Beam, Straight Up

by Fred Noe

  “It’s safer this way,” he said.

  “What do you mean, safer?”

  “It’s too dangerous to have the articles run while you’re still here. Too many people would read them, learn you were here, maybe find out where you were staying.”

  I still didn’t understand. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

  Finally he said, “Kidnappers. They would love to get someone like you.”

  “Why?”

  “Ransom.”

  “Oh.” I thought about that. “They’d be wasting their time with me. Nobody’s going to pay to get me back.”

  Regardless, I was pretty careful for the rest of the day, looking over my shoulder, wondering if I was being followed, checking to see where the exits where. But by the time night came, I was over it and ready to relax. Hell, Russia’s no more dangerous than New York. So the local team and I decided to go to a big nightclub, owned ironically enough by an American who had invited us to stop by. It wasn’t part of our official itinerary, but my group thought it would be polite to stop in and have a quick drink. Apparently the owner was very influential in Moscow.

  When we got to the place, we looked around and agreed it was a nice enough place. It reminded me of a casino in Las Vegas: loud music, disco lights, and beautiful women. I mean eye-popping, model beautiful. (Sandy, don’t you read this next part.)

  I was leaning over the bar, ordering my Beam straight up with water back, when one of the women, maybe the most beautiful in the entire place, came over and tried to engage me in conversation.

  “Where from?” she asked.

  I was hoping she was a kidnapper. “Kentucky,” I said.

  This got no reaction, so I tried again. “United States of America. USA. Ever hear of it?”

  Apparently she had. She shot me a dazzling smile, then said, “You want sex?”

  I didn’t think I had heard her exactly right. Then I thought maybe “sex” meant something else in Russian, like cigar or vodka or cheeseburger, so I said, “No, I just ordered bourbon. Jim Beam, but thank you.”

  “Want sex?”

  The second time clarified her offer. Man, they don’t waste time in Russia, I thought. In Kentucky, you have to buy a girl a few drinks first, maybe dinner, to even have a chance. “No, but thank you for asking,” I said. “Mighty kind of you.”

  She drifted away, but a few minutes later, another woman, equally attractive, approached me. I nodded hello and sipped at my drink.

  “Want sex?” she asked.

  Man, she made the other one seem shy. I sniffed myself. It must be my cologne, I thought.

  “I think I’m okay on that front,” I said, and walked away.

  A little later, someone from my group came over and told me to drink up, we’re going. We weren’t in a bar, he said. Apparently we were in one of the biggest brothels in Moscow. Like I said, different world.

  I made a return trip to Russia, or at least tried to, a few years later. I was a seasoned traveler by then, had been about everywhere, but hadn’t been back to Russia since my first trip. I wasn’t scared this time. Mostly I was tired. I had been on the road for a few weeks, touring Europe, and I was ready to go home.

  I flew in from Warsaw and when I got to the airport in Moscow, I went through customs half asleep. By then, I knew the drill, knew what to do and say. But when I got up to the main desk and handed them my visa, rather than the rubber stamp I was expecting, I got a scowl and a question.

  “Where visa?”

  I pointed to what I had just given him. “Right here.”

  “No visa!” he said.

  “Yes visa,” I said.

  “No visa.” He handed me back what I thought was my visa.

  I shrugged, started to get a little nervous. “Well, let me clear this up.” I pulled out my phone and tried to call Linda Hayes back in Clermont. Linda made all my travel arrangements. If anyone could get me out of this, she could.

  “No phone!” the customs man said. He was very large and reminded me of someone from one of those James Bond movies.

  I almost said, “Yes phone,” but caught myself. Then I swallowed. Some other guards, I noticed, were staring at me. At that point, I missed Bardstown, Kentucky, more than I ever had in my life.

  “I need to make a call,” I said.

  Apparently this was the wrong thing to say. The customs man snapped his finger, and two guards came over and escorted me off.

