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Making Its Mark: The Rise of Premium Bourbon

“I think in 20 years we’ll say ‘a $5,000 bottle of bourbon’ and no one will blink an eye. There is a shift happening right now … and I think nothing but good can come of it. It’s sure better than the alternative, where you can’t give the stuff away. We’ve seen that before.”

—Harlen Wheatley, Master Distiller at Buffalo Trace Distillery

BY THE 1970s, bourbon producers were facing a big problem. They had 8.5 million barrels aging in warehouses across the state, but their amber spirit had fallen from favor. Young people, having rejected whiskey along with everything else the previous generation had preferred, were drinking lighter distilled spirits such as tequila and vodka along with beer and wine. Having failed to foresee this change when they made their sales predictions years in advance, distillers now had a glut of inventory that no one wanted. And no one seemed to know how to turn things around.

“When I started at Brown-Forman 40 years ago, bourbon wasn’t cool,” says Chris Morris, now Master Distiller at the Louisville-based spirits company. “There were just the everyday brands: our flagship brand, Old Forester, and Early Times; our competitors, Old Grand-Dad, Old Crow, Old Taylor, Old Fitzgerald. There was no activity in terms of excitement, no new brands, no annual Old Forester Birthday Bourbon. Everybody was fighting for the same pie, and the pie was shrinking.”

Chris Morris, Master Distiller at Brown-Forman (Photo courtesy of Brown-Forman)

With too much supply and not enough demand, some producers started cutting prices, but that just moved bourbon to the bottom shelf of the liquor store, and even lower in the public’s estimation. The future looked dark indeed. Morris, who joined Brown-Forman in 1980, refers to this period as “the worst of times.”

Today, instead of gathering dust in package stores, many bottles of bourbon never even make it to the shelves: they are deposited directly into the hands of eager customers. Regulars cruise the bourbon aisle at their favorite shops like sharks, looking for something new, and buying frenzies erupt when a hard-to-get brand like Pappy Van Winkle is released. Bourbon has become a hot collectible.

“All these limited editions are being hoarded by bourbon crazies who have bunkers full of juice,” says Eric Gregory, president of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. “I don’t know what bourbon apocalypse they are waiting for, but I love it!”

So what did distillers do to make bourbon cool again? They raised its profile—and they raised its price.

“Since the ending of Prohibition, as an industry, we’ve probably shot ourselves in the foot 10 times,” Max Shapira, president of Heaven Hill Distilleries, says in Kentucky Bourbon Tales, a project conducted by the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History and the KDA, in which I participated as an interviewer. “Then finally, we started to do some things right. We introduced single-barrels, small batches. Today, there is more innovation than you could ever possibly imagine—unique ages, alcohol proof levels, and mash bills; packaging and labeling; all the elements that go into attracting new consumers.” Even flavored bourbon. “I mean, think about it: if someone in a marketing meeting even as little as five or six years ago had put his hand up and said, ‘I think we need a cherry-flavored bourbon, or a honey-flavored one,’ he would probably have been thrown out of the meeting. But these are the things that have helped to reinvent this segment of the industry.”

Heaven Hill’s Max Shapira (Photo courtesy of Heaven Hill)

And leading the way was a distillery in the middle of nowhere called Maker’s Mark.

The first bottle of Maker’s Mark Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whisky was filled in 1958 at Bill Samuels’s distillery in tiny Loretto, Kentucky. At that point, many bourbon whiskeys were harsh and high proof—something you shot to feel the burn. Bill Samuels had a different idea. “He wanted to make a bourbon that actually tasted good,” says his son, Bill Samuels Jr., chairman emeritus of Maker’s Mark. To do that, he experimented with different grain combinations, eventually using red winter wheat in place of rye, which made his bourbon softer and sweeter.

{ Just A SIP }

As a general rule, whiskey is spelled with an e in the United States and Ireland but without an e in Canada, Scotland, and Japan. Two notable exceptions are Maker’s Mark Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whisky and Old Forester Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whisky.

Bill Junior’s mother, Margie Samuels, collected fine pewter. Each piece bore the mark of its maker, which was a sign of quality—so she suggested they call the new bourbon “Maker’s Mark.” She also designed the bottle and the label, including the font, and proposed that each bottle be sealed with red wax in the manner of expensive cognac. (Whenever Bill Senior objected to one of her suggestions for cost or other reasons, Bill Junior says, Margie would remind him who had graduated first in the class at the University of Louisville, and who had graduated last.)

Maker’s Mark Distillery, in the rolling hills of Marion County, Kentucky, was founded by Margie and Bill Samuels. (Photos courtesy of Beam Suntory)

Maker’s Mark Distillery, in the rolling hills of Marion County, Kentucky, was founded by Margie and Bill Samuels. (Photos courtesy of Beam Suntory)

Maker’s Mark Distillery, in the rolling hills of Marion County, Kentucky, was founded by Margie and Bill Samuels. (Photos courtesy of Beam Suntory)

Maker’s Mark made its first profit in 1967: $1,000. The bourbon was popular in Kentucky but largely unknown outside the state. It would take a rocket scientist to launch it to national acclaim: Bill Samuels Jr., who joined the company in the early 1970s after a brief career in the aerospace industry. When he became president of Maker’s Mark in 1975, he says, his father gave him one directive: “Don’t screw up the whiskey.”

