The Bourbon Kings

Too bad he was too pissed off to enjoy it.

In his fist, a memo from corporate was crushed into a trash ball, the white paper with its laser-printed words unsalvageable. He’d had to read the damn thing three times, and not just because he was severely dyslexic and written English was a largely insurmountable obstacle course for his brain.

Talk about lighting him up. He was not a hillbilly. He’d been raised in an educated family, and he’d gone to Auburn University, and he knew everything about making bourbon from the chemical processes involved to that intangible artistry stuff.

In fact, he was the highly respected Master Distiller of the most prestigious bourbon brand on the market, and the son of the most respected Master Distiller in the history of the commercial alcohol industry.

But at the moment? He wanted to get in his half-ton and ram the grill of that F-150 right into the lobby of William Baldwine’s office at Easterly. Then he wanted to take his hundred-year-old hunting rifle and put some holes in the desks of all those corporate idiots.

Coming to a halt, he leaned back and looked at the racks that stretched up to the warehouse’s exposed beam ceiling. The branded number codes and dates that had been burned into the fronts of the barrels had been put there on orders first by his father, and then by himself, and there was a progression of both, the precious containers resting in peace for four years, ten years, twenty years, longer. He regularly inspected them, even though he had plenty of people who worked for him who could do that. The way he saw it, though, these were the only children he was ever going to have and he wasn’t going to let them get raised by the equivalent of a nanny.

At thirty-eight, he was a loner, thanks to both choice and necessity: This job, this twenty-five-hour-a-day, eight-day-a-week job was his wife and his mistress, his family and his legacy.

So getting this memo, which he’d found on his desk when he’d come in, was like a drunk driver ramming into the minivan that his entire life was riding in.

The recipe for bourbon was really simple: grain mash, which by Kentucky law had to be made up of a minimum of fifty-one percent corn, and which was, here at the Bradford Bourbon Company, a further combination of rye, malted barley, and about ten percent wheat for smoother taste; water, drawn from an underground limestone aquifer; and yeast. Then, after the magic happened, the nascent bourbon was put into white oak barrels that were charred on the inside and left to grow up to be big and strong and beautiful in storage houses like this one.

That was it. Every single bourbon maker had those five elements of grain, water, yeast, barrel and time to work with, period. But as the good Lord turned out an endless variation of people from the core elements of what made a human, so, too, did each family or company produce different shades of the same thing.

Reaching out, he put his hand on the rounded flanks of one of the barrels he had first filled when he’d taken over as master. That had been almost ten years ago, although he had worked for the company since he was fourteen. It had always been the plan to step into his father’s shoes, but Pop had died too soon, and there you had it. Mack had been left behind in classic sink or swim territory, and he sure as hell had had no intention of drowning.

So yeah, here he was, at the top of his game and young enough still to create a dynasty of his own—supposedly working for the aristocracy of bourbon makers, the company who created The Perfect Bourbon.

It was the tagline on everything BBC did, the tip of the spear of the company’s brewing, business and marketing philosophy.

So why in God’s green earth was management expecting him to accept these proposed delays in grain delivery? It was like those idiots with the MBAs didn’t understand that while they had enough product that was four years old today, if he didn’t keep the sills going, they were going to run out of that kind of bourbon to sell forty-eight months from now—and that applied to every level, running out ten years from now, twenty years from now.

He knew exactly where all this was headed. A nationwide shortage in corn, the result of global warming coming home to roost and screwing up the weather patterns last summer, meant that the bushel price was sky high right now—but it wasn’t likely to stay that way. Clearly, the bean counters in the home office, a.k.a. Mr. Baldwine’s estate, had decided to save a couple of bucks by halting production for the next couple of months and expecting to catch up when the corn prices self-regulated.

Assuming that the drought that had rocked the nation the year before wasn’t repeated.

Which was not a bet he, personally, was willing to take.

There were many faults to this “business” logic, but the core issue was that those suits and ties didn’t understand that bourbon was not a widget produced on an assembly line that had an easy on/off switch. It was a process, a unique and special culmination and expression of trial-and-error choices that had been made and refined over a period of over two hundred and fifty years: You had to cultivate the bourbon’s taste, coax out the flavors and the balance, guide the elements to their apex of existence—and then send it out to your customers under a label of distinction. Hell, he took as much pride in safeguarding the No. 15 brand, the company’s most successful but less-expensive line, as he did the higher-cost, longer-aged products, such as Black Mountain, Bradford I, and the ultra-exclusive Family Reserve.

If he interrupted production now? He knew damn well they were going to come back to him in six months and tell him to mislabel the barrels.

Six months to the suits was just half a year, twenty-six weeks, two seasons.