  I ended up in the far end of the airport in a small room with a naked light bulb hanging from a wire. Name, rank, and serial number, that’s all I’m giving them, I thought. That and maybe the exact number and location of our rack houses.

  The two guards glared at me and I kept nodding my head and smiling, wondering if any members of SEAL Team Six were in the neighborhood. After a while, they asked me a few questions in Russian, and I just nodded my head in American. We were at an impasse. Finally they left, and I saw my chance. I slipped out my phone and was about to try and call Linda again, when the head guard, the one who greeted me at customs, came back in and caught me in the act of apparent espionage. He yelled at me, grabbed my phone, and stormed off.

  A minute later, a woman came in and told me in broken English that I didn’t have a proper visa and that I should have never been allowed off the airplane. She then said I needed to pay a fine.

  “How much?” I was hoping for something in the vicinity of a speeding ticket.

  “Two thousand rubles,” she said.

  I was a little light in the ruble department, so I asked if she took credit cards.

  “No.”

  “How about traveler’s checks? I got a lot of them.”

  “No.”

  “American dollars? I can probably get that somehow.”

  “No.”

  I thought for a while. “How about some bourbon? I’ll set you up for life. You can open your own liquor store when I’m done with you.”

  “No. Rubles!” She left in a huff.

  I was wondering what Siberia was like that time of year, when the two guards came back and took me under the arm, then hustled me out of the room, back outside, and onto the tarmac, where my plane, the one I had just gotten off, was waiting. They pointed to my luggage, handed my phone to the flight attendant and told them not to give it back to me until I was in Poland. Then they curtly nodded goodbye. I got on that plane as fast as I could, ordered a drink, and didn’t relax until snow-covered Moscow was just a dot over my shoulder.

  I haven’t been back to Mother Russia since, but next time I do, I plan on bringing the right visa and 2,000 rubles, just to play it safe.

  Now, I don’t want to give you all the wrong impression of Russia. Overall, despite my initial misgivings, I liked the country and I enjoyed my visit. The people are hardworking, straightforward and couldn’t have been more decent. They’ve had some tough times over there, daily life is still a struggle for some, but they’re working hard to change things, make things better. As soon as I got there, my experience at the airport notwithstanding, I learned that they liked Americans and liked working with us. They also like our whiskey, which shows they are a nation of great taste and style.

  I’ve been to other places: Japan, where I was something of a spectacle (they kept taking pictures of me; I think they thought I was Godzilla or something); Australia and New Zealand, where the party never, ever stopped (they like their good times Down Under, especially Jim Beam & Cola, a premixed cocktail that’s sold in bottles and cans); Hungary, where I had breakfast overlooking the Danube, a pretty river that reminded me of the Ohio; and Dubai, where everything is under construction, cranes as far as you can see.

  An odd thing happened to me in Dubai. I was on my way to a meeting with two women, sales associates for the region, and when I tried to open the door to let them into the hotel, they quickly told me to close it.

  “What?”

  “Please close it as soon as you can. Please!” They nervously looked around.

  I closed the
door.

  “Don’t ever hold a door open for us again,” they said.

  “You say so.”

  Later on they explained that public displays of affection toward women were against the law. I guess holding open a door for a woman came under that heading, so I never did it again. Hell, in certain states back in America, you can’t buy or sell liquor on Sundays, so I guess everyone’s got their own peculiar laws.

  I was even in the Czech Republic; it’s a big importer of our Jim Beam Bourbon. Prague is a beautiful city, unlike any other I had ever been to before. I felt like I had fallen back in time as I strolled the streets. A real, old-world charm to everything. And I loved the food. They eat a lot of pork over there and I’m a big fan of the other white meat. What I remember most about my trip is a little incident I had with the local sales gal. She made the mistake of trying to impress me by drinking bourbon at dinner like it was Gatorade and she had just finished the Boston Marathon. I felt sorry for her; she was new to our whiskey, probably felt obligated to guzzle it in front of me (“It is so very good, Mr. Noe!”), and she paid a big price. I kept telling her to slow down, but once you’re on the slippery slope, you tend to pick up speed going down Bourbon Mountain. I know, I’ve been there a few times. The next morning, she was supposed to pick me up early and spend the day with me, take me around sightseeing, but she never showed. I feared the worst, but late in the afternoon, she called and told me she wasn’t feeling well. “I think I caught something,” she said.

