Booker, Bill and Mr. Brown

appeared in BEER, The Magazine, Summer 1996
Reprinted by permission of Charles Cowdery
Copyright © 1996, Charles Kendrick Cowdery,
All Rights Reserved.

Booker Noe, Bill Samuels and Owsley Brown are three modern whiskey men whose family roots go back to the very beginning of the Kentucky distilling industry, more than two hundred years. For their ancestors, and thousands of other early Kentucky settlers, whiskey-making was as natural as baking bread or smoking ham. Virtually every family did it, some better than others, and the best are still at it today. Booker Noe, Jim Beam's grandson, is retired from distilling but still active as a spokesperson for the Jim Beam Brands Co. Bill Samuels, Jr. is the president of Marker's Mark Distillery and the son of its founder. Owsley Brown, president of Brown-Forman, is the great-grandson of that company's founder.

Booker Noe

Booker's ancestor, Jacob Beam, came to Kentucky in 1788. He made and sold his first whiskey in 1795. Dozens of Jacob's descendants followed his lead, including a great grandson who became the most famous Beam of all, Jim Beam.

Booker Noe, Jim Beam's grandson, is justifiably proud of his family's heritage. Part of that heritage is the Beam yeast. "We are still using the same strain of yeast that my grandfather picked up here," explains Booker. "It's a spontaneous yeast, where you make a sweet slurry of barley malt, hops, and pick your yeast up naturally out of the air. It is more than 60 years old now. My grandmother told me, 'Jim stunk us out of the house. That yeast smelled up the whole house when he was fooling with it here right after Prohibition.'"

Developing a yeast strain the old-fashioned way takes special skill. "You don't always have success when you pick this yeast up," says Booker. "You set the sweet slurry outside in the summertime or spring and let it naturally pick up yeast from the air. Lots of times, you don't have a success at getting what you are looking for and it sours out. When it ferments, you keep fermenting it from one batch to another. All of a sudden, there it is." The use of wild yeast, as opposed to a pure culture, is one of the things that makes Jim Beam Bourbon unique. "We are practical distillers," says Booker, "not scientific. It's a natural thing."

Booker is also proud of his grandfather's other accomplishments. "My grandfather was 55 years old when Prohibition came in," he says, "and it was repealed when he was 70. He still had enough spunk at 70 years old -- and that's one of the things I marvel at -- at 70 years old he came in here and built the distillery, built his warehouses, set his stills up and got that thing running and ran it for 10 years himself, until he was 80 years old, he and his son, Jeremiah. That is why Jim Beam (the company) came back after Prohibition, because the man had the know-how to do it, where a lot of them faded out during Prohibition. It is a tribute to him, a great thing."

Bill Samuels

Bill Samuels, Jr., president of Maker's Mark, has an equally distinguished family heritage. "Robert Samuels mustered out of the Pennsylvania militia in the spring of 1780," says Bill, "as a distiller for Washington's army. He came to Kentucky with a land grant, a 'corn writ,' which was the first form of homesteading in this country. He set up a small farm and provided distilling services for his neighbors who grew too much grain to feed it all to their cattle."

In 1844, Bill Samuels' great great grandfather, Taylor William Samuels, established the family's first commercial-scale distillery along a new railroad line in tiny Deatsville, Kentucky, near Bardstown. Samuels was a community leader and known for more than his whiskey-making.

"He was a large man," says Bill, "about six-foot-six. In those days that was quite large. He had an older brother, Dr. Reuben Samuels, who married Jesse and Frank James' mother and raised them -- did a wonderful job -- and as a result ended up in somewhat of a caretaker role with Quantrill's army as they came to Kentucky to avoid the demise of the later period of the Civil War. They came directly to Nelson County, where my great great grandfather was High Sheriff. They got what they were looking for, a pardon was worked out on July 25th. It ended up being the final surrender of an armed Confederate band of the American Civil War and it happened at a distillery, our old family distillery. It did not happen at

Appomattox Courthouse as General Lee thought, but back here some 90 days later." Bill's father, Bill Sr., sold the Deatsville property not long after he resumed distilling there after the repeal of Prohibition. For several years thereafter, Bill Sr. stayed away from the whiskey business. Then he purchased a small distillery in Marion County, near the town of Loretto, about 18 miles south of Bardstown. Little had changed at the distillery since it was built in the late 1800s by a Scottish family named Burke. "Dad bought it in 1953," says Bill Jr., "and started the move toward making his style of whiskey and it is ideally suited for that -- great water, small size, isolated -- and when it looked like the company was going to work as a company, he started the restoration of the old 19th century plant, which has been a lot of fun and good therapy."

