Where's the Ice Machine?

Most folks who take a trip along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail are going to encounter the Jim Beam Distillery. With its central location just a half hour south of downtown Louisville, Beam is very easy to reach. The location just 2-3 minutes off I-65 and proximity to other attractions makes it a box that has to be checked on a bourbon-focused trip. If you’ve already been to a few distilleries and have tour fatigue this place is still worth a visit without the tour.

Travelers who aren’t pursuing the Bourbon Trail will also find the Jim Beam Distillery to be worth a visit. It’s easy to get to from any of the downtown Louisville hotels. Proximity to the highway, free parking and clean public restrooms make the Clermont campus one of the best highway rest areas in the South. (No pets allowed.) It’s not necessary to take a tour to enjoy the place.

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Jim Beam Distillery Grounds

Although it’s easy to reach from the city, the Louisville Metro is a world away. This is pure country with no sprawling subdivisions or dollar-store shopping plazas. The distillery is directly opposite the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, a 16,000+ acre natural preserve. The forest is home to events and picnic facilities as well as the famous Forest Giants.

Not to be outdone, the Jim Beam Distillery spent the Covid Era undergoing a $45 million renovation to the visitor center and surrounding grounds. This was the largest renovation here since prohibition. A long and winding drive from happy Hollow Road to the Outpost passes several rickhouses among the rolling hills and truly impresses visitors with the massive scale of the world’s largest Bourbon maker. Everything seen in the slideshow above is accessible to visitors without taking a tour.

Jim Beam American Outpost

What they used to call the Stillhouse is now the Jim Beam American Outpost. Whatever you call it, the visitors’ center is the first place to see. This is home to the gift shop and a lounge area with a bar upstairs. Tours begin and end in this building.

Distiller’s House

On a hill at the center of the property, the quaint country house is largely unchanged from the pre-prohibition era. Built in 1911, it served as a boardinghouse for workers connected to bourbon production before becoming a family residence for the master distillers in 1935. It was only vacated in recent years by current Beam chief and 7th generation distiller Freddie Noe and is now in the National Register of Historic Places.

To me this is the highlight of every visit. Folks are welcome at all times to post up in one of the shady rocking chairs and enjoy the sweeping view of green hills for as long as they wish. There’s a real connection to the past and Kentucky history here. It’s easy to imagine yourself the subject of the Colonel’s Toast. And hey, if you happened to have a little hip flask in your jacket there’s no one around to be mad about it.

The front porch has been expanded upon with a new patio area so there is plenty of seating on even the busiest days. This area is ideal for photos and it’s one of my favorite places anywhere. It’s the reason I usually stop in every time I pass by.

The Kitchen Table Restaurant

Part of the recent renovation, the Kitchen Table is an impressive indoor/outdoor space. Beam enlisted high-profile chef Brian Landry, formerly of Galatoire’s in new Orleans, to create the Kitchen Table menu. The result is a care-filled take on classic Southern fare like duck poppers and a selection of cheese spreads. Bold, smoky flavors dominate the menu but the folks at Beam are particularly proud of the pizzas. The yeast in the dough of each pie is the same that goes into the vats in the whiskey making process.

Anyone visiting the Jim Beam distillery should strongly consider having a meal here, if for no other reason than you are out in the country and there are no other quality restaurants nearby. If you’re touring distilleries the next closest ones are Four Roses and Heaven Hill, neither of which features on-site dining.

Jim Beam Distillery Tours

The tour strongly recommends making reservations online before arriving. While it’s technically true that space is limited, the tour groups can be around 50 people and begin every 30 minutes, so selling out is unusual. I think the reason they push reservations is because they want to capture your email during signup. The $32.50 cost is the same whether you buy online or at the Outpost, so you should be fine just stopping by.

If you do buy tickets online you should still check in on arrival and receive a paper ticket. This will make it easier to board the bus at the beginning. Meet your tour guide under the sign in the gift shop.

Some distilleries have buses and some don’t. It doesn’t go very far but it is a bit more convenient than it would be walking between the various tour stops.

Water, Grains, and Yeast

Similar to most other tours, the first stop here is full of information about Kentucky’s iron-free limestone filtered water, the grains that make up the mashbill(s), and the laws that govern whiskey. Those laws affected the early pioneers who built the distilling culture in Kentucky.

Each distillery is protective about their proprietary strain of yeast. The living yeast organisms perpetuate themselves throughout the decades and each batch is made with the same strain in the sour mash process. The story here is that James B. Beam used to drive the yeast home each night in his 1939 Cadillac and store it in his refrigerator.

Fermenting Mash

Guests are led upstairs to the fermenting room. In photos these vats appear to be about five feet tall but they extend below the grated steel floor and are actually two stories tall. Beam ferments 15 truckloads of grain every day, and the process takes 3 days to complete.