  “I think what you caught is a form of the Bust Head,” I said.

  “Bust What?”

  “It’s an affliction common to new bourbon drinkers. I’ll see you tomorrow, honey. Drink plenty of water and keep the curtains drawn tight. You’ll be as good as new tomorrow.”

  The next day, when we were at a big meeting, the woman’s boss asked how the sightseeing had gone the day before. The woman shot me a pleading look, but I already knew what I was going to say.

  “Great. She was the perfect tour guide.”

  I figured that white lie would make me a friend for life, and I was right. We still stay in touch.

  I’ve made other friends for life. Everywhere I go, no matter the country, people are friendly, warm, and engaging. They’re curious too. They want to learn about our whiskies, our family, the USA. The more countries I visit, the more similarities I see in cultures. No matter where we live, we have a lot in common.

  When I first started traveling, I thought the world was a big place. I admit, I was a little intimidated, overwhelmed maybe (I thought Bowling Green was a big city) but now I see things in a different light. The food may be different, the customs, the clothes, but in the end, people are people.

  Bourbon helps. It’s a common language, everyone understands it, no matter where they’re from. A drink or two can put people at ease, bring them together, open them up. Sometimes I think the whole world is like one big bar, and I’m the world’s bartender. Making friends, keeping them. It’s like being back at Toddy’s, except this time I don’t have any angry wives coming after me.

  BOURBON PRIMER

  A Global Spirit

  While bourbon got its start in the United States (as I’ve said, it’s America’s Native Spirit), it’s enjoyed the world over now. Jim Beam Bourbon is distributed in nearly 100 countries, and we sell millions of cases overseas every year. Those are big numbers, and they’ll most likely continue to grow over time. One thing my world travels have shown and taught me is that people have a taste for our whiskey, can’t seem to get enough of it. I still get a little charge every time I walk into a club or restaurant in some faraway place like Tokyo, or Budapest, or the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa and see our bourbon prominently displayed on the back bar. A little piece of America, a big piece of my family. Sometimes I wonder what the ghosts are thinking. Something along the lines of, “We’ve come a long way from Hardin Creek,” I imagine.

  Listed below are the countries that import the most Jim Beam Bourbon.

  Australia

  New Zealand

  Germany

  United Kingdom

  Hungary

  Canada

  The Czech Republic

  Japan

  CHAPTER 9

  BOURBON AND CHANGE

  A lot of people ask me where the bourbon industry is headed. And to help answer that question, I think it would be smart to take a look at where it has been.

  Now, I touched on some history in the first chapter, but kind of stopped right after Prohibition. I’d like to pick it up from there, if you don’t mind.

  As I said, bourbon took a big hit from Prohibition—it could have been the death penalty for us. But we picked ourselves up and, slowly and surely, put things back together and started producing quality, one-of-a-kind whiskey again. It took some time, about a year and a half, to get things running, but in March 1935, we completed our first run of whiskey and threw a party at the distillery to celebrate.

  When my great-grandfather died, my Uncle Jere was already running things so the transition was smooth and that helped us move forward. Uncle Jere wasn’t really a distiller. Though he obviously knew the process backward and forward, he was more of a promoter and salesman—a marketer, though they didn’t use that word a lot back then. He really got us going again, opened up channels of distribution, marketed the heck out of the brand. Even though we had other bourbon brands like Old Tub and something called Cave Hollow (not sure who did the product naming back then), for all practical purposes, we were a one-trick pony at that time and that pony was Colonel James B. Beam Bourbon, which soon became simply Jim Beam Bourbon. For a long time, that was enough. It was a great product, still is, and America gradually agreed. Soon it was flying off the shelves, recording double-digit growth, and this helped lift the entire bourbon industry. From about 1950 to 1966, sales of the category grew and grew and eventually bourbon became the number one whiskey in the nation.

