Profile: Bill Samuels

BILL
SAMUELS, Jr. •
67 • President & CEO • Maker’s Mark Distillery
• Loretto, Kentucky

Tall and rangy
Bill Samuels is steeped in family history, local culture,
yarns, jim-crack anti-promotion, all driven by a deep love
of the taste of his family’s 5O-year tradition of making
fine bourbon. Samuels is lovingly supervising a rebuilding
program at his venerable distillery, restoring buildings
on-site and in the village, and converting an ancient rack
house into a contemporary urban lounge and hospitality
center. He wears his learning in many fields lightly, but
uses all in his work: civil engineering (as above),
physicist (best reason why he came home), law (can talk his
way through a briar patch). His funny, candid, homespun,
bone-dry yarning rambled on about family history, neighborly
competitors and his single high-grade product. A stroll
around the historic landmark distillery with Samuels was
punctuated by tour groups, wax dips, aromas of cooked corn
and creek-side spearmint, and the whiff of a buzz about an
unscheduled visit by a black bear!

HISTORY
LESSONS Our
family’s historic T.W. Samuels distillery near Bernheim
Forest was built after Prohibition by my granddad; it closed
with the others when Roosevelt mandated that all US
distilleries convert to making industrial alcohol for the
war effort. (Didn’t matter that our still columns were too
short to make 19O proof alcohol, only tall enough to make
13O to 15O proof whisky.) We threw up our hands, and Dad
signed up for the Navy the next day; he was stationed at
Hingham (MA) Shipyard ’til late ’45. (Mom christened the USS
Ramona with a Champagne bottle.) The distillery business
collapsed, the building was left untouched from 1943 ’til we
started using the rack houses in the ‘9Os. So, the war put
us out of the pedestrian bourbon business. When we came
back, we came back with a new notion – a fresh plan – and
essentially led the charge that ushered in the modern era of
bourbon, and put Kentucky in the forefront of the cocktail
culture. So even if it didn’t seem right at the time, we
thank Mr. Roosevelt for making bourbon today’s hot brown
category!

DIM
BULBS This seven
generation Bourbon dynasty was not always easy truckin’. As
I researched the family I found several generations of
incompetence. They carried my great-grandfather at both
ends: his father when he was young, and his son when he was
old. You could get away with that in the old days. Dad was
the only odd-generation male who was reasonably competent;
the others weren’t criminal, just ineffective. Family
business, other than small retail, is a thing of the past,
unless you get sperm-lucky or bring your daughters in. First
daughters tend to be aggressive; I thought mine had the
knack. But it turns out my son Rob has it. When I was in
graduate school in California, I worked at a test base at
Aerojet General on the Polaris missile project. I made a
large mistake, and the rocket broke loose from the test bay
and went into the executive office building. That was a bad
thing and a big one: it made the Associated Press and I got
fired. At that moment I knew I needed to come back and help
Dad. He didn’t want me, so I went to Vanderbilt Law School
in Nashville.

HAP
HELPS OUT After law
school, I wanted to go practice law and accepted a job at
Bendix Company in South Bend. I only came back because of
Hap, Dad’s friend and actual competitor. Hap was Dan Evans
Mottlow, great-nephew of never-married Jack Daniels and son
of Lem, to whom Jack gave the business. Their distillery
office was right across the street from my law school. On
Friday afternoons, we’d go fish, play gin rummy, visit the
distillery. Hap said, “You owe me for puttin’ up with you
for three years. So I want you to spend one year with your
father’s distillery. I think it’s gonna work. Go back and
poke around for a year, then make your own call.” When Hap
talked me into coming back, Dad was prepared: he had work
for me that assured that nothing would blow up. He tried to
be polite and said: “Tell you what, son. I’ll take care of
the distillery and the money, and you git on up to
Louisville and find us some customers.” Though I have a
varied technical career, hardly any of it is in applied
whisky-making. Working for Dad wasn’t too bad, because he
wasn’t a control freak. He saw himself as a visionary but
what he really was was an optimist. They’re very different
animals. Neither one of us thought that the business would
be anything more than a hobby; he’d lied to me when he told
me it was ‘turning a corner’.

