Carla Harris Carlton - Barrel Strength Bourbon: The Explosive Growth of Americas Whiskey

Barrels of bourbon age in a rickhouse at Heaven Hill in Bardstown, Kentucky. (Photo courtesy of Heaven Hill)

Barrel Strength Bourbon:
The Explosive Growth of Americas Whiskey

COPYRIGHT 2017 by Carla Harris Carlton

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any fashion, print, facsimile, or electronic, or by any method yet to be developed, without express permission of the copyright holder.

For further information, contact the publisher:

CLERISY PRESS

An imprint of AdventureKEEN

2204 First Avenue S., Suite 102

Birmingham, AL 35233

clerisypress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carlton, Carla Harris, 1966 author.

Title: Barrel strength bourbon : the explosive growth of Americas whiskey /

Carla Harris Carlton.

Description: Birmingham, AL : Clerisy Press, [2017]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016041259 | ISBN 978-1-57860-575-0

ISBN 978-1-57860-576-7 (eISBN)

Subjects: LCSH: Bourbon whiskeyKentuckyHistory.

Classification: LCC TP605 .C28 2017 | DDC 663/.52dc23

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2016041259

Distributed by Publishers Group West

Printed in China

First edition, first printing

Editor: Lady Vowell Smith

Project editor: Ritchey Halphen

Cover design: Travis Bryant

Text design: Steve Sullivan

Cartography: Scott McGrew

Proofreader: Susan Roberts McWilliams

Indexer: Ann Weik Cassar/Cassar Technical Services

Cover photos: front, The Len/Shutterstock; back, Brown-Forman Interior photos: as noted on page and as follows: pages 1011, Brown-Forman; pages 2627, Beam Suntory; pages 3031 and pages 5455, Kentucky Distillers Association; pages 8283, Heaven Hill; pages 106107, Kentucky Department of Travel; pages 150151, Carla Carlton; pages 162163, Heaven Hill

For my mother, who has listened to far more of my stories than I will ever write, and my father, who never drank anything stronger than black coffee but was proud of me anyway.

This quote has been widely attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but most fact-checkers now agree that the actual source was writer and editor Peter De Vries (19101993). In any case, its sound advice.

THIS BOOK IS the culmination of years of studyand Im not just referring to research done while sitting at a bar.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the many folks in the Kentucky bourbon industry who let me tag along while they did their work and answered dozens of questions, among them Master Distillers Jim Rutledge, Jimmy and Eddie Russell, Chris Morris, Harlen Wheatley, Fred Noe, Charlie Downs, Parker and Craig Beam, Denny Potter, Wes Henderson, Steve Beam, John Pogue, and Paul Tomaszewski; Makers Marks Bill Samuels Jr. and Rob Samuels; Heaven Hills Larry Kass and Josh Hafer; Sazeracs Amy Preske; and Four Roses Karen Kushner.

The Kentucky Distillers Association (KDA), particularly president Eric Gregory and Adam Johnson, manager of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail program, provided invaluable data and insight. The Kentucky Bourbon Timeline commissioned by the KDA (tinyurl.com/kybourbontimeline) was also a great resource, as was Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage, by my friend Michael Veach.

Some quotes in this book were taken from Kentucky Bourbon Tales, an oral history project produced by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and the KDA, for which I interviewed Four Roses Jim Rutledge and Al Young. For more information, visit nunncenter.org/bourbon.

The KDA also provided photographs for this book, as did a number of individual distilleries (as noted on page) and the Kentucky Department of Travel. (See the copyright page for additional credits.)

Thank you to Jerry Rogers, whose invitation to join the Bourbon Board of Directors at Party Mart has given me many wonderful bourbon-education opportunities.

Thanks also to Stacey Yates for making the introduction that led to this book, and to Tim W. Jackson, senior acquisitions editor at AdventureKEEN, for his patience, his kindness, and his skill in fending off the production team.

Thank you to all of the teachers who honed my use of language, including, but not limited to, Nancy Basham, Pauline Weis, Brenda The Grammar Goddess Martin, and James D. Ausenbaugh.

Thank you to my mother, Joyce J. Harris, who read to me every day when I was little, and to my father, Carl Harris, who demonstrated that anything worth doing is worth doing right. Their love and belief in me taught me to believe in myself. I wish my father had lived to see this book, but his delight that I was writing it is enough.

Finally, thank you to my two bright and beautiful children, Harper and Clay, who inspire me to be a better person (and who shot some of the photos in this book), and to my wonderfully supportive husband, Chad, who is a better person but puts up with me anyway. I love you all more than I can say. Cheers!

Interior of Brown-Formans office on Louisvilles Whiskey Row, circa 1890 (Photo courtesy of Brown-Forman)

ALONG THE OHIO RIVER in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, bourbons future is rising from its past.

At the turn of the 20th century, Brown-Forman warehoused hundreds of barrels of Old Forester bourbon in a three-story brick building at 117 W. Main St., a bustling thoroughfare then known as Whiskey Row for the scores of spirits companies located there. As a strategic shipping hub, Louisville was once the center of the bourbon universe. But when Prohibition was enacted in 1920, most of the distilling companies were shuttered and Brown-Forman, which had been granted one of six licenses in the nation to sell bourbon for medicinal purposes, left downtown for a location several miles south, where it could store the thousands of barrels it acquired during consolidation of other distillers inventories.

In early 2016, the sounds of hammers and power saws echoed inside the building at 117 W. Main and its next-door neighbor at 119, both steadied from the outside by steel rods spread like poker hands. (Youd probably need a little propping up, too, if you were 159 years old.) Unfurled across their facades, a large banner proclaims, OLD FORESTER DISTILLERY: OPENING IN 2017.

More than 80 years after this river citys Whiskey Row faded into obscurity, distillers and civic leaders are betting that the recent global thirst for bourbon will continue. Just a few blocks east of the Old Forester site, Angels Envy has opened its own distillery behind the facade of another 19th centuryera building. As you travel farther west on Main, youll pass the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, a microdistillery and tourist attraction, at 6th Street; the old Fort Nelson Building at 8th Street, which Michters is rehabbing into a boutique distillery; and, at 10th Street, Peerless Distilling a craft distillery that bears the same name and Distilled Spirits Plant number (50) as the distillery that owner Corky Taylors great-grandfather operated in the early 1900s in Henderson, Kentucky.