Competitors? Or Friends? Among Distillers, it’s Often All the Same...

An old photo on the wall of the parlor at The Samuels House may seem a bit unusual; here are a couple of guys in early-1930’s swimwear standing on a beach with another gentleman in a coat and tie. A little odd, perhaps, but the story behind it paints a picture of a unique characteristic among Kentucky distillers: your biggest competitor might just be your best friend.

One of the bathing-suit-attired men is Jim Beam – yes, that Jim Beam, the maker of what is today one of the most popular bourbons in the world. He’s standing alongside the more formally dressed Leslie Samuels, who ran the T.W. Samuels distillery in Deatsville, just down the road from The Samuels House. While Beam and Samuels were competitors, they also were next-door-neighbors in Bardstown and best friends. In fact, the photo was taken at Virginia Beach, where the two families vacationed together nearly every summer. The younger man in the photo is Leslie’s son, Bill, whose best friend, in turn, was Jim Beam’s son, Jeremiah – “Jere” for short.

Fast forward about 20 years and now Bill Samuels is thinking about trying something completely different from his family’s traditional way of making whisky. He had sold the old distillery in Deatsville and bought a modest operation just south of Bardstown in Loretto. He burned the old family recipe (literally) and started working on an entirely new approach: distilling to a specific flavor profile that would take the bitterness out of bourbon.

Bill thought he could use some advice for this groundbreaking project, so he turned to his fellow whisky makers. His best friend, Jere Beam, was happy to help. So was Ed Shapira, another Bardstown neighbor who had created Heaven Hill. The chairman of Jack Daniel’s, Hap Motlow (Jack Daniel’s great nephew) was a close friend, too, as was the co-founder of the Stitzel-Weller distillery, Pappy Van Winkle.

These four good friends – competitors, all – helped Bill in a variety of ways, making trial batches of whisky, and sometimes just providing a sounding board for him to talk through his vision. In the end, Bill’s new idea turned out pretty well: it was Maker’s Mark, which became not only an iconic brand, itself, but kicked off a new category in the spirits industry: premium bourbon.

And the collaboration didn’t stop there. In the late 1960s, Bill’s daughter, Leslie, began giving tours of the Maker’s Mark distillery, something that had never been done in the industry. When people actually started showing up, Leslie and her brother, Bill, Jr., realized that it could be a boon for tourism in Bardstown if other distilleries would join in. So, they convinced three competitors to help create placemats – which they got into every restaurant in town – showing the distilleries in the area that would welcome tourists: Beam, Heaven Hill, Barton 1792, and Maker’s Mark.

Collaborative bourbon tourism was born. Today, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail^Ô is managed by the Kentucky Distillers’ Association and features more than 40 stops, attracting two million visitors annually to the bourbon capital of the world.

The close cooperation between friends and competitors has extended across generations to challenging times, as well. In 1996, a fire at the Heaven Hill distillery turned into a catastrophic inferno as 90,000 barrels of bourbon went up in flames, the burning liquid flowing through the complex like lava, reducing nearly the entire operation to smoldering ash. Bill Samuels, Jr., who by then was running Maker’s Mark (and whose godfather, by the way, was the aforementioned Jim Beam), immediately called his friend Max Shapira (Ed’s son) who was in charge at Heaven Hill, offering to do anything necessary to help minimize the impact on Max’s business. So did the other distillers, and within weeks, competitors were cooking Heaven Hill’s mash bill (their recipe), barreling the distillate, and putting it in their own warehouses until the Shapira family could rebuild their own.

Not something that most competitors would do in any other industry. But it seems to be the norm among whisky makers in Kentucky.

A number of items on display at The Samuels House celebrate these close connections throughout the industry. There’s the only known signature of Elijah Craig –considered the father of bourbon as one of the first whisky makers in Kentucky (along with one of Daniel Boone’s brothers, whose 5x-great granddaughter, Nancy, is married to Bill Samuels, Jr.). There’s also a photograph of Pappy Van Winkle at Louisville’s famous Pendennis Club, where the Old Fashioned cocktail was created. There are photos of Hap Motlow and Jere Beam, and a bottle of Yellowstone bourbon from the brand’s first post-Prohibition bottling run in 1935.

Competitors, or friends? Among Kentucky distillers, the answer typically has been, “Yes!”