All in the (Whiskey) Family

If there’s one thing to learn from the Roy family in the hit television series “Succession,” it’s that blood relatives and business often don’t mix. But that adage doesn’t ring true in American whiskey, where many storied families have embraced distilling with enduring success. The oldest distilling families have been at it for centuries— most notably the Beams, where the tradition stretches back eight generations to 1795, when Jacob Beam sold his first barrel of corn whiskey. Closely intertwined with that story is today’s Noe family, who are direct descendants.

Other families might not count eight generations back, but are nonetheless ingrained into the story of American distilling. Think the Van Winkles of Pappy fame, who are now into the fourth generation of whiskey makers, or the Hendersons with three generations of distillers, who created Angels Envy and recently launched True Story whiskey. Willett, too, has long remained a family affair, with a fifth generation currently at the helm by way of master distiller Drew Kulsveen and his sister, Britt Kulsveen, who is the distillery’s president and chief whiskey officer. But the list also includes Jack Daniel master distiller Chris Fletcher, whose grandfather served as master distiller from 1966 to 1989, and Uncle Nearest master blender Victoria Eady Butler, whose great-great-grandfather Nearest Green is credited as the first-known Black master distiller.

And then there are families who, while not necessarily distilling themselves, have remained at the fore of the American whiskey landscape. This includes the Shapiras of Heaven Hill, who operate the largest family-owned distillery in the U.S. They’ve been making whiskey since 1935, and now have a third generation running the company. The Brown family is another American whiskey dynasty; George Garvin Brown founded Brown-Forman in 1870, and today, fifth-generation family member Campbell P. Brown oversees its portfolio of spirits that includes Jack Daniel’s, Woodford Reserve, and Old Forester. In Louisville, Corky Taylor and his son, Carson—representative of the fourth and fifth generations in the business—revived their family’s distilling legacy back in 2013, when they set up shop at the far end of Whiskey Row under the Kentucky Peerless banner. We spoke to some of these distilling families about their legacies and what makes it all work.

The Beams

In Kentucky whiskey, there’s no name as prolific as Beam. In the 200-plus years since Jacob Beam sold his first jugs of whiskey, there has always been a Beam running a still. At least 30 of Jacob’s descendants became distillers (with many more involved in other aspects of the business), and today the family is on its eighth generation of whiskey makers. Among the modern-day Beams are Stephen and Paul Beam, brothers and co-owners of Limestone Branch Distillery. Stephen, who serves as Limestone Branch’s master distiller, always knew that he wanted to end up in whiskey, thanks in large part to his mother—herself a descendant of J.W. Dant—who would take him around to old distillery sites when he was a child. Plenty of his cousins, aunts, and uncles also worked at distilleries, lending him additional inspiration, but by the time he came of age in the 1980s, Kentucky whiskey was in free fall, so he put aside his distilling ambitions. It wasn’t until 2010 that he finally took the leap into whiskey, convincing his brother to come along with him; the two broke ground on Limestone Branch in 2011, and today they’re making whiskey with the same family yeast strain and recipe that their grandfather Guy S. Beam used for Yellowstone bourbon.

There are a couple other Beam surnames in the business, including Craig Beam, son of storied master distiller Parker Beam, and Ben Beam, warehouse manager at Michter’s. Craig—who is currently master distiller at Jackson Purchase Distillery in Hickman, Kentucky— worked alongside his father at Heaven Hill for decades, working his way up from warehouse cleaner to truck driver to co-master distiller. Parker passed away in 2017, ending a 40-plus year career at the distillery, and Craig left shortly after, ending an eight-decade run of Beam stewardship of Heaven Hill’s whiskeys.

These days distilling at Jim Beam is overseen by two master distillers: father and son team Fred and Freddie Noe, who represent the seventh and eighth generations of their family. In 1933, James Beauregard Beam— known as Jim Beam—founded the Clermont, Kentucky distillery where the Noes work today, and his daughter Margaret married into the Noe family. Margaret’s son, Booker Noe II, became Beam’s sixth master distiller in 1965, a position he would hold for nearly 40 years. Booker, of course, was integral in changing the course of bourbon not only in the U.S., but worldwide. But it wasn’t always a given that his son Fred would follow in his footsteps.

