Beam, Straight Up

by Fred Noe

  He eventually met up with my mom, Annis, a slight, quiet woman who quickly became his better half. She was a medical technologist, was good at her job, and put in some long hours at the hospital. My mom is tiny and Booker was a grizzly bear, but they lasted close to 50 years. My mom could tell you stories about Booker, keep you up until midnight laughing, but she won’t, so I will.

  I think one of them, a short one, sums up his approach to life. It involves the old Ford Fairlane that he brought me home from the hospital in. He drove that car forever, piled the miles on it, drove it so hard that eventually you could see the road underneath the floor rushing by. Literally wore it out. Then one day, on the way back from the distillery, that car stopped on him like a dying horse. Couldn’t go another mile. So Booker got out, pushed it off into a field, grabbed his lunch pail, and hitchhiked home. That car stayed in that field for years. I used to see it from the road when we drove by in our new car, weeds growing out of the windows, a testament to my childhood.

  Although he became something of a celebrity later on in life, at least in our industry, he was, at heart, a working man. As I’ve already mentioned, he put in long hours at the distillery. There was nothing glamorous about what he did, and he pretty much did everything. Oversaw production, oversaw maintenance of the plants, oversaw the people who worked there. It was a job and it was his life. He never complained, not once.

  As I mentioned before, he was a big man, well over six feet, and he had a low, gravelly voice that you could hear a mile away, like thunder on a prairie rolling your way. When he was mad at you, you knew it, and when you did good, you knew it. He was a Beam, straight up, no bullshit.

  He started at the company in 1950 and put in long hours down there, first at Clermont, then later at the Boston, Kentucky, plant.1 He did just about everything. Built this, fixed that. He could be a tough boss and wasn’t above settling a labor dispute out back behind the dry house, though he didn’t do that very often because most men were afraid of him.

  Life at the distillery was hard and it could take a toll. After a particularly long day, he would come home, grab up a bottle, and pour himself a tall one, then go over to the kitchen sink and run the tap water cold. Then he’d swing that glass back and forth underneath the faucet, fill the rest of the glass with water and drink the whole thing down in three big gulps. (This was before bottled water, mind you.) I knew that the bigger the glass, the longer the day had been.

  When he wasn’t at the distillery, he fished and sometimes hunted. I remember shooting the Model 12 shotgun with him at the distillery when I was about four. Thing knocked me back on my ass, sent me flying. Booker had a big laugh over that. Every so often in the fall, we would head down to the plant to shoot pigeons that lived in the rack houses. They got inside through broken windows and nested up in the rafters, making a mess. So Booker asked some workers to go up there and make some noise to flush them, and when they flew out, Booker would pick them off with the shotgun, one by one, that old gun cracking in the evening, the sound echoing off the nearby hills.

  He wasn’t all outdoorsman. He liked to putter around in the kitchen, driving my mom nuts, while he worked on some concoction, some recipe for something. He fancied himself a cook and he usually made a mess of things. My mom, she was the real cook.

  Booker spent years trying to perfect something called Salt-Risen Bread and Beaten Biscuits. His grandmother used to make them for him when he was a boy, and Booker spent hours trying to recreate the memories and magic. He’d camp out in the kitchen for hours, his face white with flour, sweat on his forehead, as he created. In the end, despite all his efforts and dozens of recipes, and despite the fact that I always thought they tasted pretty good, he would be disappointed in the final product and go off to sulk in the backyard, sit down and stare up at the sky, probably trying to ask his dead grandma for the divine recipe. A few days later though, he’d be back at it. He was determined, a perfectionist with everything that he did.

  But he did have his areas of expertise when it came to food. He had a smokehouse in his backyard, built by Jim Beam, and he cured and smoked hams there. By the time we were living in the Big House, you weren’t supposed to have a smokehouse in Bardstown; it was against the law. But our smokehouse was grandfathered in; it had been built so long ago, it was something of a local landmark and it still is.