MOM’S
HIGH MARKS My mom
(Margie Mattingly) did some things extremely well, looking
at the business from the outside with a consumer’s and
designer’s eye. She had great taste in decorative arts,
graphics, antique furniture, was a foremost authority on
English pewter and the makers’ marks. She designed our
package exactly 5O years ago from a pewter bottle. From her
collection of 18OOs cognac bottles, she took the wax seal
idea as a visual cue. That’s her Star Hill Farm seal, too.
With her chemistry degree, Mom marched to the basement,
threw out my photo lab, and set up a wax test kitchen. She
used the deep fryer – no more French fries – and came up
with a grabby, tamperproof red-wax dip that we use today,
right on the bottling line. The squared bottle shape was a
big departure, didn’t fit in the bar wells. Dad caved in on
the packaging – Mom was the stronger person – but was
worried to death about getting the wax off. He finally paid
people to insert a little ‘pull me’ tab while the wax was
hot, rather than deal with lawsuits when bartenders went to
the knife. My dad’s distilling goals were to remove the
whisky’s bitterness and control consistency. When Dad was
stuck on which grain combination to use, Mom struck paydirt
again, leading the way by baking loaves of bread with
various grains. The eventual surprise winner for whisky
turned out to be red winter wheat (we use 16%) to go with
the corn (7O%) and barley. Her touch can also be seen in the
village restoration and our first press releases.

MARKET
PLAN: 1967 Post-war
bourbon wudn’t a commercial product, but an expression of
Dad’s self. The hard part was communications ’cause Dad was
adamant about not attacking people. Our global business was
17,OOO cases and 16 of it was in Kentucky. Bacardi and
Smirnoff were on the move, and white wine followed in the
‘7Os. Bourbon was out of the race. A marketing plan was
concocted by Louisville advertising guy Jim Lindsay and me.
Our precepts: spread word of mouth; let product speak to
consumers; make taste experience foremost (a hardheaded
idea!). Our game plan: hover, never attack. Our position:
Jack Daniels plus, aimed at mature tastes. Our success
depended on Jack Daniels’, as we’d get their spinoffs. Dad –
disciplined, honorable and pure – could see our results, but
not scrutinize our questionable, even reprehensible
procedures. I was way more commercial than he, not wanting
to disappoint consumers.

JOURNAL
JUMPSTART What
jump-started us nationally was Dan Govino’s wall street
journal article on my father and the distillery’s historic
status in 198O. Restaurants and watering holes perked up and
started to contact us. We put our heads down and tried to
keep up, and we’re still at it 27 years later. In the late
‘8Os, local competitors began to make their own high-grade
expressions of bourbon. Beam’s launching its brilliant
small-batch collection 2O years ago added gravitas to our
staunch stance for product over growth. After the article,
we had to: One, buy time. We had zee-ro distribution; my
sister took phone calls. Keep buzz going until we had more
to sell (one year back-up in the warehouse); Two, field
requests from restaurants and bars and local ‘distributors’.
Bottle at a time; Three, spend time with media, listening to
every phone call and letter; Four, Crank production! Never:
lower proof below 9O, sell below 6 years, buy whisky, and
Five, leak some product to major cities without
discounting!

BOURBON
BARONS There were
really great mentors in this industry. I got a dose of
working with Jack Martin (of the Heublein family, we say
‘high-bline’) who bought Smirnoff for $14,OOO. Mr. Sam
Bronfman – he bought Seagrams before Prohibition – would
come down to [Kentucky] Derby with bottles of Crown
Royal as house gifts before anyone heard of it. Jim Beam was
amazing, too, so good with kids. We lived next door and I’d
spend after-school with The Colonel. He kept a gigantic box
of Lincoln Logs under his bed on the ground floor (had a
hard time with stairs). He’d say, “Build a fire station.” He
was born during the Civil War, and died when I was 7. Over
at Heaven Hill, Larry Kass and Max Shapiro, the first
Kentuckian to graduate first in his class at Harvard
Business School.