“Dad tried to push me away from [the distillery], because the bourbon industry was not so strong in the ‘70s when I was ending high school,” says Fred. “He made comments like, ‘Don’t even bank on this being here’; we would just shut down one of our distilleries, because by the late ‘70s demand for bourbon just wasn’t there.” Of course, the slump wouldn’t last forever, and by the time Fred finished college—a Booker prerequisite—he had decided to work at Clermont. It was very different for Freddie, whose path to distilling was more straightforward—at 18, he knew without a shadow of doubt that he wanted to try his hand at distilling. After doing an internship at age 20, he was hooked for life.

While Fred and Freddie honor the legacy of Jim Beam and Booker in their work, they also look to the future. “The whiskey that’s in the bottle today isn’t exactly what was in the bottle way back when, even if you’re following the process to a T, but we stick to the fact that we’ve got reference points to work with, from our family that came before and the philosophies they passed down,” Freddie explains. “I never try to lose sight of that, and we’re always trying to honor that.”

Freddie points to Beam’s single barrel whiskeys as evidence of how past generations influence today’s decision-making. “One of my favorite examples is my dad, and when he’d talk about single barrels with my granddad, Booker would throw a fit about single barrels because of the inconsistency,” he laughs. “But now everybody loves them so, so much. We don’t do a Booker’s single barrel, but knowing my granddad, I bet you in today’s world he would do that. That said, because of what was important to him when he was with us, we won’t do a large-scale single barrel release for Booker’s, but we do it with our other brands.”

As far as family gatherings go, the nuclear Noe family is small, limited to Fred and his wife, and Freddie and his wife and their two children. The two families live next door to each other, and while Fred and Freddie could talk about whiskey at home, in the car, and pretty much everywhere, they keep the distilling chatter to a minimum if the kids are around. “For me, keeping our work-life balance in check comes down to the kids,” he says. “If they’re around and they’re speaking to us, we’ll clam up about whatever we’re talking about to listen to whatever they have to say. When you come into this business as the eighth-generation, it’s not really a job, but a 24/7 lifestyle, so you have to take those moments and the chances to break away when you can.”

THE BEAM FAMILY REUNION

The many branches of Beams, distillers or not, connect at a family reunion that’s been an annual event for over 50 years. For the past 20 years, the reunion has been organized by Harry Beam and his wife Celeste; the pair took on organizational duties as an homage to Harry’s father, Wallace Victor Beam, who was passionate about the reunion. Though Harry is not in the whiskey industry, his great-grandfather Joseph L. Beam was among the original investors in Heaven Hill, and its first master distiller; Harry’s grandfather, Henry “Harry” Milburn Beam was Heaven Hill’s second master distiller.

Around 200 to 300 Beams attend the reunion, held in Kentucky each year, and while there are fewer Beams in the industry now than in decades past, whiskey is still very much around. “The family members who are still in the bourbon industry will bring a pour of what’s new,” he says. “On the flip side, there’s often a long-lost bottle brought to the reunion to celebrate with, and old brands are brought to show the new generation just how many labels the family has been associated with [over the years]. All of our family history is woven through the bourbons the family has produced since Jacob Beam’s first sale of bourbon in 1795.”

The Russells

For 70 years, Jimmy Russell has been a fixture at Wild Turkey. While he’s no longer distilling day in and day out, his son Eddie— who’s been with the distillery for 43 years himself—says most days, it’s a safe bet you’ll find him somewhere among the stills or at the visitor center. “Jimmy’s starting his 71st year at the distillery at the end of this year, and he still wants to go to work; he’ll work seven days a week if he can,” he says. Bruce Russell, Eddie’s son and associate blender at the distillery, fondly calls out Jimmy’s “Russell Shuffle”—“He’s almost 90, but he’ll shuffle around the distillery and talk to people, tell jokes, tell them he caught them not working, that type of stuff.”

Eddie and Bruce both had a similar entry into the family business: Neither was certain that joining Wild Turkey was in the cards, but summer jobs following school sealed the deal for both (though Bruce would take several years to fully land there, whereas Eddie took several weeks). That said, both also acknowledge that Eddie had a rougher go of it, as he was the only one to work directly under Jimmy’s tutelage. “I think for Jimmy, I was competition, as he knew I was going to replace him one day, so working with him was difficult,” says Eddie. “It’s hard to follow in the footsteps of the master distiller. Eventually I wanted to expand our portfolio and bring out different brands, and Jimmy was completely happy with 101 and Rare Breed. We butted heads a lot, but once we left the distillery at the end of the day, there were no arguments— work was just work, and at home, family’s family.” Bruce credits his grandmother Joretta with a lot of peacekeeping as well. “If you asked the whole family who’s in charge, it’s my granny, so even if we aren’t getting along at work, we have to get along at home because granny makes us.”