  Now, next to bourbon, smoked hams were Booker’s specialty. He’d get the fresh meat, rub them down with salt, then lay them on an incline for a few weeks, until all the natural juices were drained off. Next, he’d hang them up in the smokehouse—a small, brick cylinder building in the backyard—and smoke them for a few days, using green hickory. Then he’d leave the hams alone for a long time, let them hang for two summers, until they were ready to eat. Those hams, when they were good to go, were the talk of Bardstown. When Booker cut them down it was an event; people would line up for a taste. And if you were lucky, you would get one on your doorstep at Christmas.

  He loved those hams so much he would travel with them. He usually had one in the trunk of his car. “Just in case,” he would say. A “just in case” happened once when he was up in Chicago visiting the corporate headquarters. He was having lunch with some Beam executives at a fancy restaurant and ordered the ham. Bad move for him. Worse move for the restaurant. The ham was poor and he did not hide his displeasure.

  “This is inferior,” he said to Jim, the public relations guy who always traveled with Booker. (Jim was personally assigned to Booker since Booker was always on the verge of creating an international incident every time he left Bardstown.) “Go out to the car. I have a ham in the trunk. Go bring it in here.”

  When Jim seemed hesitant—in Chicago you usually don’t bring food into a restaurant—Booker began to get agitated. “Go get the damn ham,” he said, throwing Jim the keys. “It’s underneath my suitcase.”

  When Jim came back a few minutes later holding a three-pound ham in front of him like it was a newborn infant, the manager of the restaurant expressed some concern and intervened.

  “Excuse me, sir, you can’t bring that in here.”

  “Tell him that,” Jim said, nodding at Booker.

  The manager looked at Booker, who was wearing a big cowboy hat, and quickly recognized that he was in the presence of a Higher Ham God. He let Jim proceed and followed him to the table.

  “Go get your cook,” Booker said to the manager. “He needs an education in ham.”

  A moment later, a confused and pretty scared chef was sitting at the table watching as Booker cut him off a hunk of ham with his pocketknife. By now, every eye in the restaurant was watching the proceedings.

  “Eat this,” Booker said, as he handed the hunk to the chef.

  The chef chewed, swallowed. “Pretty good,” he said.

  Booker stared right at him.

  “Delicious. Wonderful,” the chef said.

  “Damn right it’s delicious.” He looked around the restaurant. “Anyone else wants some? Pull up a chair.” Legend has it, he fed half the restaurant.

  In addition to ham, Booker liked fish. He liked to catch it, and he liked to eat it. I fished with him a lot, starting out in the distillery, fishing the small ponds together, then later on branching out to lakes and rivers in Arkansas and Kansas, then Canada, Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico, where he once accidentally caught a 400-pound shark that he had to shoot with a gun. It was quality time together, and next to walking inside the quiet rack houses, fishing was probably where he was most happy and content.

  Later on in life, when traveling got to be a bit of a chore for him, he built himself a pond in our backyard and stocked it with fish. The pond was really a glorified swimming pool, pretty unsightly, and it was stuffed with catfish, bass, and bluegill. When Booker was hungry, he would go out and try to catch something to eat. Despite the fact that there were dozens of fish in there, sometimes Booker didn’t get a nibble, so he would stand there and quietly talk to the fish, encourage them to take the bait, before g
iving up and going back inside to make himself a ham sandwich.

  Booker also liked to party. For a big man, he was a deft dancer and he would take my mother to the Fish & Game Club on Saturday night and cut the rug for hours, a favorite of the ladies. His parties in Bardstown were legendary, especially his Kentucky Derby bash. Half the town would show up, whether they were invited or not. Booker would hire a band and “blow into a jug” along with the music. (He loved blowing into that jug, treated it like it was a Stradivarius.) He also took bets, mixed up some juleps, and cut up some ham and put it on the beaten biscuits. It was a big time.

  We held this annual party with one of the family’s best friends, the Dicks. Donald Dick had been Booker’s best friend and when he passed, his wife, Toogie, spent a lot of time with us, taking vacations, hosting dinners. She was more or less family. Anyway, one year, my mother and Toogie decided to send out invitations to the big party, got them all ready to go. Booker came home from the distillery, picked one up, scrutinized it, shook his head, then handed it back to my mom.

  “So no men are invited to the party?” he asked.

  My mom was confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “No men allowed?”