Bill Junior didn’t want to mess with the bourbon; he wanted more people to drink it. His father had always been reluctant to advertise. Bill Junior, on the other hand, has been known to wear a red suit that lights up to promote Maker’s Mark. But in the beginning, he worked with the Doe-Anderson agency in Louisville to develop two low-key approaches that his father could accept: establishing an informal group of “ambassadors,” or Maker’s Mark fans who were willing to talk up the brand and request that their favorite watering holes carry it; and creating a series of ads that read like letters to consumers and included the tagline, “It tastes expensive … and is.” Doe-Anderson would later capitalize on Maker’s Mark’s red-wax seal in a series of clever billboards as the bottles became an industry icon, instantly recognizable on a back bar.

But none of it would have worked, Bill Samuels Jr. explains, if what was inside the bottle hadn’t been good. “If we didn’t have a product that people couldn’t wait to go tell their friends about, then we were dead in the water, because there certainly wasn’t any momentum for bourbon,” he says. “And there was no such thing as ‘premium’ and ‘super-premium’ bourbon; it just didn’t have any of the connoisseurs’ cues… . If Maker’s Mark was to become what we wanted it to become, after Dad took the shackles off a little bit, the reputation of bourbon had to change. And somebody had to be first.”

In 1980, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal named David P. Garino made his way to Loretto. His resulting story, “Maker’s Mark Goes Against the Grain To Make Its Mark: Bourbon Distiller Is a Model of Inefficiency by Choice,” ran on the front page. Suddenly, the distillery couldn’t keep up with the demand for its bourbon.

Blanton’s single-barrel bourbon (Photo courtesy of Buffalo Trace Distillery)

Other distillers took note of the success that Maker’s Mark was having by positioning its bourbon as special and sophisticated, and they followed suit. In 1984, Elmer T. Lee, distillery manager at George T. Stagg Distillery (now Buffalo Trace) in Frankfort, introduced the first bourbon that was mass-marketed as “single-barrel”: Blanton’s. Most bourbon is blended from the contents of many barrels in order to achieve a consistent taste profile. But now and again, distillers come across a single barrel that they think contains exceptional juice. Each bottle of bourbon labeled as single-barrel has been filled from just one of these so-called honey or sugar barrels.

{ Just A SIP }

Buffalo Trace’s Elmer T. Lee Single Barrel Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey was the drink of choice for Boyd Crowder, the antagonist in the Kentucky-set FX series Justified (2010–2015).

To consumers, the designation indicated a higher quality. It didn’t hurt that single-barrel bourbon sounded a lot like the term “single-malt Scotch.” Even though the terms don’t mean the same thing (a single-malt Scotch is one produced in a single distillery), single-malt Scotches were beginning to fetch premium prices in the 1980s. Many more single-barrel bourbons would follow. In 1986, the creator was honored with his own label: Elmer T. Lee Single Barrel Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey.

Near the end of the decade, Booker Noe, Master Distiller at Jim Beam, introduced another innovation: the small-batch bourbon. His Booker’s, bottled at barrel strength with a label written in his own handwriting, was the first of what would become Beam’s Small Batch Bourbon Collection; in 1992, it was joined by Baker’s, Basil Hayden’s, and Knob Creek, all marketed as ultrapremium bourbon whiskeys.

{ Just A SIP }

There is no official definition of, or requirement for, what constitutes a small-batch bourbon. A small batch can be drawn from one barrel or dozens of barrels—it means whatever the bottler wants it to mean.

To market these new high-end products, industry executives decided to send their distillers out to liquor stores and bars along with sales reps, both to educate the public about bourbon and to give the brands a personality.

Elmer T. Lee and Booker Noe went on the road, along with Jimmy Russell, who had become the head distiller at Wild Turkey in the late 1960s. Fred Noe, Booker Noe’s son and the current Beam Master Distiller, refers to the trio as “the elder statesmen” of bourbon. “By being accessible, shaking hands, and telling the stories of the bourbon industry through their eyes, they laid the groundwork for the popularity of bourbon today,” Fred says.

A LIMITED EDITION OF ONE: SINGLE-BARREL SELECTIONS

As the demand for limited-edition bourbon grows, many distilleries are now offering the most limited edition of all: a single barrel that is hand-picked by a liquor store, restaurant, or bar owner and bottled exclusively for that establishment.

Along with two other bourbon writers, Susan Reigler and Michael Veach, I have had the honor and privilege of participating in a number of these selections as a member of the Bourbon Board of Directors for Party Mart, an independently owned store in Louisville.

The procedure at most distilleries is very similar. We arrive at the tasting bar, usually located right in the barrel warehouse, where glasses, water, and crackers or chips have been arranged at each place. Three or four exceptional barrels, preselected by the Master Distiller, lie on their sides, bungs facing up. (Four Roses, which, with two mash bills and five yeast strains, has 10 recipes, pulls one of each.) The distiller, or a brand representative, removes the bung with a bung knocker and a chisel. Then, using a long copper “straw” called a whiskey thief, we take turns drawing bourbon from each barrel and depositing it either directly into the glasses or into a decanter that the distillery officials pour into the glasses.

The tasting room at Four Roses’ warehouse and bottling facility (Photo: Carla Carlton)

We nose and taste each sample, taking notes on each and discussing our reactions. We are looking for superior bourbon, of course, but we are also on the hunt for a sample that has a taste profile that is distinctive in some way. Why would you pay extra for a single barrel of Old Forester that tastes exactly like Old Forester?