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BOURBON
WHISKEY
Our Native Spirit
From Sour Mash to Sweet Adventures
With a Whiskey Professor
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Revised Edition
Bernie Lubbers
Blue River Press
Indianapolis, IN
Bourbon Whiskey © 2011 Bernie Lubbers
pISBN: 978-1-93562-825-5
eISBN: 978-1-93562-888-0
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a database or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover designed by Phil Velikan
Editorial assistance provided by Dorothy Chambers
Packaged by Wish Publishing
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Published by Blue River Press
Distributed by Cardinal Publishers Group
Tom Doherty Company, Inc.
www.cardinalpub.com
To Virgil, David, Steve and the Whiskey Chicks (Sam and Paige—and yes, that means you all, too, Kathleen and Linda)
Whiskey professor Bernie Lubbers and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
BY FRED NOE
PROLOGUE
WHISKEY PROFESSORS ARE BORN AND MADE
CHAPTER 1
HOW I BECAME A WHISKEY PROFESSOR
CHAPTER 2
WHAT MAKES BOURBON, BOURBON?
CHAPTER 3
DISTILLING AND AGING BOURBON
CHAPTER 4
HOW TO READ A LABEL
CHAPTER 5
BOURBON’S PLACE IN AMERICAN HISTORY
CHAPTER 6
VISITING KENTUCKY AND THE DISTILLERIES, AND YOU WILL
CHAPTER 7
HOW TO HOST A BOURBON TASTING AT YOUR HOME
CHAPTER 8
MY FAVORITE BOURBON RECIPES
CHAPTER 9
BOURBON: OUR NATIVE SPIRIT
APPENDIX:
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Foreword
Bernie asked me to write a foreword for his new book, so I figured I should tell ya’ll just who the hell I am. I’m Fred Noe, seventh-generation distiller in the Beam family. My great-grandfather was Jim Beam. He’s the one most people know of since his name is on the bottle, and he’s the one who started our distillery again after Prohibition in 1934. Pretty amazing for a guy to restart a whole distillery at 70 years old. But it was his great-grandfather, Jacob Beam, who started our family legacy by distilling and selling his first barrel of whiskey back in 1795. To think our family has stuck in this business for over 200 years is really amazing. I’m glad they did, because I don’t know what I’d be doing otherwise. It’s literally and figuratively in my blood.
Fred Noe (courtesy of Beam Global Spirits & Wine)
My dad, Booker Noe (of Booker’s Bourbon), taught me all about the business, and I think he was one of the very best. I remember traveling with him on trips where we would promote the small-batch bourbons that Pop created in the early 1990s, actually creating a new category. He taught me not only about distilling, but also how to be a guardian and an ambassador for the brands he created. You see, brands have lives and live on way longer than us human beings. When Dad passed away a few years back, it was just me serving as the ambassador for these brands, and the world was craving more bourbon, more stories, more everything.
I have a son, Freddie, but he needs to get out of college before he can even think about joining the family business. Bourbon is so popular now that we couldn’t wait for him to graduate, so we brought in Bernie Lubbers to help promote Knob Creek and our other bourbons. Now Bernie’s not from a distilling family, but he caught on pretty darn quick. I had heard Bernie’s name and voice on the “Bob & Tom Show” radio program in the morning, so I knew he’d have a leg up, as a lot of this job is being able to talk to just about any type of person around and to communicate a fairly complicated topic like bourbon.
I guess he had a lot of passion for it since his dad and grandfather worked in a brewery in Louisville, so maybe something rubbed off on him, or poured off on him somewhere along the line. Bourbon is something you don’t just learn overnight. It takes years—really it takes a life time—and even though there’s a lot more for us all to learn, I’d say Bernie knows his shit pretty damn good.
Being bourbon ambassadors, we have people who come up to us and tell us that they could do our jobs since they love bourbon. But being an ambassador requires quite a few unique skills. Enjoying bourbon and having bourbon knowledge is a good start, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You’ve got to enjoy traveling. And when I say traveling, I mean flying more than 100,000 miles a year, sometimes to several cities in a week. A typical ambassador is gone at least two to three weeks a month. We do staff trainings and educational tastings at bars and restaurants with our sales people during the day. Then we might have a bourbon dinner or other type of consumer event that night. Then there are the whiskey shows, where thousands of people attend to taste their favorite whiskies and try new ones. Drink bourbon all night, all day and night sometimes. The next morning you might have to wake up early and catch a plane to somewhere to do it all again, or maybe be on a morning radio/TV show and look and act fresh, and be the life of the party all over again wherever they take you afterward. But if you can, it’s a true brotherhood of people, and it’s a truly incredible ride.
I think Bernie’s book brings some of that to life for you, and I think you’ll also learn quite a bit about bourbon, even if you already know a lot about bourbon. Once you finish this book, you may want to come visit us here in Kentucky at our distillery. Come on down and come thirsty and come by and say hey to me and Bernie. If you keep drinking it, I’ll keep making it.
