March 14, 2017

Shelbyville, Kentucky

STANDING REGALLY ON STAGE, Deirdre Mahlan, president of Diageo North America, leans into the microphone and says to the audience, “Join me in welcoming the founder of the Bulleit brand … Tom Bulleit.”

The roar from the crowd thunders as I jog up the steps to the stage and hug Deidre, who is applauding now, a grin spread across her face. I arrive at the podium and look out at the hundreds of invited guests packed inside this tent the size of a big top. A kaleidoscope of faces whirls before me—dozens of Diageo folks, members of the media, local and state politicians, my family, and scores of friends, some who’ve traveled thousands of miles to celebrate this day, this momentous event.

Suddenly, I feel weak-kneed and disoriented, barraged by emotions—joy, gratitude, humility, validation, even shock.

And love. I feel enormous love.

The applause soars, peaks, ebbs, and then silence descends, humming with expectation, the only sound the thumping of the wind against the canvas of the tent. I pause to catch my breath.

I peer at the crowd, these hundreds of people eyeing me, waiting, many beaming, some leaning forward on their folding chairs, some holding their programs wound tight in their fists, the wind outside continuing to sing.

I smile and extend my left hand like a game show host pointing out the grand prize. We are on the grounds of the first Bulleit Bourbon distillery, occupying 300 acres of rolling Kentucky countryside. On this campus, we’ve built four of what will eventually be 12 barrel houses, each holding 55,000 barrels of bourbon, and a 52-foot still—the land, the construction, irrigation system, solar panels, the whole works coming in at a cost somewhere north of $250 million. In a few minutes, along with Deirdre, the governor of Kentucky, one of the senators from our state, and a few other dignitaries, I will wield a pair of ridiculously oversized shears and cut the ribbon dedicating the distillery. But now, I shake my head in wonder.

“I was sitting in the audience,” I say, my hand frozen in mid-gesture, “and I was thinking if all this could happen, I should buy a lottery ticket, because I could win the lottery.”

I lower my head to a ripple of laughter. I smooth my tie, and say, “Thank you all for coming. This is an extraordinary day. I thought, mistakenly, that this would be a day like many others. I don’t know what I was thinking. Sometimes I can speak well, but today—”

I can’t hold the emotion back. I clear my throat, grip the podium with both hands, and say, “I hope you will forgive me. Today I’m a little bit overwhelmed by my wedding anniversary.”

Another laugh, followed by another surge of applause.

“Thirty years,” I say. “Betsy and I. Thirty years. That’s when we officially started our journey together. And that’s when all this began. Of course, if I go back to the very beginning, when my great-great-grandfather Augustus created the original recipe for Bulleit Bourbon, we go back 160 years or so. And speaking of old, did I mention that today is my birthday?”

Now a cheer. I shake my head slowly and whisper, “Extraordinary.”

I pause again, look over the crowd, and close my eyes. In my mind’s eye I see bottles of Bulleit Bourbon and Bulleit Rye lined up on a shelf, the bottles draped with double gold medals from the San Francisco World Spirits Competition and other international competitions, not just once, but year after year … extraordinary …

How did this happen? How did I get here?

It was simple, really, but not easy. Not close to easy.

I went one bartender, one handshake, one sip at a time.

* * *

Eleven years ago.

“Try it,” I say.

The brute of a bartender wearing a lumberjack’s shirt and a bushy, flame-colored beard swipes a rag across the bar. He’s a human mountain, six-five, 250 pounds, a three-way hyphenate—manager, barkeep, bouncer—slinging shots, beers, and hardly ever mixing cocktails in this, call it, rustic bar in Kansas City. Bars like these on the East and West Coasts have started to become trendy, some heading toward hipster, and a few places have seen the emergence of a cocktail culture. No sign of that here. I would call this a hillbilly bar, without a shred of disrespect. I myself am a born and bred Kentuckian and proud of it.

The place smells of pine disinfectant, grilled burgers, and onions—and whiskey. An American pub, catering to business types on the move or on the make sitting shoulder to shoulder with blue-collar regulars in this home away from home, or pit stop, or a place to forget, fortify, or escape. A familiar place.

I’ve been here before. Or have I? I’ve been to similar bars for days and I’ll continue tomorrow. If I don’t come here, I’ll bring my sample bottles to another bar, and then another … and another …

I don’t stop.

