The Fred B. Noe Distillery

This month’s BARDS (Bourbon And Rye Drinkers Society) meeting was hosted by Carlene Slucher and her husband John. She arranged for the meeting to be at the Beam Distillery in Clermont, Kentucky with a tour of the Fred B. Noe Distillery. This distillery is on the same campus as the Beam Distillery, but is not usually open to the general public. In order to tour this small distillery, you need to book a special event or be part of a private barrel selection. The distillery is a scaled down version of the Beam Distillery at Clermont. Whereas the Beam distillery makes about 1,200 barrels a day, the Fred B. Noe Distillery makes about 50 barrels a day. The purpose of the distillery is experimentation. Here they experiment with distillation proof, mash bills, barrel entry proof and other aspects of making whiskey. They are distilling mostly small batch brands such as Booker’s and Baker’s Bourbon in this distillery. That day they were distilling Baker’s Bourbon.

We arrived at the distillery just before noon, with the tour set to start at noon. Our tour guide, Frank, arrived at noon and the group gathered together and got on the bus that took us to the distillery, located towards the back of the campus. We entered the distillery and Frank talked some about the process. Jim Beam is made with a jug yeast and the facility for making the yeast is on this site. I learned that they make the yeast for the Boston Distillery here as well and take a 50 gallon batch out to the Boston Distillery every day. We then went into the fermentation room and tasted the mash. We then went and looked at the stills. I learned that they have different distillation proofs for different brands, and that one brand actually goes into the barrel at 115 proof as that is what they bring it off the still at. We then moved into the barrel fill area of the distillery where they were filling the last barrel for the day.

After the tour, we sat down in the tasting room where we got to taste four whiskeys. We tasted Knob Creek 10 year old rye, Knob Creek BourbonXRye, Little Book Chapter Eight, and Old Overholt 10 year old cask strength. The BourbonxRye is a mixture of Bourbon and Rye whiskeys but tasted strongly of rye. The Old Overholt is a product that was released earlier this year, but is sold out. Every one of the whiskeys was excellent. I particularly liked the Old Overholt. After tasting what they had before us, Frank pulled out a couple of other products to taste. First was the Old Overholt Pennsylvania style Monongahela rye. It was excellent whiskey. The next was a Jim Beam that was a collaboration between Fred and Freddy Noe. This Bourbon was excellent, but once again, it was sold out and we could not get a bottle. We finished the meeting with a lunch at The Kitchen Table Restaurant. The food was very good and I had the spicy pork rinds and the fried chicken. Both were very tasty and satisfying after drinking whiskey. After lunch we visited the gift shop and then returned to Louisville. It was a great tour and I enjoyed it quite a bit.