Here’s lookin’ at ya.
Fred Noe
John Hansell (Whisky Advocate Magazine) at Binny’s Beverage Depot during Chicago Whiskey Fest.
Prologue: Whiskey Professors
Are Born AND Made
The first question that people ask after they find out I’m a whiskey professor is, “How did you get that job?” Well, the truth is that the job came to me. I didn’t go after it. I performed stand-up comedy for 20 years, and “whiskey professor” wasn’t on my radar screen. Hell, I didn’t even know it existed. But it’s a career where you use verbal skills and your personality to explain and promote a product, so in many ways, stand-up comedy was a perfect background.
It also may have helped that I grew up in a family in the beer business. My dad worked at a brewery for 45 years, and my grandfather was one of the founders of that brewery. In some ways you could say I grew up “under the influence.”
For example, every summer we closed our house in Louisville and moved up to a “camp” my parents owned on the Ohio River in Utica, Indiana. Utica is like that little town in To Kill a Mockingbird but without a lawyer and with more Boo Radleys. Our “camp” was (and still is) a two-bedroom concrete block house on a slab that my dad built with his friend Evvers Johnson. Nothing luxurious, but it was awesome to us, and best of all we had our own little beach on the river. We would swim, hike, skip rocks, and fish every day. We had a ball. The Fourth of July was the climax of the summer, with fireworks going off all day, and parties, parties, parties.
We knew all of our neighbors along the river – we referred to ourselves as the “river rats.” And river rats are the most friendly and gregarious folk around. Even though Dad
went to work every day, it was like a summer vacation for our parents, too.
Beer was a big part of those summers. On weekends, my parents let us take sips of beer when we fetched them one from the house to the beach or patio overlooking the river. Because I had been exposed to beer and adult beverages as a youth, I never went to or threw crazy high school parties like other kids did when their parents went out of town. The idea of playing quarter bounce or anything like that was silly and ridiculous to my siblings and me. The first time we went to a high school party like that, my buddies and I turned around and went home and played pool and poker, and probably drank Mountain Dew or Coke. We never drank beer just to drink beer. It was a nice little treat, but not something you just drank. It just wasn’t forbidden fruit at my house, so I really could have taken it or left it.
Do you remember your first official beer? I’ll never forget mine. It was July 20, 1969. Something called the lunar module had just landed on the moon with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong tucked inside. The whole world was glued to their televisions. There are times in your life when you watch history in the making and don’t know it. That July night we were watching history, and we knew it. There was no event bigger than this, and I was sharing it with my mom.
My mom’s name was “Champie.” She got that name by winning the freckle face contest at the Kentucky State Fair in 1939. She had a great sense of humor and everyone who met her, loved her. That July night was a night we would spend bonding along with the entire world.
Walter Cronkite was in great form. He was interviewing a never-ending string of scientists and astronauts. He had the coolest plastic models showing just how the lunar module worked; we were mesmerized. After a couple hours of delay after delay, though, my mom turned to me and said, “How long is this gonna take? Would you be a dear and go get me a beer?” And then she added, “It’s not every day a man walks on the moon, so why don’t you get one for yourself, too.” Two historic occasions in one night! I was so excited.
I was 10 years old at the time.
After another hour of watching for Neil Armstrong’s lunar debut she looked at me and said, “If he doesn’t come out and climb down that ladder soon, we’re going to be drunk!”
Neil and Buzz finally did come out somewhere near the end of my one beer. We watched as they skipped and hopped across the lunar surface. I will not forget that night for the rest of my life.
When I tell people that I travel the world teaching bourbon classes, running consumer events, and hosting bourbon tastings, they just can’t believe there’s a job like mine. The fact that there is a job called Whiskey Professor is probably why the terrorists hate us so much. I’m sure glad there is because I am having the time of my life. How many people in the world can say “My life is a paid vacation”?
I can. This is a story about living on a paid vacation, the people I’ve met along the way, and the host of that vacation: bourbon whiskey. So pour yourself a highball and come along for the ride.
My sister Katie, me (holding a silver mint julep cup), Mom, and my brother Lar.
I do get to meet some neat people with this job...
Posing with Celebrity Iron Chef Mike Isabella (photo courtesy of the author)
With owner/mixologist Derek Brown of the Gibson in Washington, D.C. (photo courtesy of the author)
With singer/songwriters Mayer Hawthorne, Daryl Hall and Booker T. Jones during a taping of “Live from Daryl’s House”
(www.livefromdarylshouse.com)
How I Became a Whiskey Professor
“I never drink water; that is the stuff that rusts pipes.”
