Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
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34 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2.15 Whiskey workers Call them bourbon additives, fve jobs that serve bourbon neatly. historical consultant and tour guide Rick Bell The Evan Williams Bourbon Experience The frst stop at the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience downtown on Main Street is a theater. In a re-enactment video, it's 1783 and city of Louisville trustees in a can- dlelit room discuss the election of a new wharfmaster. Evan Williams (he was a real guy) is late because he's been making whiskey. He puts a jug of it on the table. Some guy gets scolded for trying to drink it at the meeting. thing like this, you really have to pile on the details," he says. Bell holds up fve test tubes, each flled with liquid in varying shades of gold and amber. "Which one do you think is the real bourbon?" he asks. Everybody says number three, which is the darkest because it's actually whiskey with iodine in it (aka new-make whiskey). Bell explains how distillers would add coloring to give the appearance of aged bourbon or whiskey instead of going through the time-consum- ing aging process. "It's one of the reasons cocktails became popular," Bell says. During tours, Bell gets all kinds of questions. Does he ever get one he can't answer? "Not many," he says. bourbon disposer Kevin Broecker Parallel Products Kevin Broecker spends his days in a group of buildings in Shively that used to belong to National Distillers. In that company's hey- day, it made lots of products (most notably Old Grand-Dad bourbon) before closing in the 1970s. But traces of the distillery remain. The logo is still on the elevator in the ofce building. Distillery employ- ees' retirement records and a log kept by the on-site nurse are still upstairs. Parallel Products bought the facility in 1989. Now the company uses a 100-foot, 66-tray distilling column to recycle unsellable bour- bon (and other liquors and sugary liquids) into 200-proof ethanol. That becomes the "E" part of the E10 you can fuel your car with. Broecker oversees that process. The facility (one of fve Parallel Products recycling plants in the U.S and Canada) receives 25 truckloads flled with cases of beverages a day. Broecker isn't allowed to name any of the bourbons shipped there. The companies don't tell him exactly why they send products there, but Broecker says some are discolored, have of-favors or sat on store shelves too long. Parallel Products makes money from the recycled products. The company also pro- cesses and sells the boxes, bottles and the sugary syrup left behind. Beverage companies get produc- tion-tax money back. The 41-year-old mentions the time he had to deal with 120 railcars full of beer that was damaged by water during Hurricane Katrina. "It was really kind of nasty," he says. "It smelled like the beach, inside a hotbox for about three or four weeks with stale beer." barrel maker Greg Roshkowski Brown-Forman Cooperage Greg Roshkowski is in charge of the two Brown-Forman cooperages, one in Louisville (of West Broadway on Dixie Highway) and one in Trinity, Alabama. Between the two facil- ities, 360 employees build 3,000 charred white-oak barrels a day to keep up with bourbon demand. "We also have our sawmills that are scrambling for logs at this point, trying to produce enough stave and RICK BELL All of that actually happened. Rick Bell has copies of the meeting minutes in a three-ring binder. When Heaven Hill ofcials frst considered the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience (which opened in November 2013), they hired Bell on as a historical consultant. Before that, he'd written books about the 1937 Flood and the history of Lou- isville's waterfront, among other topics. The 68-year-old historian is a stickler for accuracy. "The lan- guage they use in the flm is almost verbatim," he says. "You don't need to do a fctional one; the real story is just as good or better." Bell also created the basement speakeasy tour, which he conducts on weekends. Dressed in period costume, he tells visitors about the underground liquor industry during Prohibition. "Louisville didn't really agree with the law," he says. While researching, Bell says he often spent eight hours a day, six days a week, in the public library, combing through old newspapers on microflm. "When you do some- B OUR - BON TOWN