by cowdery » Sat Feb 03, 2007 10:41 pm
Obviously, the myth-makers in marketing want to attribute these things to the Master Distillers, who they have made the personification of the company. Better to have the products seem to be made by a man than by a factory. However, even Paul Pacult's American Still Life, which is virtually an official history of the Beam company, credits the idea for Booker's to Mike Donohoe, a company sales executive. Booker had long had his "private stock" that he hand-selected from the whiskey he made at the Boston plant. Winemakers have done this for centuries, making and selecting a "private stock" for themselves and their families. The Germans even have a name for it, "Kabinett." Literally, the wine the winemaker keeps in the cabinet for himself.
Booker kept his in an unlabeled 1.75 L Jim Beam bottle. I had the honor of drinking from that bottle, with Booker, in his kitchen, as have many others. Booker did this for no reason other than, hey, he had a whole distillery's output at his disposal, why shouldn't he drink the whiskey from there that he liked best?
On at least two occasions, his wife blew the door off their stove by grabbing the Booker's bottle, thinking it was 80 proof Jim Beam, when making her bourbon baked beans recipe.
This had been going on for years when Mike got the idea of bottling it as a business gift and, later, as a consumer product.
Booker is quoted in Still Life as explaining it this way, "This isn't Jim Beam, it's just a special individual batch from a special place in the rackhouse."
By "batch," Booker meant the output of one day's distillation that was all aging in a particular place in the rackhouse. Normal practice, there and at most of the distilleries, is for a "batch," in that sense, to be about 50 barrels, but it might be 45 in some cases and 60 in others. That's not the whole day's output, which would be hundreds of barrels, but they divide them up among different warehouse locations in batches of about 50 barrels, give or take.
Virtually the exact same thing was explained to me by Elmer, that the way he selected a "batch" for Blanton's would be to taste a few barrels and when he found one he liked, that barrel and the 50-or-so others from the same "batch" would be pulled and dumped. He was a little shy about admitting he didn't taste every single barrel.
So that's what most distillers mean by "a batch," a set of approximately 50 barrels, all made on the same day and all stored together in one warehouse.