I can’t.

I can’t be stopped.

It’s 11:50 in the morning, 10 minutes before the bartender unlocks the front door and ushers in the day-trippers. Plenty of time. I tap-tap-tap the lip of the bottle of bourbon I’ve placed on the bar. I grin at it. I do. I grin because I know the honey-colored liquor inside intimately and I know the convoluted, improbable—no, impossible journey—that brought the bottle and me here. It’s 2006, and at this moment I don’t know how the tale ends. I do know three things. One—the saga comes with some history, beginning 160 years ago in the Old West. Two—it’s a miracle I’m standing here in this bar … a miracle I’m standing at all … a miracle I’m alive. And, three—our little brand brings in virtually no cash flow, we’ve got a miniscule marketing budget, and few people have even heard of my upstart bourbon. All that adds up to one simple, incontrovertible fact: I really need to make this sale.

“Try it,” I say to the bartender again.

I nudge the bottle of bourbon another inch forward into his sightline and spin it to make sure the orange label faces him head on. He hitchhikes his thumb at a row of liquor bottles crammed onto a shelf buckling behind him.

“I’m overstocked,” he says.

“Well,” I say. “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”

The bartender frowns. “Huh?”

“Mark Twain,” I say.

“Ah.” He shimmies his massive shoulders as if shaking off fleas, flips the rag over, and resumes wiping down the bar. “Got to remember that one.”

“Good. Clearly, you have an appreciation for the best.”

He folds the bar rag into quarters, tosses it aside, picks up the bottle of bourbon, and squints at the label. “Bull-ay?”

“Bull-it,” I say. “Like what you fire out of a pistol.”

He peers at me dubiously.

“That would be my name,” I say. “Tom Bulleit. And you are?”

“Matt.”

“Pleased to meet you, Matt.” I offer my hand. Matt extends his in return and we shake. My hand disappears inside his palm, which is the size of a catcher’s mitt.

“Same here, Mr. Bulleit.”

“Please. Tom.”

“This your brand, huh?”

“It is.”

Matt nods and considers the bottle.

“Frontier Whiskey,” he murmurs, reading the label, and then slowly wagging his head. “Bourbon’s not really selling, Tom. Everybody’s drinking vodka.”

“I’ve heard. Repeatedly.”

“Sorry,” he says, sliding the bottle back to me.

I don’t budge. I keep my eyes fixed on his. “Here’s the thing.”

I pause.

“Now that we’re on a first-name basis, pretty nearly friends, I need a favor.”

Now he squints at me. “What kind of favor?”

“One sip.”

Matt leans both of his tree-limb sized forearms onto the bar. “I told you. Nobody’s buying bourbon.”

“That’s why I’m asking for a favor. Or maybe it’s a dare. One sip. For the fun of it. For research. For your edification. For future generations. For Mark Twain. Otherwise, I’ll have to come back tomorrow and go through my whole schtick all over again. And neither of us wants that.”

A sound explodes from Matt that may be a chuckle. An interminable 10 seconds ticks away. Time stops. Matt’s forehead folds in two and then I realize he may in fact be thinking. And then movement. Time resumes. Matt shakes his head, reaches under the bar, and brings out two shot glasses.

“Join me,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say, and pour us each a finger’s worth of bourbon. I raise my glass. “Cheers.”

We clink glasses. Matt swishes the liquid in his mouth, then inhales his shot. After a moment he licks his lips like a bear at a barbecue.

“Damn,” he says, sliding his shot glass toward me. I pour another finger’s worth. He drinks that one faster.

“My,” he says.

“So, just for research, may I interest you in a bottle for your bar?”

“Hell, no,” Matt says. “I’ll take two.”

* * *

Back to Shelbyville.

March 14, 2017.

I stand on the stage in this tent on the dedication of the first Bulleit Bourbon distillery, gripping the podium in front of what feels like an infinity of faces.

I look out at them and I say, “I don’t believe our lives are told in years … or months … or weeks. I believe we live our lives in moments.”

I pause.

“That’s what I remember most,” I say, and that’s what I am about to share.

The moments.

