Bourbon plants expanding THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BOSTON, Ky. – Workers at the Booker Noe distillery are on the job six days a week, 24 hours a day, and they can’t make whiskey fast enough.
Buildings that house aging barrels of bourbon are rising from the ground in Nelson County, and plans are in the works to build a second still by the end of the year.
This is where Jim Beam, the best-selling bourbon in the world, is made.
To keep up with rising sales, Beam Global Spirits & Wine Inc. is spending $70 million to upgrade the plant. Beam and its parent company, Fortune Brands, also are spending nearly $50 million on the Maker’s Mark distillery a few miles away in Loretto and a bottling and production plant in Frankfort.
Industry leaders say the Beam expansion is part of the biggest production boom in the American whiskey industry since just after World War II. Although the Beam projects appear to be the state’s largest at the moment, demand also is growing for many of Kentucky’s other bourbon producers.
“The appeal of bourbon worldwide is on a roll,” said Ed O’Daniel, president of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. “Everybody is gearing up for more production.”
When the Boston expansion is finished, the Booker Noe plant could produce 15 million gallons of whiskey a year, up from the current 10 million. Its mash cookers will eat up corn, the main ingredient in bourbon, at a rate of 75 acres a day.
Jeff Conder, a Beam vice president, told The Courier-Journal that the company hasn’t gone out of its way to publicize the expansion in Boston.
And the inner workings of the Booker Noe plant are largely unknown to the public. The facility has no tours, and there is no gift shop or tasting room for customers.
Dorothy White, executive director of the Nelson County Chamber of Commerce, said that although she knew of changes at the plant, she wasn’t familiar with the size of the investment.
Although jobs aren’t being added in Boston, Beam is hiring about 50 workers in Frankfort, where the company has been approved for $960,000 in tax credits – the only financial incentives so far out of the three projects – for an expansion of its bottling line and storage facilities.
The increased production also will boost state and local inventory taxes. According to the state Department of Revenue, those taxes for all brands of distilled spirits reached $9.66 million last year, a 65 percent increase from
2001.
The largest single share of those taxes comes from Beam Global, which accounts for 45 percent of the state’s bourbon inventory, with 1.82 million barrels on hand. The second-largest stash of bourbon belongs to Bardstown-based Heaven Hill Distilleries, with close to 700,000 barrels.
Jack Daniel’s, part of Louisville-based Brown-Forman, is made in Lynchburg, Tenn.
Chuck Cowdery, the Chicago-based author of a bourbon newsletter, said the nation’s whiskey industry is expanding production at a rate of about 5 percent a year, and Kentucky is benefiting because about two-thirds of that production comes from inside its borders.
“Virtually all” of the state’s distilleries are operating at capacity, he said.
Like much of the industry, Beam and Fortune Brands are seeing faster growth among their more expensive labels. The flagship Jim Beam saw volume growth of 5 percent last year, but the higher-priced Maker’s Mark posted a 12 percent increase, its 10th consecutive year of double-digit growth.
Beam’s other bourbons include Old Grand-Dad, Old Crow, Basil Hayden’s, Baker’s, Booker’s and Knob Creek.
Keith Neumann, senior marketing director for bourbons at Beam Global, said the growth at Jim Beam has been fueled by a NASCAR sponsorship and a renewed effort to promote the brand’s historical connections to the Beam family.
Bill Samuels, the president of Maker’s Mark since 1975, said the planned expansion in Loretto was delayed about 18 months after the brand was acquired in
2005 by Fortune. The project is back on track, and Samuels said one of the first pieces of equipment to be added is a $9 million anaerobic digester to process the spent grain that isn’t consumed in the fermenting process.