  “What are you saying?”

  He handed my mom the invitation. “Read what that says.”

  “What?”

  “Read what you wrote. Out loud.” (It’s probably important to remind you here that our last name is pronounced “no.”)

  My mom squinted at the invitation. “‘You are invited to a Noe-Dick Party.’”

  “‘A Noe-Dick Party,’” Toogie innocently repeated.

  Booker looked at them. At first nothing registered with the women, then all of a sudden everything did.

  “Oh my Lord!” said Toogie and my mom.

  “Throw those things out, Annis,” said Booker.

  “I’ll do it right now.”

  “Let’s just call people instead,” Toogie said.

  “That’s a good idea,” my mom said.

  Another memorable party involved the Blue Knights. This one didn’t have any written invitations either.

  The Blue Knights were a club of policemen who rode motorcycles for a hobby. Somehow Booker got hooked up with them, and went over to see them at their annual get-together in Sheperdsville to say hello, have few drinks. (Knowing Booker, he probably thought you can never have enough friends who are policemen.) So, he goes over there on Saturday night, and one thing leads to another and suddenly he’s everyone’s best friend and suddenly he’s inviting everyone over to our house the next day for lunch.

  Fast forward to breakfast the next morning. Booker, buttering up his pancakes, casually mentions to my mom that he invited some people over for lunch.

  “Well, how many?”

  Booker shrugs, reaches for the syrup. “Well, I never got an official count. I’d say three, four hundred.”

  My mom dropped her coffee cup. “Three, four hundred ?”

  “About that,” Booker said chewing. “Like I said, never got an exact count, but I think that’s the ballpark.”

  Sure enough, a few hours later, there were about 300 motorcycles on our front lawn and parked up and down the side streets. The town was overwhelmed.

  We had to run out and buy every piece of meat in Bardstown. Just about cleaned out the two grocery stores. Finally they said they wouldn’t sell us anymore, wouldn’t be fair to the other residents, so we had to go to another town.

  I remember Booker surveying the scene, his backyard full of partying policemen, sipping bourbon, eating beaten biscuits and ham, listening to a local band he had hired. “God damn,” he said, “I bet I’ll never get another speeding ticket as long as I live.”

  When he wasn’t hunting and fishing and dancing and drinking, Booker made bourbon. He was good at it too, a craftsman. Took his work seriously. Under his watch, production increased; he was particularly good at what we called producing yield. He and Cousin Carl were competitive on this subject. Carl didn’t like the fact that Booker, who was younger, could get more whiskey out of a bushel of grain than he could. (How much bourbon a bushel of grain would yield used to be a source of pride back then.) This quest for high yields produced some tension between them, which was only natural—show me one family business that doesn’t have any tension—but they got over it. In the end, all that mattered was making good bourbon.

  After a few years at the big Clermont plant, Booker started up another distillery in nearby Boston, Kentucky. It’s pretty remote out there, not many visitors, off the beaten path. No one came to visit and this suited Booker just fine. Peace and quiet. Time to create. No tourists coming down to walk around like they did at Clermont. No executives from the home office stopping in to chat. This soon became his laboratory, and he began to tinker with some whiskey with good results. In time, he shared those results with friends and family and word spread. Booker was on to something. This was around 1986–87, the Big Eighties, stock market up, business booming. People were enjoying life, looking to spend some money on finer things. Eventually, the head of sales, Mike Donohoe, up in the home office in Deerfield, Illinois, got wind that Booker was on to something and called him to inquire.

  “What are you making down there?” Mike said.

  “Who told you I was making anything?”

  “Booker, what are you drinking down there?”

  “Ain’t drinking nothing. Who’s got time to drink? Working my ass off.”

  “Booker, heard you’re making something special.”

  “God damnit,” Booker said, and the secret was out.

