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.
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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.
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