The History of Jim Beam: Eight Generations of One Kentucky Family

Johannes Jacob Böhm was a German immigrant miller who anglicised his name to Jacob Beam and moved to Kentucky in the 1780s. Like most farmers on that frontier he distilled surplus corn, because whiskey travelled and did not spoil and grain did neither.

In 1795 he sold his first barrel. That date is on every bottle of Jim Beam sold today, and it is the founding claim of the brand. The whiskey he made was called Old Jake Beam Sour Mash, and it would have borne only a passing resemblance to the bourbon in the bottle now.

What matters about 1795 is not the recipe. It is that a single family has been in continuous control of the operation ever since, which is genuinely rare in an industry that has been consolidated, bought, sold and shut down repeatedly.

David Beam took over from Jacob and moved the operation to take advantage of the railroads. David M. Beam moved it again, to Nelson County, and renamed the whiskey Old Tub. By the late nineteenth century the Beams were an established Kentucky distilling family among many established Kentucky distilling families.

Then Colonel James Beauregard Beam took over in 1894, and the brand that carries his name today began with him.

Note what was happening around them. American whiskey in the nineteenth century was widely adulterated. The Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 was passed specifically because so much of what was sold as whiskey was not, and it created the first federal quality guarantee in American food and drink: one distillery, one season, four years minimum, exactly 100 proof. Beam still makes bonded bottlings to that standard.

On 16 January 1920 the manufacture and sale of alcohol became illegal across the United States, and it stayed illegal for thirteen years. Most Kentucky distilleries did not survive. Equipment was sold, warehouses emptied, expertise dispersed, and the rye-heavy whiskeys that had dominated American drinking almost completely disappeared. Beam's Pre-Prohibition Style Rye is named for exactly that lost style.

Jim Beam spent Prohibition in citrus farming, coal mining and quarrying. None of it worked particularly well.

Repeal came in December 1933. He was 70 years old. He rebuilt the distillery at Clermont, Kentucky and had it running in 120 days, which is a remarkable thing to do at any age. The whiskey was renamed Jim Beam because that was the name people trusted, and the yeast strain the family had preserved through those thirteen years is, according to the distillery, still in use today.

That yeast is not marketing garnish. Yeast strain is one of the genuine variables in what a whiskey tastes like, and continuity of it is one of the few tangible links between what Beam makes now and what it made before 1920.

Booker Noe, Jim Beam's grandson, became master distiller in 1960 and is the most consequential figure in the modern history of the company.

In the 1980s American whiskey was in trouble again. Vodka and white spirits had taken the market, bourbon was seen as an old man's drink, and the industry response was mostly to compete on price. Booker went the other way. In 1988 he released Booker's: uncut, unfiltered, straight from the barrel at whatever strength it happened to be, which was often over 60% ABV.

Nobody was doing that. It effectively invented the small batch premium bourbon category, and every limited release and cask strength bottling on the market since owes something to it. Beam's own Single Barrel and limited releases descend directly from that idea.

Booker also presided over the era of the ceramic decanters. Between 1955 and 1992 Regal China made more commemorative decanters for Jim Beam than any distiller has made before or since, and the Beam's Choice Collector's Editions are the best of them.

Fred Noe, Booker's son, is the current master distiller and the seventh generation of the family. His daughter Freddie Noe is the eighth, and the two of them made Lineage 15 Year Old together, which is a fifteen year old bourbon and an unusually old one for Kentucky.

That last point is worth explaining. Kentucky's climate swings hard between summer and winter, which drives whiskey in and out of the barrel wood far more aggressively than a cool maritime climate does. A fifteen year old Kentucky bourbon has extracted far more from the wood than a fifteen year old Scotch has, and it is much easier to over-oak. Getting one right is a real achievement rather than a matter of waiting.

The company itself has changed hands more than the family has. Beam was owned by American Brands, then Fortune Brands, then spun off as Beam Inc., and in 2014 was bought by Suntory of Japan to form Beam Suntory. Through all of it the Beams have run the distillery.

For all the history, the whiskey is straightforward. White Label is a four year old Kentucky straight bourbon from a mash bill of roughly 77% corn, 13% rye and 10% malted barley, aged in new charred American oak, and bottled in Australia at 37% ABV.

By law bourbon must be at least 51% corn, distilled in the United States, aged in new charred oak containers, and entered into the barrel at no more than 62.5% ABV. Nothing may be added but water. All of that is legally enforced, which is why the word bourbon on a label tells you considerably more than the word whiskey does.

Jim Beam Black is the same distillate held in wood far longer and bottled at 40%. Devil's Cut recovers the whiskey soaked into the barrel staves after the barrel is drained and blends it back in at 90 proof.

The whole range, seventy-one products, is on the shop page.