still had the fire in him. Get out of my way, let me do my job. He applied for a reinstatement of his liquor-making license, then spent a year trying to get financing in order. Finally, in 1934 and with the help of his son T. Jeremiah, his brother Park, and his nephew Carl, they rebuilt that old Murphy Barber plant from scratch, bit by bit, renamed it the James B. Beam Distilling Company, and got it up and running in less than 120 days. The first post-Prohibition whiskey was sold about a year later. It was a real family effort, a high point in our history, everyone working together to preserve the legacy, the heritage, and even though they were crunched for time and money, they pulled it off. The Good Times, they were back.

  Well, maybe not all the way back. Prohibition was like death to the bourbon distillers. As soon as the law was lifted, scotch, gin, and Canadian whiskies flooded the market. Remember, they hadn’t stopped making that stuff in Canada and
Scotland, so those distilleries were ready to go, they were chomping at the bit. Meanwhile, we pretty much had to start over: grind up the corn, distill it, and most important, age it. It takes time to age bourbon whiskey, years, and people weren’t about to wait years. Hell, they had waited long enough for a drink. So they turned to scotch, gin, and Canadian and Irish whiskies. We were all but forgotten. Bourbon, hell, what’s that again?

  To make matters worse, a lot of the post-Prohibition bourbon was inferior whiskey. We and the other distillers rushed young whiskey to market or took old whiskey and added neutral spirits to it in an effort to stretch it, make it go further. The result wasn’t high quality and this caused even loyal customers to look elsewhere for a cocktail.

  But we kept on at it. Jim and Uncle Jere, Uncle Park, and Cousin Carl worked hard, worked their asses off, but hard work sometimes isn’t enough. They needed money and thanks to Prohibition, they didn’t have much. So, after I’m sure some thought and some debate and a few late nights, and a few trips to the bank and a few more trips to the accountants, and another trip to the bank, they decided to sell a big chunk of the distillery to a group of investors in Chicago, who gave them a free hand in running things. A few years later, they sold off the rest. My family had lost their independence but had gained the freedom to pursue their life’s work. They got production moving again, brought what was left of our inventory to market, and probably bought other, bankrupt distilleries’ inventory as well. Then they hit the road, promoting it all over the country. Billboards went up on the side of the highways, lifelong relationships with retailers and distributors were forged, ads in magazines taken out. The Beams are good at making whiskey, but we’re also pretty good at selling it. In the 1950s, Colonel James B. Beam (later to be named Jim Beam Bourbon) was a national brand, and things were humming along.

  Jim Beam kept running as fast as he could, but you can’t outrun time and age, and pretty soon he said, “That’s it,” and turned the operation over to Jere. Time to head off to the front porch. In Kentucky, people don’t ride off into the sunset, don’t head out to pasture; they sit on the front porch. And he had one of the best front porches in Kentucky. Wide and sturdy and overlooking North Third Street, Bardstown’s main drag. Jim watched the world go by from that porch for a few years, then on Christmas Eve 1947 he gave my father, Booker, his Winchester Model 12 shotgun—good for hunting quail, he said—and the next morning, Christmas Day, he died in his own home, in his own bed, 83 years old, a life lived.

  I guess you could say things changed after that, and they did and they didn’t. A few years before, and with Jim’s blessing, a nephew, Earl, Park Beam’s son, had gone to work for another distillery, and we no longer owned the business, but we still were in charge, we were still making bourbon whiskey. Uncle Jere and my cousin Carl, and later his sons, Baker and David—good old Kentucky boys you didn’t mess with—did more than just preserve the legacy; they grew the business during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, gave everything they had, put their hearts and backs into it. They lived right there at the distillery, the plant a part of the family, a living and breathing thing. They took care of it, through floods, tornadoes, and lightning strikes, and it took care of them. Sales soared, and then we got bought by American Tobacco, which later became Fortune Brands, which later took us public, so we were independent again. An American company, now a global company selling more than six million cases of Jim Beam Bourbon every year, along with a lot of other bourbons and spirits.

  But I’m getting way ahead of myself. In 1950, my dad, Booker, entered the picture. Big man, big ideas. (More on him later; he deserves his own chapter.) He was close to Uncle Jere, a favorite, had a knack for the business and soon enough was named Master Distiller. Booker worked for more than 50 years at our distilleries (we had two by then, one in Boston, Kentucky, and the flagship in Clermont), increasing production year after year, broadening our portfolio of brands, introducing higher-end bourbons. In short, making sure things got done right and that the foundation was solid for the next generation.

  And that next generation, a seventh generation, slowly but surely came along. I’m referring to me, of course. Lucky Seven. Yours truly.