It took some convincing, but Eddie finally introduced a new whiskey in 1998 with his father’s blessing: Russell’s Reserve bourbon, which celebrated Jimmy’s 45th anniversary at the distillery. Getting one new whiskey through the door didn’t mean subsequent new releases would come easily, though. “When I wanted to do more rye, I started the Master’s Keep series, where I was doing things that our industry just wasn’t used to, and Dad and I butted heads on that,” Eddie explains. “Once he realized I was never going to do anything to change 101 or Rare Breed—the whiskeys he’d built this brand on—he was okay with it, but still, to this day, when he sits in the visitor center and signs bottles, if someone brings him a bottle of Master’s Keep he’ll go, ‘Oh no, that’s Eddie’s.’”

For Bruce’s part, joining Wild Turkey (first on the marketing side, and now as a blender) offered an opportunity to really get to know his family. He likes to tell a story about the summer he worked at the distillery as a tour guide, back before the bourbon boom had really taken hold and the biggest tours might encompass all of 10 people. One day, after two or three months on the job, Eddie pulled him aside and told him he wanted to take him around the distillery. “He basically told me I didn’t know anything, and he wanted to teach me not just what we do, but why we do it, because I only really knew the hard-and-fast stats,” he says.

The two spent the rest of the day at the distillery, with Eddie explaining the ins and outs of Wild Turkey to his son. “He’d say, ‘We do things this way because of this,’ or ‘This drives our flavor development,’ or ‘Jimmy learned it this way so we continue to do it this way,’” explains Bruce. “And it was really neat to understand not just the distillery, but that my Dad was super passionate about what he did. Most of my childhood, Dad would tell me ‘We do it that way because I say so,’ or ‘because it tastes good;’ you never got any real good answer. I realized working at Wild Turkey was a chance for me to get to know Dad, and then I fell in love with the business as well.”

In addition to the three Russells, Jimmy’s granddaughter Joann Street also works for the distillery as a brand ambassador. While there are a few great-grandkids in the picture, they’re far too young to be up for fourth-generation consideration, though Eddie sees the Jimmy Russell spirit in his 3 year old granddaughter. “I’ve always seen it in Bruce—he has that Jimmy Russell charisma, where he knows how to talk to people and they come to him—and I see it now in my granddaughter, so maybe 20 years down the road she might think, ‘I want to get into this and see what my granddad, great-granddad, and uncle are doing.’”

“Even if we aren’t getting along at work, we have to get along at home because granny makes us.”—Bruce Russell

The Samuels

When Bill Samuels Sr. and his wife Margie founded Maker’s Mark in 1953, Bill Sr. was far from the first Samuels to distill whiskey. His great-great-great-grandfather distilled Pennsylvania rye in the late 1700s, while his father and grandfather ran the T.W. Samuels Distillery in Deatsville, about 10 minutes from Bardstown, which Bill Sr. ultimately ran until its closure in 1942.

T.W. Samuels whiskey was not as approachable in flavor profile as Bill Sr. preferred, so after his father passed and World War II was over, he set out to create a new recipe, ultimately landing on a mashbill that eschewed rye in favor of wheat. While the whiskey was entirely Bill Sr.’s creation, much of Maker’s Mark’s look and feel, including the name, came from Margie, as did the concept of urban whiskey tourism; under her design, Maker’s was the first Kentucky distillery to open its doors to visitors, and aimed to make them feel right at home.

While Bill Sr. and Margie toiled away to make their distillery a viable business, their son, Bill Jr., considered life outside the company. A trained aerospace engineer, Bill Jr. also received a law degree from Vanderbilt. While studying there, his mentor, Hap Motlow—part of the family that owned and managed Jack Daniel prior to its sale to Brown-Forman—encouraged him to take up the reins at Maker’s, or at the very least try his hand at the family business. As it turns out, he didn’t need too much convincing, and Bill Jr. assumed leadership by the mid-1970s. While the company long ago took on a larger owner and today is owned by Suntory Global Spirits, the Samuels family is still very much involved. Bill Jr’s son Rob is captaining the Maker’s ship, though his father remains an integral part of the story. “My dad is technically retired, but I talk to him every single day,” Rob says. “I love bouncing ideas off of him. We’re very close, and he’s been a tremendous role model for me.”