  During that time, the company also began shipping more and more bourbon overseas. Seems during World War II, American GIs had been passing the bottle around to their English and French counterparts, to name a few. Sharing the American spirit. The seeds had been successfully planted, and those seeds took root. That helped our sales even more and soon we had to expand, add another distillery (hence the plant in Boston, Kentucky, Booker’s private laboratory.)

  We rode the Jim Beam Bourbon horse hard, rode it as long as we could, rode it far and wide. But soon enough that horse got tired and started to get passed up. By the 1970s people were starting to look for other beverage options, and bourbon began losing ground to other spirits. The decline was slow at first, but eventually it picked up steam and soon it was undeniable; after a good 20-year stretch, we were heading in the wrong direction. Bourbon was old fashioned; been there, done that. Even the names of most of the brands reflected the position of the industry: Old Taylor, Old Fitzgerald, Old Charter. Everything about bourbon was old. Especially our customers.

  What exacerbated the situation was what happened to Old Crow. For a time in the early seventies, it was a big brand, bigger than ours. Then something happened to the product. Conflicting stories on what, exactly. One story has it that they deliberately monkeyed with the recipe, watered it down some to make it go further so they could keep up with the demand. Another version has them losing the original recipe, which I admit sounds a little farfetched. (There’s only one copy of the recipe? No one has it memorized?) Anyway, it wasn’t the same bourbon; people noticed, stopped buying it, and when it went south it took a part of the category down with it.1

  By the 1980s beer and wine (and their cousins, wine coolers; remember Bartles & Jaymes?) were riding high, and then along came vodka, and finally scotch and the single malts. Big change in the wind. Suddenly you haven’t made it unless you’re seen holding onto a glass of Scotland’s finest, nosing its peaty aroma, or asking for a martini, shaken not stirred, extra dry, with two olives. Not many people were asking for Beam, straight
up, and the ones who did probably personally knew my great-grandfather.

  So it was time to innovate, get creative, rewrite the book.

  That’s easier said than done, of course. It’s never easy revising the game plan, especially one you’ve been following for about 200 years. But as I’ve mentioned, Booker, my dad, did it. To be fair, he wasn’t the only one in the industry to do it, there were others for sure, but Booker made the biggest splash with his own special bourbon, Booker’s, and in the process created the Small Batch Bourbons.

  As I’ve mentioned, the Small Batch Bourbons—Booker’s, Knob Creek, Basil Hayden’s, and Baker’s—helped kick-start things, let people know that we were still around. They proved to everyone that we could keep up, be relevant. The most important people we proved that to was ourselves. Hey, we can change after all. Look at us, man! We’re good.

  So Small Batch marked an evolutionary milestone for us. Sales were strong. Bourbon was back and growing, and starting in the late nineties, a real renaissance took place.

  But instead of following that success up, you know what we did?

  Hell, not much.

  From the early nineties, when Small Batch was launched, until just a few years ago, there really wasn’t much in the way of innovation in the bourbon industry. As I just said, sales were solid, especially for Knob Creek, and that was good enough. All the different distilleries had their own version of Small Batch, so we were all doing okay, but . . .

  There’s an expression I’ve heard in the accounting industry, “Things go bad before they go bad.” This means that while things might be fine for now, if you look down the road, the numbers are telling you they might not be as fine in a few years. I’m not saying that things were going to go bad in our industry, there’s no way you could predict that, but one thing I do know is that rather than wait for a storm to hit like we did back in the Old Seventies, we did something about it.