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Distilling, for me, is not just about making whiskey. This is something that

family's done for generations.

I mean, it's our legacy. It's our pride.

There's a lot that goes into that bottle besides just liquid.

I'm very fortunate to be in Kentucky and to be able to go back.

to my ancestors.

I know where they're buried.

I can go visit.

It's just a spiritual journey that I have with it.

And I think bourbon, for our family, has always been like that.

It's more than a job. It's more than the liquid.

It's what we are. It's our essence.

I'm Stephen Beam, and I'm the master distiller of Yellowstone Bourbon.

The very first mention of bourbon actually is in a deposition for a murder

trial. The trial took place in 1797.

It took place in a tavern, of course, and there was a mention of a barrel of

whiskey there, and they referred to the barrel of whiskey as red whiskey. That

was bourbon.

Bourbon is the American whiskey. It's the American spirit. As a matter of

you can't make bourbon anyplace else than America, the United States.

The beams are intrinsic, if you will, to the entire bourbon industry. I mean, it

was Jacob Beam, I believe, that was the very, very first whiskey maker.

We're still in the late stages of the 1700s. We haven't even fought the War of

1812 yet, and the Beams are making whiskey. That is a legacy that is

by anyone making whiskey in America today.

When people ask, they assume that I've been around, that I grew up in the

business, and I tell people that I grew up around the business.

My father was in the business, but was out of it well before I was.

But I had aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone was involved in the bourbon

business. So it was always a conversation in the family.

One of the things that I was always passionate about was horticulture and

plants. I gardened as a very young kid and had a greenhouse when I was 13 years

old. grew exotic plants. I loved growing things.

Come on.

Life is so unpredictable because where you think you might be 10 years from

you can be 180 degrees.

I knew I had always wanted to open a distillery, but the time was not right.

Everything was geared toward large distilleries. Nothing was geared toward

distilleries. And there wasn't a lot of interest in...

you know, crafted items in the restaurant business for 10 years.

And it was fine.

But I kind of felt like I had bought a job.

Kept looking back, kept coming back to the distillery.

There was an organization called ADI.

I went to one of the conventions and I was hooked. So that was in April.

And by October, I had sold my shares of the restaurant.

and started the journey to opening the distillery.

Chase, are you getting the titration on that?

Yeah, awful.

Good.

Which one is that? Which fermenter? Fermenter 3.

Fermenter 3? Awesome.

Okay. What we're doing here, we're trying to get our acid titration here so

we can see what types of bacteria may be present in that mash.

The acid titration lets us see organic acids that are being created by bacteria

versus the alcohol that's going to be created by our yeast.

Have you done the gravity on that one already?

Okay. Yep. You've got your gravity listed. You've got your bricks listed.

That's awesome. Looks good.

So my family has always been hard workers. My mom and dad, my brother,

they're all in the bourbon industry. When I grew up, dad always made sure

we knew if you were going to do something, it was worth doing it right

time or not doing it at all.

Making bourbon is hard work, but it's a simple process. The hard part about

making bourbon is being repeatable and consistent and following the

procedure, doing things the right way, not trying to cut corners, not trying to

look for an easy out. The process is simple. It's just grain, water, and

but the details are where all of the complexity come in.

I'll tell you a very interesting story about Steve Beam. When he first starts

getting back into making whiskey, he wants to carry on a family legacy. He

something that I think is so incredibly creative.

He comes to the museum here, and he's looking around for something that he

was donated a long time ago, 40 years ago.

There was a yeast jug that was donated to the museum. We still have some yeast

jugs here.

But none of the distillers have come back to see if they've got what we would

call the family yeast.

So what he does is he takes the jug and he takes it to a University of

California laboratory.

And what they do is they're able to clone the yeast that his grandfather

make whiskey.

There is nothing like that on the landscape. It is the most wonderful

it really tells you something about his level of dedication because that's...

second to none in the industry. He's literally a genius in just taking that

move, that legacy yeast, and making his product out of that. I think it's just

absolutely spectacular.

One of the many hats that a master distiller wears in a

small distillery is a master blender as well.

And so what I'm doing today is I'm blending our next introduction of

You can see these are all different profiles that I'm going to blend

And there are almost an infinite number of combinations, and there's not really

one right combination, but I try to find the best combination.

And for me, I always have and always will make whiskey that I like to drink

and hope other people do as well. And so far, it's worked out.

Pretty good, so let's taste through these.

This is the first one I'm tasting here, and on the nose there's honey,

some brown sugar, pretty basic or pretty classic

Kentucky bourbon profile on this one.

Well, the frustrating part is this one may have a fantastic nose, but when you

blend it in with the other, it completely disappears.

So it's just a lot of trial and error and taste.

So it's a tough job, but someone has to do it.

The thing that I know most people here that work here, me included, we take a

lot of pride in knowing that we have seen this product.

From the second the grain comes into our bin to going into the mash tank and

being able to be distilled twice. And then our distillers fill it into a

We literally roll the barrels ourselves onto barrel trucks.

Once a week, we ship a truck over to Lux Rose. They get aged.

Four years pass, which most of us have been here that long. We've been able to

see our product, right, get put into production and get put into a bottle.

then we're able to see it in itself.