  He had wanted it all for himself: bourbon, uncut, unfiltered, taken from the center cut of the rack house, the fifth floor, where the humidity and temperature combine in perfect proportion to produce the perfect bourbon. Aged six to eight years, and bottled at barrel strength, around 125 proof. Bourbon the way it used to be, the way it was meant to be. Bourbon made in limited amounts. It changed a lot of things, not just at Beam but within the industry. Soon we were selling Booker’s (he liked it so much, he named this special bourbon after himself), and a few years later we were selling Knob Creek, Basil Hayden’s, and Baker’s, named after my cousin. Small Batch Bourbons: higher proof, extra aged. Limited quantities, made in small batches. All top-shelf, back-of-the-bar stuff. He helped create a category—ultra-premium bourbons—and kick-started things, not just with us, but with the entire industry. In short, he helped lead a full-fledged renaissance. Bourbon wasn’t your grandfather’s drink anymore; you didn’t have to chase it with a beer. It was right up there with single-malt scotch, connoisseur worthy. Not cheap, but worth every penny.

  The Small Batch Bourbons, they put Booker on the map. Suddenly he was the talk of the whiskey world. Reporters from the New York Times and Esquire and CBS News and GQ wanted to come down and visit with the man with the strange name, Jim Beam’s grandson. Suddenly consumers wanted to meet this old Kentucky boy; suddenly Booker was flying all over the world, traveling, taking up two seats in coach, then later first class, spreading the word. Booker spoke in front of hundreds of people, leading Small Batch tastings in Australia, Germany, Japan, and Mexico, with people lining up for his autograph. Suddenly Booker was saying what he wanted to say in front of hundreds of people, keeping the PR team scrambling, clarifying, apologizing. Suddenly he wasn’t at the distillery anymore; he was gone, that part of his life done forever.

  Well, almost done forever. Despite his schedule, he kept a close eye on the process, the quality. Made sure nothing slipped while he was off in Paris, wolfing down foie gras. When he was at home, the distillery would send over samples of Booker’s bourbon, and we would sit at the kitchen table and sip the whiskey, trying to decide if it was ready to be bottled or needed more time in the barrel. Many times, I would sit there with him, along with a few trusted friends, like Jerry Dalton, who lived behind us and who would later become our Master Distiller. We would sit, sip, sniff, sip, and then Booker would ask whoever was t
here what they thought. We would all vote, but we knew it didn’t matter, because Booker had the only vote that counted.

  Back on the road, my mom, and sometimes Toogie and Booker’s friend Jack Kelley, who was also his lawyer, traveled with him. Sometimes I tagged along. The Booker Express. The Kentucky Mafia. For a long time, he loved it; Booker was at home being in the center of things, being the ringmaster—step right up—but after 10 years, he eventually grew tired of the travel and the commotion. Enough’s enough. He was over 70 and wanted to fish, wanted to make some more beaten biscuits. In other words, it was time to sit on the front porch, time to pass the baton. By then, I was approaching 50 years old and was kneeling in the on-deck circle, bat in hand, ready for action.

  Also around that time, Booker started to get sick.

  It started with a shortness of breath, which led to one thing and then another, then later a diagnosis of diabetes. This was the beginning of the end of the man I knew. Even Booker wasn’t a match for that. Dialysis three times a week in Louisville, hooked up to a machine for hours at a time. No more hunting, no more fishing. No more dancing, no more parties. No more walking inside the cool, dark rack houses, smelling the sweet whiskey air, like his grandfather did, and his dad before that. Just hooked up and playing out the string. Waiting for whatever came next.

  I took him back and forth to the hospital during those times, and it was during those drives together that we finally made our peace. Ever since he took me home in that Ford Fairlane, Booker had had high hopes for me, high standards, standards I had at times failed to meet, standards I thought that were impossible to meet. (The only answer he ever wanted to hear from me was “Yes, sir.”)

  I had been a wild kid; had long hair, lived to party, stay out all night, didn’t care about a whole lot besides getting to Saturday night. The last year or so, though, as I took over his role as spokesperson and ambassador of the company (more on that later), I could tell he was proud of me. I don’t think he ever thought I could do it, and when I did, I suspect I surprised him. So we were already on a pretty good path when he got sick, but the diabetes brought us even closer together. Those trips back and forth to Louisville, those afternoons waiting for this treatment to end, we did a lot of talking. Closure, I guess that’s what they call it. A lot of fathers and sons don’t ever get it, so I guess we were lucky we did.