Some bourbon makers use open-topped wooden vats for this. While these are more traditional and look great in photos the closed stainless steel fermenters are much easier to clean and maintain between different mashbills. For an operation of this scale that’s a necessity.

The Jim Beam Distillery’s Still

After fermenting, tours are led to the building that houses Clermont’s large column still. As you can see by its outline painted on the building, it’s massive and it runs 24 hours a day. But even that is not enough to fill the barrels for a brand that produces half of all the bourbon in the world. Jim Beam has an auxiliary distilling plant in nearby Boston, KY that is responsible for 2/3 of their total production, and that still creates 1100-2000 gallons a day.

Inside visitors can see the still itself from ground level, and the freshly distilled whiskey produced at the bottom. Like most stops on the Bourbon Trail all the copper work here is done by Kentucky’s Vendome Copper and Brass Works.

Barreling Bourbon

The next stop explains the process of creating and charring barrels to age the product. Bourbon barrels are provided by Independent Stave Co. and charred to a level 4 alligator char to produce Jim Beam white label.

As you can imagine, cooperage is a big business in Kentucky. With each barrel being used only once in bourbon production, empty barrels are sold wholesale and reused to age various wines, spirits, hot sauces and other products. The average bourbon barrel’s life continues for decades after leaving the rickhouse and including the time used in aging bourbon a barrel can be in use for up to 100 years.

Each tree cut produces only two barrels, so reforestation is a major undertaking. Two trees are planted for each one that’s harvested. Forestry and various tree-planting campaigns are a big part of Beam’s operations.

This tour stop also features demonstrations on how barrels are filled and dumped. This is a straightforward process and explanations are provided about blending and proofing whiskey as well as terms like large batch, small batch and single barrel.

Bottling Knob Creek

The barrel filling and dumping stations on the tour are used for the Knob Creek 9 year old small batch. They give visitors a good idea of how the process works but are nowhere near the size and scale of the real Jim Beam operations.

The tour’s bottling line is in the same building and is likewise used only for Knob Creek 9. You can see how it works but at no point do you feel as though you have visited a bottling plant. Because this particular product is made in such small quantities the line is idle most of the time.

Guests on the tour have the opportunity to purchase and personalize their own bottle at this point. They cost the same $66 as in the gift shop. If purchased here you can select and rinse your own bottle, watch them fill it, and put your fingerprint in the sealing wax. For my money I’d rather find the honey hole in one of Kentucky’s massive liquor stores.

Aging In The Rickhouse

Rickhouses are a common sight when traveling through Kentucky. While many are located on the grounds of the various distilleries, perhaps even more are situated on offsite real estate. They quietly do the business of soaking whiskey in wood without so much as a sign out front to indicate who owns the place.

Stepping inside one is a unique experience and an important part of any distillery tour. They have their own atmosphere inside and are often many degrees colder than the ambient temperature, even with their many windows fully open.

Similar to other producers, Beam makes a big deal out of each millionth barrel and various other special barrels. These are stored on the first floor and are the highlight of this part of the tour. There are 3 million barrels currently aging in the company’s warehouses.

At Jim Beam they like to focus on the positive and didn’t mention that monitoring such large wooden structures is an ongoing engineering challenge. Steel buttressing supports some of the warehouse walls from the outside. Most rickhouses have a plumb bob at the centerpoint. An observer can see on a floor plate how far the whole structure is out of plumb. The tour guide made no mention of this.

The Jim Beam Distillery suffered a catastrophic collapse and fire at a warehouse after a lighting strike in 2019, around the same time a warehouse collapsed at the Barton distillery.

Tasting Finished Products

Every distillery ends its tour with a tasing flight. Four is the usual number of samples provided, which are typically a half ounce pour. Smaller operations might only feature three. The exact bottles offered are subject to change. I believe the day I visited they offered white label, two Basil Hayden varieties, and Legent.

More experienced bourbon drinkers may find these tastings a little corny, especially after completing several of them along the trail. If you’re more serious and want to taste a flight without the tour guide prattling on the on-site restaurant has several flights on the menu.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

I mentioned before that I’d rather shop for bottles at a retailer. But don’t forget that most distilleries offer at least a couple of gift-shop exclusives. These releases are usually worth a close look. They’re always a high quality product and a single point of availability ensures their rarity.

At the time of my visit the available gift shop releases were:

Lineage: Originally this 15 year old cask strength release was limited to global travel retail, i.e. the duty free shops in international airports. It was $250 at that time but I am not sure what the price is in Clermont.

Distiller’s Share: The tour guide indicated this as an experimental bottling. The 5 year old 102 proof bourbon contains brown rice in the mashbill and goes for $70 at the gift shop.

If you flew into Louisville it is definitely worth it to rent a car and see Beam and one or two of the other nearby distilleries. Rates start below $50 a day, which is less than you’d pay for rideshare just to Beam and back.