So we have a lot of pride.

in the small and uniqueness that we have at limestone to say that we've started

it literally from start to finish

so

whenever we receive in our grain we're going to get our grain probe from the

truck so that we can get a nice accurate sample this would be our corn coming in

and we're going to take this corn and do all of our scientific testing on it

One of the first tests that we're going to do is a contamination test. So we're

just kind of looking through here, and we're just making sure that we don't

any large quantities of cob, stick, anything like that that maybe would have

been in the field.

Most of our corn obviously needs to be corn.

The moisture of our corn needs to be at a set percentage. The farmer typically

dries it in their silos.

We want to make sure that we're getting the right grain moisture content because

otherwise we're paying for water. So we want to make sure we're getting the

right amount.

So for us, we want to be below the 15 % moisture, and this sample here is in

range. So we are accepting this corn.

organisms growing on this corn like aflutoxin.

Aflutoxin is a common thing that will occur to corn once it sits out in wet

weather. We want to make sure that we have the best corn we can possibly have.

So we're going to take our black light and shine it into our corn. We're just

looking to see if we have any really bright green reflective spots.

So I don't see any reflective spots on this corn. So this corn here is free

aflutoxin and it is accepted.

When you take a sip of Yellowstone whiskey, remember that you're tasting a

legacy that's gone back probably a hundred years, if not longer. I remember

Yellowstone was named after a national park, okay? So I think Teddy Roosevelt,

want to say it was like 1912, 1915 that he institutes the National Park Service.

So we're looking all the way back past a hundred years to something that really

wasn't made and was disconnected, if you will.

Nobody knew that it existed until Stephen Beam had the inspiration to get

yeast jug and see if he could clone the yeast that was being used to make

Yellowstone bourbon more than 100 years ago.

The proper way to enjoy bourbon, any way you like to drink it.

It doesn't make any difference if it's neat.

on the rocks, or with diet soda.

Whatever you enjoy, that is the essence of bourbon. But I really think

the way to drink bourbon is with friends and enjoy the community.

And it's really about camaraderie and enjoying it with other people.

So this is New Hope, Kentucky, and it means so much because this is kind of

where my family began their journey in Kentucky.

The house over here is my grandparents' home.

That's where I would come spend summer.

We came every Sunday when I was a kid, had family gatherings there, and it's

kind of sad to see it in this state of repair because when my grandmother had

it, it was...

pristine there were great big shade trees this time of year there'd be

ferns on the porch and potted plants that she loved so much and flowers i

that's one of the inspirations for me liking plants so much was uh all that

growing up around all those plants that she had but i remember you know this

very fond memories all the hills back over here especially as a kid, you know,

coming from the city.

I grew up in the suburbs of Louisville, and you come out here, really wasn't

much to do other than just go out and fish and hunt.

A lot of memories that, you know, the kids today don't have like

that. And, you know, I think it's a little unfortunate.

So this is St. Vincent de Paul in Hope, Kentucky, and some of my earliest

memories are here.

I remember an aunt who got married here, and that's one of my earliest memories.

It means so much to our family.

My grandparents, great -grandparents, were founding members of the community,

the church community.

And you look around, and you stain glass windows with my great -grandparents'

name on them.

My other great -grandfather over there, J .B. Dent, who was the founder of

Yellowstone.

So like I was saying, there's so many different elements of our family

in the church and the community.

The bowling, birch, dance all came to Kentucky in the

1780s. So they were here before Kentucky was a state.

and helped build this area, which was the thriving area of Kentucky at that

time. A lot of people don't realize that in the 1780s, Kentucky was the western

frontier.

I think it's kind of fitting, you know, to be here today.

And 254 years ago today, Daniel Boone first came into Kentucky,

and he said, heaven must be a Kentucky kind of place.

And, you know, I kind of get what he meant.

I really think that our family has such an impact on Kentucky bourbon.

You know, I was following great men who did great things in the industry. I

don't even try.

to say that I'm going to be as good as they were.

My grandfather, you know, spent his entire life in the distillery. And I

to call myself a master distiller for at least 10 years until I felt like I had

mastered it.

So Minor Case Bean was the oldest of his generation, and he kind of

helped glue that generation together.

So I had the vision of...

bringing our side of the family, our story out, because it had long been

forgotten.

And it's an important story, and I wanted it to be told.

So, like I said, Minor Case being trained, a lot of the people who go on

train master distillers across Kentucky.

So, so many different whiskeys, bourbons trace their back, their master

distiller's roots back to being trained by Minor Case.

Well, Miner, it only took 100 years,

but we're back in the game.

Here's to another 100.

We've used the word legacy, and bourbon truly is an American legacy. It's kind

of a love song in spirit form to who Americans are.

It's not just the color and the flavor and the process. It supports

It supports shopkeepers in business.

It supports towns.

It supports churches.

It supports neighborhoods.

It supports the people that work in the distilleries.

And the nature of the industry today has really kept the promise, if you will,

of the American dream by moving forward, by becoming the juggernaut it is today,

and by making something that is so uniquely and identifiably American that

there's nothing like it on the face of the earth.

The filling, for me, is not just about making whiskey. This is something that

our family has done for generations.

It's our legacy. It's our pride.

There's a lot that goes into that bottle besides just liquid.

We make bourbon in good times. We make bourbon in bad times.

We just make bourbon.

And that's what we do.

It's more than a job. It's more than the liquid.

It's what we are. It's our essence.