I AM THE SON of two fathers, my biological father, the one I never knew but who lives in my heart and my imagination, and my father who adopted me, the one who gave me his heart, his soul, and his name. I know both to be military men, as am I. I know both to be warriors and heroes, and a hero I am not. But I, too, am a warrior, and like my warrior fathers, when I sign up for a mission, I complete it, or die trying. George Gage, my biological father, died in 1944 during his mission at Utah Beach in Normandy. The details are insignificant. His death—and the deaths of the thousands who died with him—is not.

* * *

I remember the smells.

I sit in my highchair at the kitchen table. My mother, Dorothy Bulleit, and my grandmother whom we call Nana, bake constantly—cakes, pies, cookies. As they swirl through the kitchen in a kind of dance, I summon the smell of chocolate chip cookies right out of the oven, resting on a plate just out of my reach. I am not quite two, but in February 1945, my father has gone to war and I am the man of the house.

One day, the doorbell rings. Two emotions, nearly running into each other, cross my mother’s face. First, surprise, because she’s not expecting anyone. She wipes her hands on her apron, opens the front door, and a man hands her a telegram. She closes the door and the second emotion appears. Dread. She tears open the envelope, skims it, and her pounding heart settles. The telegram informs her that her husband—my father—has been slightly injured in battle. My mother has been holding her breath, and only now allows herself to exhale. A month later, she receives a second telegram, a follow-up, informing her that the first telegram was a mistake. What she’d read was untrue. My father had been seriously wounded. That second emotion, dread, reappeared, but this time a third emotion followed—fear.

* * *

Eastern Belgium. January 1945. The Battle of the Bulge.

A five-tank patrol, part of the Timberwolf Division of General Patton’s Third Army, comes upon a full Panzer Division, heavy artillery, and dozens of tanks, maybe close to 100, total. The Sherman Tank gunner has received his orders. His mission. Hold off the Panzer Division until reinforcements arrive.

Thomas Ewing Bulleit, my father, the gunner, swivels the tank’s big gun and blasts into the swarm of converging German tanks. The Panzer tanks return the fire relentlessly, riddling the five American tanks from all sides, from every angle. Inside my dad’s tank, the hammering of the gunfire deafens him as a torrent of bullets rips through the tank’s metal skeleton like it’s made of aluminum. My father, shocked, blinded, blood pouring down his face, pulls himself out of the tank, drops into two feet of snow, and crawls on the ground, away from the massacre. Advancing Allied troops pick him up and bring him to a triage station. Shortly after, the only available surgeon, a dentist, removes his right eye. He spends a year in England, recovering, fighting infections. Finally, he returns home, and after undergoing several operations to reconstruct his face, my dad gives up his career in banking and takes a job as a purchasing agent for Delmonico Foods. Despite horrific migraine headaches from shrapnel lodged in his brain, he never misses a day of work and I never once hear him complain. The Panzer Division assault on his five-tank patrol lasts less than five minutes, but we prevail in the Battle of the Bulge and win the war. My father—soldier, warrior—has completed his mission.

* * *

Lessons taught without words.

As I grow out of my youth and enter my teens, a new relationship with my father forms. He’s no longer my playground chaperone, my bike rider teacher, my evening reader. We remain fishing buddies, though more and more infrequently, the silences between us becoming longer and increasingly acute. I drift into friendships with kids cooler than my parents—all kids are cooler than everyone’s parents—and I discover girls. At home, although something about us has changed, I remain aware of my father as this omniscient, godlike figure, a tall, dapper, well-dressed man in button-down shirts and slacks, never in jeans—even when fishing—a cigarette dangling from the fingers of one hand, a bottle of beer or a glass of bourbon cupped in the other. He’s a quiet man, not unaffectionate, but not what I would call warm. He is, in the best sense, a survivor, of war, of business, of life. At times—too many times—he enters the one bathroom in our house, locks the door, and sighs heavily, the smoke from his cigarette slithering up from the narrow opening between bathroom door and hallway floor. I know he’s closed himself off to try to stifle the debilitating agony of his nearly constant migraines. I can’t imagine that smoking helps his condition, but I tell myself that maybe it somehow lessens his pain. In the mornings, he emerges from the bathroom, sits down for breakfast at 7:00, and leaves in time to make it to work by 8:00. I don’t realize then that I assimilate key life lessons from my father’s simple, consistent behavior. Accept the hand life deals you. Don’t complain. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Work. Keep moving forward, never stop, never quit. Work.