EXPORT
PROMO We’re gonna
send Rob up to Harvard Business School so he can take over
when I go into semi-retirement. We put him in charge of
export less than two years ago – essentially going from
zee-ro to something – and it didn’t take him long to figure
out why: it’s tiring. I’ll do 3 to 4 big trips out of the
country a year; our distiller just got back from Japan,
Germany, London. We do half his travel, Rob does the other
half. We didn’t have any whisky for export ’til lately, and
we kept putting off the marketing. Rob figured we’d best go
where the inquiries came from: Australia, England, Japan,
Germany. But it’s still teensy: grown from 2% to 8% in two
years. Stateside there wudn’t much interest outside Kentucky
’til the ‘8Os. When I started, Kentucky was 95% of our
market; now it’s about 7%.

DON’T
MESS with MAGIC
We’ve had double-digit growth every year since 198O. That’s
low double-digit: since we don’t buy whisky from others,
have only one source of supply and only one product, we have
to anticipate 6 or 7 years. Fortunately Dad had the
foresight to anticipate increased production. We’ve always
been leery of expansion, so what we did six years ago – in a
novel yet simplistic (and expensive) way – is to duplicate
the 18OOs distilling equipment so there’s a mirror image
distillery, doubling our output. It’s not just ‘don’t mess
with success’; it also acknowledges that we don’t know
exactly what’s going on, ’cause when the alcohol is in vapor
form, you’re out of control. You think you’ve got control,
because you can regulate temperature and pressure, but it
dudn’t take much to tweak it. The safest way to up
production, was just redo what we did. We went to the
engineering company that made the old equipment, and they
dug out the plans and built another one. We’re replicating a
third one right now. The pot stills are the same dimensions.
Three little distilleries, side by side, all making one
whisky.

BEAT
the HEAT We lease
the Old Fitzgerald distillery’s rackhouses because you can
open and shut the windows. We maximize summer heat by
opening the lower windows and shutting the upper ones. We
don’t do vertical blending, but do rotate every barrel.
Vertical aging is better than flat, but that makes the
material handling job difficult. We’ve got lifts, trucks and
rickers (three ricks per floor). When I first worked here as
a teenager, they hid the rickers, and told us we’d have to
roll the barrels up an inclined plane to get ’em on the
right level. That’s in summer in 12O degree heat! I guess
they wanted to impress me with the idea of going to
college.

GEOLOGY
RULES Water and
grain are the keys to good whisky, notably corn and water
‘familiar with each other’, that is, coming from the same
geological area. The water table is limestone shelf; shale
layers allow a pathway and the faster the water moves the
more it’s super-saturated with calcium. Another key point:
there’s no ferrous oxide. This shelf goes up into Kentucky,
S. Indiana, and tails off into Tennessee. (The Scotch Irish
immigrants in Virginia and Pennsylvania knew how to make
whisky. Governor Patrick Henry’s first three land-grant
offices were right on this limestone shelf. To get land
free, farmers had to raise grain. Stills were all over the
place back then, but today all the good whisky’s made right
back where it belongs: Kentucky, Tennessee. We’re all
playing by the geology rules now, a good thing for
discriminating consumers.)

TRADITION
REIGNS We do the
same thing with our corn and wheat. We don’t buy from grain
elevators. We buy from farms as we’ve done for 5O years, in
delimited regions with the same soil composition. Attention
to detail gets harder as you get bigger. We tested soil
samples, chose areas, and to this day we purchase our corn
and red winter wheat from the same four farms. As we made
two major expansions this decade, we must get our farmers to
expand, too. The upside: we’ve controlled growth and have
more demand than product; and downside: the distillery’s a
registered national historic landmark, so we can’t make
sweeping changes. Our old grist mill was replaced by a new
one that uses not hammers (too much heat gives the corn beer
a burnt sensation) but rollers, which grind coarser than a
bakery mill.

TRUE YEAST This
is another critical component. Dad kept our yeast alive in a
water refrigerator for ten years when we were out of
business. He wasn’t sure if the family yeast was the right
one, because we’d made mediocre whisky before. The
fraternity of other distillers – Hap Mottlow, Jerry Beam,
The Van Winkels, the Brown-Forman folks – were very helpful
in sharing their yeasts, but eventually we went back to our
own.