—W.C. Fields
My name is Bernie Lubbers. I love bourbon, and that’s a good thing since I am a whiskey professor. Now that is one sweet job title! And the answer is yes: I do have a business card that says whiskey professor right on it. It’s a job your counselor doesn’t tell you about when you’re in college. And in many ways, it’s not really a job, it’s a lifestyle. You can’t just stop being The Whiskey Professor. If you see me in an airport anytime soon, which is pretty likely since I travel 100,000+ miles every year promoting bourbon, odds are I was out late the night before sharing my passion and probably a couple drinks. Just this morning as I was coming through the airport security, a gentleman saw my Knob Creek bourbon shirt and asked me for a sample. I rolled up my sleeve and said, “You want a sample? Here you go, lick my arm.”
People ask me just how I got this job and what it takes to be a whiskey professor. Well, besides a strong liver, the first requirement is a deep passion for our country’s “native spirit.” Second, a person must have an unquenchable thirst for studying the history and heritage of bourbon and the whiskey men and women who forged its legacy. And I guess it doesn’t hurt to be born in Kentucky and be part of a distilling family, even though in my case that was brewing beer. But you will soon learn, you’ve got to make beer before you make bourbon!
My grandfather was one of the 13 saloon keepers in Louisville, Kentucky, who started the Falls City Brewing Company in 1905. They produced Falls City, Drummond Bros., and finally Billy Beer. For those of you under 30, that was named for President Jimmy Carter’s famous beer-swilling brother. The brewery couldn’t produce beer during Prohibition, so they manufactured soda pop and sold ice to stay viable. My grandfather was also forced to close down his saloon. So he decided to start selling hardware … and bootleg whiskey. He sold hardware in the front and hard liquor in the back. The back room business was more brisk than the front.
After Prohibition my grandfather moved the bar from the back room to out front and reopened the saloon, and the brewery started brewing Falls City Beer again. When my father graduated from Xavier University in Cincinnati, he went to work at the brewery. He spent his entire career there, starting in the ice house and retiring as Vice President of Purchasing and Labor Relations 45 years later. He would have had 49 years of service at the brewery, but the U.S. Army drafted him in WWII at the age of 32! Because he took a couple law classes at Xavier, he was chosen by the company to be one of the first people in Kentucky and the country, for that matter, to strike deals with the Teamsters and other unions on behalf of the brewery. I’m sure there were some pretty good stories he never shared with us about those times.
GREASING THE GARBAGEMAN
I guess it was my dad who taught me that if you represent a brand or company, you do it in all aspects of your life. When I was six or seven years old, the garbage was picked up at our house every Saturday. My father gave me the job to go out and count how many guys were working on the truck and then bring them each a frosty cold bottle of Falls City Beer … two each if it was going to be really hot. Can you imagine doing that today?
I thought this was an awesome responsibility – after all, I was a little boy, and little boys love garbage trucks. Here’s a giant truck that grown men get to hang off the side of; I mean, how cool is that? And then the men get to take garbage cans and dump them in this big hopper, pull a lever till it smashes the garbage away to the back somewhere and clears the way to dump more in. Fabulous, right? The guys on the truck would ask me every week what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would smile and shout, “I want to be a garbageman!”
So every Saturday morning about 8:00, I’d look out the living room windows eagerly awaiting the arrival of the magical truck. And every Saturday morning several thirsty garbagemen would look out their windshield eagerly awaiting the sight of this magical little boy who dispensed frosty cold bottles of beer.
Needless to say, our family was very popular with our garbagemen. Our neighbors, who didn’t give them beer, never got the same degree of service we did. If they left out old broken swing sets or large appliances, the garbagemen wouldn’t pick them up because they were not suppose to fill up their trucks with those kinds of bulky items, so the neighbors would have to borrow a truck and haul it off to the dump themselves. But at the Lubbers household, the garbagemen would take old jungle gyms, dishwashers … hell, they
probably would have hauled dead bodies away without comment! The old man was pretty smart in a couple of ways on that one. Not only did it save him from borrowing a truck and hauling things down to the city incinerator, I bet when those garbagemen bought beer on their own, they’d pick up a 12-pack of Falls City Beer. I didn’t know it then, but Dad taught me a valuable lesson in walking the walk, and drinking the talk. Anyone you meet in life–from garbagemen to CEOs—is a potential customer, especially when you’re in the beer/liquor business.
My mother was a homemaker and did what most moms did in the ’60s. She raised kids, and she was busy with four of us. Back then you didn’t have 25 versions of Benadryl or other over-the-counter wonders. When we were teething, she would rub bourbon on our gums. When we were sick, it was whiskey with honey and lemon. We either weren’t sick anymore, or we didn’t care. Either way, we slept soundly all through the night. Nowadays they’d probably call child services on her for doing that, but that was standard operating procedure for most moms of that generation. My guess is that it got me used to the taste of bourbon, because I never had to acquire a taste for it or beer.
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