Booker Noe Distillery
The Booker Noe Distillery , which was Churchill Distillery until 2004 , is a bourbon whiskey distillery owned by the Beam Suntory Corporation in Boston , Kentucky . It is one of two distilleries producing Jim Beam , alongside the Jim Beam Distillery in nearby Clermont , Kentucky . While the distillery in Clermont has a visitor center and tours are organized there, the Booker Noe Distillery is a non-public factory site. The factory, founded in 1953, has been named after the former master distiller Frederick Booker Noe II since 2004 .
Beam Suntory does not state which Jim Beam whiskey is produced in which distillery . The Booker-Noe # distillery focuses primarily on the top-selling product Jim Beam White Label, while most of the other Beam whiskeys come mainly from Clermont.
history
After Jim Beam successfully resumed whiskey distilling after the end of Prohibition , the company was so successful in the market that it wanted to expand production capacities. The family bought 450 acres in Boston, near Clermont, on which the abandoned Churchill Distillery was located. They quickly built warehouses there to mature 60,000 barrels of whiskey. The water for whiskey production came from nearby Wilson Creek. The site was remote and was supposed to allow production without tourists passing by.
In 1954 the Churchill Distillery started operations. Frederick Booker Noe II started working there in 1953 at the age of 23 and was master distiller in this distillery for four decades from 1960. In addition to everyday business, he used the distillery as an experimental field. There, in addition to the Jim Beam White Label, he developed various newer and higher-priced brands of the Beam Group and also introduced the Small Batch Whiskey as the first whiskey distiller . Booker had access to all the barrels in the Boston warehouses and was known for knowing the best barrels and putting together the best whiskeys there for private use and for guests. Several premium brands of the Beam Group developed from these assemblages. When the success of the single malt whiskey in smaller quantities became popular in the 1980s , Beam began experimenting with small batch bottlings - whiskeys in which only whiskey is filled from barrels in which the whiskey matures particularly well. With Booker’s Bourbon, Beam was the first manufacturer to use this label, which is now widely used in the bourbon world.
In 1974 a tornado destroyed a warehouse in Boston. The tornado tore the roof and walls of the warehouse and left the internal structures in a skeletal structure. Whiskey barrels flew through the air and a total of 5,200 barrels of whiskey were destroyed. Nobody was injured in the incident.
Remarks
- ↑ Susan Reigler: Kentucky Bourbon Country: The Essential Travel Guide University Press of Kentucky, 2013 ISBN 0813142709 p.184
- ↑ a b Associated Press: Grandson of Jim Beam honored in ceremony at distillery he ran ( Memento of the original of December 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , September 13, 2004
- ^ A b c F. Paul Pacult: American Still Life: The Jim Beam Story and the Making of the World's # 1 Bourbon John Wiley & Sons, 2011 ISBN 1118045688
