Beam, Straight Up by Fred Noe & Jim Kokoris

Author:Fred Noe & Jim Kokoris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

I worked at the distillery for 28 years, moving around the place, serving in a number of capacities. As Booker wanted, I was learning the family business from the ground up, all aspects. Bottling, labeling, the distillery, the fermenting room, the dump room. My knowledge of the business grew inch by inch, day by day. Looking back on it, I was like a bourbon myself, aging slowly, gaining flavor in the relative quiet of the Clermont plant.

Age and experience are important things in the bourbon industry. You can’t learn everything in one day, or one week, or even a year, especially in a business as old as ours. It takes time to absorb all the different facets and it takes patience to learn the nuances. There is a rhythm to making whiskey, it’s a slow, easy, and methodical process. This isn’t Silicon Valley where things change every day. This isn’t Wall Street with the big ups and downs. This is Bullit County, Clermont, Kentucky; things may change here, but when they do, they change slow.

I was content enough. By then I had met up with a girl who would later become my wife. I had met her driving “the loop” in Bardstown. The loop was a Saturday or summer evening ritual, and you’ve probably seen it in movies about small towns. Bunch of people pile up in a car and drive around. We started out at Burger Queen (that’s not a typo; in Bardstown, we had a Burger Queen; not sure why) and ended up about a mile away at the McDonald’s. Then we’d drive back again. It usually turned into a parade of cars, people honking their horns, the radios up high, seeing what’s going on. Teenagers did it, people in their twenties did it. Bardstown is a little isolated; there aren’t many other towns really close by, Louisville is close to an hour away and Lexington even further, so our entertainment options were limited. It was either drive the loop, or sit on someone’s front porch and watch people drive the loop.

Well, I met Sandy driving the loop, and we started hanging out and then going to ballgames, and later, the local night spot, Boots and Bourbon, and one thing led to another and pretty soon we were married and pretty soon, man, I was a father.

It was all good. Sandy was a Bardstown girl, so she had a basic understanding of the bourbon business, knew what it meant to be a Beam, so there was no major education needed. She knew that bourbon, whiskey making, was going to be my life and she was fine with that. She understood she wasn’t marrying a doctor or a lawyer. I tell you, having a spouse who is on board with your career, someone who gets it, that’s a big help. And Sandy got it from the start and she’s been there the whole time.

So I was all settled down and everything, Hank Williams, Jr. and that life, gone forever, the transgressions of my youth a memory.

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