* * *

In 1961, I graduate from Trinity High School, enter the University of Kentucky, and major in partying. Thinking back, I don’t recall a single moment in which I cracked a book or studied for an exam. My grades confirm this. Somehow—I have no idea how—I eke through freshman year and stumble into sophomore year, my dedication to partying escalating, which I never would have thought possible. I excel at Phi Delta Theta, my fraternity, which makes Animal House seem like a monastery. Concerned, my parents arrange for what today would be called an intervention. They first bring in Sister Aunt Jean Clare, one of my father’s sisters, whom I refer to as “Top Nun,” a college professor whose attempts to convince me of the value of education, fails. They then call on tough-as-nails Aunt Pearl, my father’s other sister, who sits me down for a constructive conversation about my future.

“You will never amount to shit,” she tells me.

I concede that she may have a point, but I do, in fact, have a plan.

* * *

Kentucky. Land of rolling hills, thoroughbreds, and bourbon. Kentucky is to bourbon what the Napa Valley is to wine. Actually, more so—95 percent of the world’s bourbon is made in Kentucky. Later in life, I will discover that bourbon, while always in my consciousness, is also in my blood. But I know that bourbon has always been in my family.

In the mid-1800s, my great-great-grandfather, Augustus Bulleit, emigrated from Europe, landed in New Orleans, and moved north to the Louisville area. He married, sired five children, opened a tavern, and began distilling bourbon using a recipe of two-thirds corn and one-third rye. Augustus, salesman, entrepreneur, and man of mystery, would load barrels of bourbon onto his wagon and his raft, haul them to New Orleans to sell, helping to create the legend of Bourbon Street. On one of his trips from Louisville to New Orleans, Augustus and his wagon and raft full of bourbon disappeared, vanishing from the face of the earth. We’ve considered all the obvious explanations: Augustus was slaughtered by Indians; Augustus was robbed by bandits who murdered him, stole his money, and absconded with his bourbon: or, the most intriguing, Augustus disappeared on purpose, perhaps into the arms of another woman, a second wife he had stowed away in New Orleans. As a teenager, the legend of Augustus Bulleit, my great-great-grandfather, bourbon distiller, possible bigamist, and creator of our family bourbon recipe remains romantically etched in my mind.

* * *

I work summers at a distillery. The sounds, the smells, the action, the camaraderie, the world of making bourbon affects me in ways profound and small. I can’t articulate this feeling to anyone yet, because I can’t put my finger on it. But it feels like a cross between catching the bourbon distilling bug and falling in love. Most of all, the world of bourbon feels like my world. I see this world—bourbon distilling—as my future, my calling. In my gut, I know that I want to become not just a distiller, I want to revive Augustus’s recipe. One afternoon, coming home from my job at the distillery, I find my dad at his customary position on our front porch, enjoying a bourbon and a cigarette. I decide this is the perfect opportunity to inform him of my grand plan.

I nod as I climb the stairs to the porch. I take a seat next to him. I hold for a count of three.

“I’ve been thinking about my future,” I say.

Dad raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“I have a plan.”

“Well, that’s a relief, Tom,” he says, “because your grades are, frankly, abysmal.”

I smile. “Thanks, Dad.”

It takes him a moment to realize I have no idea what abysmal means.

“What’s your plan?” he says.

“I want to go into distilling and bring back Augustus’s original recipe.”

My father shakes his head slowly.

The head shake.

One simple movement that signifies exasperation, frustration, and disappointment without saying a single word.

“No,” he says, as punctuation.

“No?” I squeak.

He takes a long sip of his drink.

“No. You will complete your undergraduate education, you will enlist in the military, and then you will go to law school and become a lawyer.”

I think of our family’s educational lineage, daunting to me. My grandfather attended the University of Chicago, my father, Notre Dame.

“Law school?” I say. He might as well have instructed me to land a spacecraft on Mars. “But my grades are … abysmal.”

“Then you’d better get to work.”

College. The military. Law school. No mention of Augustus’s bourbon recipe or becoming a distiller.

But my father has spoken.

And as all fathers I know of his generation and mine, his word is law.

I don’t dare face another head shake—or worse.

Without speaking, I revise my plan.

Beginning now, I’ll do what my father says.