MASH
& TUN To a
blend of 7O% corn and 16% (most unusual) red winter wheat
(rye is too bitter) and 14% malted barley, we add 25% of
yesterday’s tun leftovers [sour mash]. A little
malted barley is added last because it cooks fast. We don’t
use a pressure cooker, which overcooks the wheat and barley.
All we take from the mash is the carbohydrates; the rich
wort (or spent beer) goes to hogs and cattle. We use only
American white oak, grown in Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas.
Local coopers are Independent Stave and Bluegrass; take a
tour if you can. We drive our coopers crazy because we don’t
trust their kilns for consistent heat. Our oak staves sit
quarantined in a woodyard to air dry for a year. Other than
a nail, nothing taints a whisky worse than a green barrel
stave. It imparts a musty, pungent aroma.

FOURTH
on MAIN When our
former mayor not quite seduced a major developer to build an
entertainment district in downtown Louisville in 2OO4, he
countered by bringing famous local brands to the table:
Louisville Slugger [bats], Kentucky Derby and us.
Our presence was to help revitalize downtown, though we
caught grief at first from neighborhood bars and
restaurants. It’s turned around now. We only asked, one,
that it be the finest bourbon lounge in the country, not a
saloon (they redesigned it), and two, no Maker’s Mark
paraphernalia; we want to showcase all the
bourbons.

MARKET
PLAN: 2OO7 We’ve
just now begun to tap the international market; my son Rob
has raised our ex-US sales from 2 to 8% since 2OO5. We’re
just seeding the market, but it’s not a tease. This is all
we got! Markets today are: California (85K cases, rising),
Kentucky (flat at 65K), Texas, New York, Florida, Georgia,
Oregon and Washington, Tennessee, Indiana, Virginia. Five
years ago we started to experience an undiminished explosion
of visitors: the market has literally come home. Kentucky
Hospitality is the recent key to rebuilding the industry
locally, and all the distillers are on board. We’re changing
and preserving all at once. We’re upgrading two 188O rack
houses at the distillery. One and a third will stay in use
but two-thirds of the second is being transformed into a
modern urban lounge with fancy bar, a Glassworks sculpture
of a big Maker’s Mark bottle spouting “Kentucky Shampain”,
copper colored pillars, brown maple rafters, room for 1OO,
and a sound system for bands.

BOURBON
TRAIL Internal
growth within the bourbon industry has meant more and
broader taste profiles. Our collective concentration on the
pie has served to make that pie grow. “Bourbon Country”
consists of 7 distilleries owned and operated by members of
the Kentucky Bourbon Association. We make the product, still
talk to each other, and we’re taking our hosting
responsibilities seriously. Seven distilleries are on board,
with more to follow: Jim Beam, Heaven Hill (terrific
Visitors Center!), Makers Mark, WIld Turkey, Four Roses,
Woodford Reserve, and Buffalo Trace. Six county judges and
Jim Woods, President of the Louisville Convention Center,
are involved in creating the Bourbon Trail (like Napa with
no train) starting from Louisville as our Gateway City.
Fleshing out the hospitality fabric are B&B’s in
charming communities like Frankfort and Bardstown. Every
venue’s different. Communities embracing the concept include
counties with no surviving distilleries but charming towns,
Danville and Harrodsberg.

PRODUCT
LINE=1 We’ve never
made a second product; front palate finish is our main goal.
We don’t like big, bold bourbon. We’re about whisky, not
bells and whistles. We could never get comfortable with the
idea that blending over-age and under-age whiskys could
create the right product. Our SKUs are few (1.75L, 1L,
75Oml, 375ml, 2OOml [handful], 5Oml minis, mostly
for Kentucky dry-county clubs) and inside is only Maker’s
Mark.

YELLOW
WAX EVENTS Every
bottle is hand-dipped right on the line by ladies who exert
a little personal English. The wax is red, except for
charity event bottlings, nearly all in Kentucky. Our local
leading lady is Sally Brown (Forman), now 96 and strong as
new rope, who set up W.L. Lyons-Brown Foundation, donated so
far $1OO million for preservation, such as the palisades on
the Kentucky River. Maker’s Mark has raised $5 million for
underprivileged children at U. Louisville School of
Education (25OK), Markey Cancer Center at U. Kentucky,
Thoroughbred Retraining Center.