If Bill Jr.’s biggest contribution to the distillery came in the form of Maker’s 46—which, Rob points out, consisted of creating a whiskey that matched his father’s tasting notes of “bigger, bolder, and yummy”—Rob’s is more focused on raw materials. “Right now, Star Hill Farm [the 1,100-acre property Maker’s sits on] is leading research into regenerative farming in this area,” he says. He points to the distillery’s collaborations with some of the foremost experts in wheat breeding as it tries to push into modern wheat varieties that have a competitive yield but also more flavor intensity. Maker’s also counts itself as the only single location in the U.S. where every type of American white oak grows, a testament, Rob says, to the importance of Quercus alba to the longevity of the industry. “It’s all in the name of thinking differently about whiskey, of thinking about it as agriculture,” he explains.

Aside from overseeing everything that goes on at Maker’s, Rob is an avid whiskey memorabilia collector, picking up historical tidbits that anchor the family’s history in place. Hanging at the distillery is a copy of a tax bill dating back to 1779, levied on a 60-gallon still owned by Robert Samuels Sr., and in his office, Rob has copies of his father’s and grandfather’s tasting notes, which will eventually be framed. He also has a letter from his grandfather to his father, scolding him for including his signature on an advertisement he didn’t care for; that one will stay at his desk.

“My dad is technically retired, but I talk to him every single day. We’re very close, and he’s been a tremendous role model for me.”—Rob Samuels

The Calls

In 1791, Samuel Call was living on a farm in what is now Kentucky’s Bourbon County when he decided to add two stills and a dozen fermenters to his land, fulfilling a goal of making whiskey. Suffice to say he succeeded, as seven generations later, there are still Calls distilling drams.

When seventh-generation master distiller and current Call family patriarch Ron Call was a child, his father worked at Jim Beam under Booker Noe. If his father was working the night shift at Beam’s Boston, Kentucky plant, Ron would take dinner to him and observe the distillery’s operations, developing an affinity for whiskey making in the process. Booker was a family friend—he and Fred would bird hunt with Ron’s father on the Call family farm—and he gave Ron a job in 1974, first as a lab technician and later as quality manager. Ron’s time in Kentucky came to a close in 1990, however, when he was recruited to Florida Distillers (then the name behind Cruzan rum). In the years that followed, Call would have two children, Jacob and Clayton, both of whom would eventually join him in the business.

Jacob knew from the start that he wanted to carry on the family legacy, and would eventually join his father at Florida Distillers in 2007 after an eight-year stint as a banker in Louisville, which he says gave him a good head for business. He moved back to Kentucky in 2014, cut his teeth more fully as “employee one” at the old Charles Medley Distillery in Owensboro—then renamed O.Z. Tyler and now known as Green River—before ultimately opening his own distillery, Western Kentucky Distilling Co., in 2023. It was with this distillery that Jacob, Ron, and Clayton were all able to collaborate, as they brought the Hemingway whiskey brand to life. “I was a little late to the party,” jokes Clayton, who started blending just a few years ago.

“Dad talked us into doing our own thing and getting out for a while, so I did just that. Then 20 years later, Hemingway came around, and they asked if I wanted to be involved—it was an easy ‘Yes.’” Hemingway, which is a product of three families—the Calls, the Hemingways, and the Groths—is distilled by Jacob at Western Kentucky (with some of the liquid coming from Indiana, as well). Then, after aging, it’s shipped to Florida where it’s blended and finished by Clayton and Ron.

In the beginning, Ron was hesitant to take the dive into rye, but found he could learn a thing or two from his sons. “The most rye I ever experienced before making it myself was 51%, and that was tough, because it wasn’t great,” he says. “When we started talking about Hemingway, I wasn’t sure about high-rye, but what Jacob is making [95% rye] was an eye-opener for me. As it turns out, you can teach an old dog new tricks every now and again.” Jacob gives his father credit though, saying that his 50-plus years in the industry have given him the right to an opinion, good or bad.

“I was a little late to the party. Dad talked us into doing our own thing and getting out for a while, so I did just that.” —Clayton Call

Hemingway is in its second full year now, and what the three all agree on is that it’s drawn them far closer. “The sentimental truth is that the best part for me is just this—we’re all together,” says Clayton. “We work together, we vacation together at least once a year, and we’re a tighter-knit group than ever before.”