  BOURBON PRIMER

  Behind Every Good Bourbon There’s A Beam

  There are a lot of Beams in Kentucky. Always have been, probably always will be. We have a reunion every year next to the distillery, organized by my first cousin Jim Beam Noe, who is an engineer at the Clermont Plant. More than 100 people show up and we have a big time. Thumb through the Bardstown phone book and you’ll see a lot more Beams. Our family tree bears out our size, and a little more research will bear out our influence in the bourbon industry. I have a long line of cousins and uncles that have worked not only at our distillery, but for competitors as well. A second cousin, Joseph, helped found Heaven Hill. Another cousin, Jack, founded the Early Times Distillery. And another Beam, Elmo, was a Master Distiller at Maker’s Mark. The list goes on and on, stretching back more than 200 years. While there aren’t a whole lot of direct descendants of Jim Beam, there are a whole lot of cousins. Joe Beam was one of them, for example. He was Jim’s cousin, and he had seven sons and those sons were all distillers, every last one of them. All told, more than 30 descendants of Jacob Beam became distillers, whether for our company or others. It’s a who’s-who in whiskey and kind of flat-out amazing when you think about it.

  Some families have lawyers in them, some have politicians; others have their share of writers, poets, or bankers. My family is full of distillers. Bourbon in our blood, bourbon in our bones.

  Letter Asking for Permission to Operate a Distillery After Repeal

  1Just in case you’re interested, bourbon gets its dark color from sitting inside, or aging, in a new oak barrel that is burned or charred on the inside. When it comes off the still, it’s white as water, and when it comes out of the barrel, it’s brown, having absorbed the color of the caramelized layer of sugar that is created from the charring. That’s some knowledge you can impress your friends with.

  CHAPTER 2

  A KENTUCKY BOYHOOD

  My first recollection of going to the distillery was when I was about seven years old. We lived in Bardstown, of course, about 15 miles from the Clermont plant, right next door to my great-grandfather’s house on North Third Street. Jim Beam was long gone when I came around, but his wife, Mary (the aforementioned Maw Maw Beam), and his daughter, Mimi, lived there, so family was as close as you could get.

  My dad, Booker, was committed to the plant. It was like his other son, my older brother. He spent a lot of time there, gone by 6:00 AM, back at 7:00 PM, dinner, then maybe back to the plant to fix something that broke down, or get up in the middle of the night because the night manager had gone home sick. I could have gotten jealous of the distillery, it took a lot of my dad’s time and I was an only child, but instead I was curious. Wanted to know what was up over there. Wanted to be part of whatever my dad was part of. Wanted to see what the big deal was, see what was taking my father away.

  So, one day, he took me over there. I think it was a Sunday, but I can’t be sure. I was sitting in the back seat of the Ford Fairlane, window down, and we rounded a curve and it came into view. Smoke was coming out of the stack, I saw that first; then over some train tracks, past a guard house, and there we were. It was big and it was quiet and I smelled something sweet in the air and knew mash was cooking somewhere. I closed my eyes tight and sucked in a lungful. So far, so good, I thought.

  My dad took a few minutes to show me around, then told me he’d be right back, there was something he had to check on, and disappeared into the fermenting room. I remember standing there, looking up at the rack houses, full of aging barrels of bourbon—tall, dark, mysterious buildings staring down at me. I felt there might be ghosts up there, my uncles, my great-grandfathers, my cousins, thought they might be whispering. If they were, they were probably saying, “So here’s the new kid. Next in line. Good Lord, we got some work
to do.”

  We didn’t stay long that first time, but we came back again and again, and soon enough Booker took the leash off and let me run free. Kid at Christmas. I got to climb on the trucks, blow the horns, jump up in the trains when they stopped to deliver our grain, eat lunch with the other workers. My favorite thing to do, though, was fish in the hot-water pond. We had a pond that we pumped hot water into after we were done with it, and no one, especially Booker, thought there was any fish in it.

  “God damn, boy, there’s no fish in that hole—too damn hot!

  But I believed otherwise, brought my rod with me every weekend, kept at it and one day, a Saturday, I caught a sunfish, and the next day, a bunch of bluegill. Booker couldn’t understand it. “Let me look at that fish,” he said. He inspected them, sniffed them, looked at me, looked at the fish, tried to figure out which one of us was lying, then walked away, mumbling “God damn” under his breath. After a while, word got out and that pond became a regular fishing hole for workers. Eventually, even Booker threw a line in. I was always proud that I “discovered” that fishing hole and regarded it as my special place. For years, I thought the ghosts in the rack houses were looking after me, keeping it stocked.