The plant, now known as the Maker's Mark Distillery, mashes about 200 bushels of grain a day. That was the typical distillery capacity in the late 1800s (the capacity at Deatsville in 1896 was 215 bushels a day), but it is quite modest by today's standards. Maker's Mark is the smallest active distillery in Kentucky yet the whiskey made there, recognized by its distinctive red wax top, is enjoyed throughout the world.

Owsley Brown

In their country distilleries, with tree limbs brushing the windows and gurgling streams flowing outside, it seems appropriate to call Bill Samuels and Booker Noe "Bill" and "Booker." But in Louisville, Kentucky's largest city, in the dark and impeccable wood-paneled board room of Brown-Forman corporate headquarters, even a man as warm and personable as Owsley Brown seems more like "Mr. Brown" than "Owsley."

He is descended from William Brown, who came to Kentucky for the first time in 1782. He and his brother came to visit their third sibling, who was living in Kentucky's first permanent settlement. William liked the place and ten years later he returned for good. There is no evidence that either he or his sons were distillers, but the next generation was to begin a whiskey dynasty unmatched in Kentucky or the world.

George Garvin Brown was born in 1846. In 1870, he started the company that became Brown-Forman. Two of his great grandsons run that company today and there are other family members on the board, and/or in key management positions.

George Garvin Brown was not a distiller. He did not make whiskey, but he changed forever the way it was sold. "In the early days," tells Owsley Brown, "whiskey was sold to bars and restaurants by the barrel and the whiskey salesman would give to each purchaser a bottle with the name of the distillery on it." This made sense in theory, but it was too easy for unscrupulous retailers to water down the product or substitute cheap whiskey for good, which was more than just an annoyance for drinkers. "Doctors in that era prescribed whiskey as medicine and as a tonic," Brown explains. "My great grandfather heard one of these doctors bemoaning the fact that he could not find any reliable, high quality whiskey he could prescribe with confidence."

George Garvin Brown's solution was to sell whiskey only in sealed bottles. "When a customer bought the whiskey he called Old Forester," says Brown, "it had a seal right on it from his own bottling operation, which said that this whiskey is absolutely pure and the finest and highest quality, and you can enjoy it with great confidence knowing that nobody has fiddled with it." Old Forester was the first major whiskey brand sold exclusively in bottles and the trend caught on quickly.

Today, the company over which Owsley Brown presides is a large and diversified multi-national corporation. Whiskey is still important but they also make Lennox China and Hartmann Luggage, and are a major importer of wine and spirits products. Their best-known brands include Jack Daniel's, Early Times, Old Forester, Canadian Mist, Southern Comfort, Bolla, Korbel and Fetzer.

The Future

Booker, Bill and Mr. Brown all see the bourbon industry continuing to expand internationally. "Over the last 20 years it has started to blossom," says Owsley Brown. "Now bourbon is a very important export for Kentucky and is becoming an important export for America. People around the world are discovering the pleasures of a fine drink of bourbon whiskey."

Bill Samuels of Marker's Mark agrees. "The good news," says Bill, "is that the international markets are now recognizing bourbon as the nifty new import in their countries and the word is spreading fast." Bill travels extensively promoting bourbon, as does Booker Noe. Booker is also enthusiastic about the industry's future. "When 2000 comes around, I'm optimistic. You have to be optimistic." He concludes, "everything that goes around comes around. I just believe we're going to be stronger in the year 2000 than we are now, bourbon in general."

Whatever the future holds for the bourbon industry, it is certain that Booker Noe, Bill Samuels and Owsley Brown will be part of it. They and others like them embody a rich and unique tradition. Happily, the proud product of that tradition, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey itself, is alive and well too.