Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/453014
LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2.15 35 four years, which might as well be a century when it comes to consumer tastes. "I'm totally making this up, but say you decided to do a new Jim Beam with bacon (favors). What if, four years from now, there's a huge backlash against bacon? Then you have all that bacon bour- bon sitting there and have nothing you can do with it," she says. Welder Josh Smith Vendome Copper and Brass Works If you've seen the copper pot stills in town at Michter's Distillery or Copper & Kings Brandy Distillery, you've seen Josh Smith's work. The 24-year-old started at Vendome Copper right out of high school as a union-employed apprentice, doing grunt work like sweeping foors. In the Vendome workshop, Smith polishes weld lines on the curvy top of a copper pot still, called an onion dome because it resembles the vegetable. Smith says any dirt or moisture can ruin a welding or soldering job. Mistakes are expensive: a sheet of copper can cost about $60,000. A big part of Smith's job is putting the mirror or satin fnishes on the stills. "I spend 40 percent of my time polishing — maybe even more than that, honestly," he says. It's a bit of an art. "You could train a monkey to do it," Smith says, "but the monkey's not going to do a good job because he doesn't know how much efort to put into it." He spent 150 hours over one three- week period perfecting a 250-gallon still's fnish. Two surprising things about Smith's job. First, he has to get in strange positions. "I'm not a big guy, so I'm the confned-space guru," he says. "I've actually been in a 12½-inch-diameter pipe, welding." Second, the patina that develops on copper also attaches itself to Smith. "When it's hot, your pores open up and you get copper dust and dirt in there and you cannot get it out. The copper actually turns your skin green after awhile," he says. "My dad (also a copper welder) is salt- and-pepper on top, but his head's completely green, and no shampoo in the world will get rid of it." heading material to keep the place running," Roshkowski says. There's no back stock of empty barrels (and you can't reuse barrels to make more bourbon), so they're all immediately flled with Old Forester, Woodford Reserve, Early Times and Jack Daniel's. If the supply of staves and headings runs out or something goes wrong with the cooperage (aka barrel-making) machinery, distillery production stops too. It takes a machine an hour and a half to build a barrel. By hand? Eight hours. Roshkowski works a lot in his ofce but does visit the cooperage daily. He listens for banging ham- mers, the whoosh of air from ma- chines, barrels rolling down a track. "We had a plant manager who just retired," the 50-year-old says. "He'd been there 43 years, and he basical- ly could listen to the place and tell if something was wrong." Senior Research Scientist Heather Daines Beam Suntory If Heather Daines is doing her job right, 95 percent of the spirits she creates end up poured down the drain. "If you're constantly only making really good things in the lab, you're not pushing the bound- aries enough," she says. The 35-year-old, who has a doctorate in food science, blends liquids together, trying to concoct the next successful bottle for Beam Suntory, which makes Jim Beam and other spirits. (Daines lives in Louisville and works at Beam's facility just outside town in Clermont.) She helped create the clear, minimally aged whiskey called Jacob's Ghost. She had a hand in blending together nine small barrels of bourbon to create Quarter Cask, part of the Jim Beam Signature Craft collection. Other ideas don't make it past the focus-group stage. "Yeah, it's heartbreaking," Daines says. She brings up one particular taste test for a product she'd created. "I loved it and we took it to a smaller consumer test where they're kind of just around the table talking," she says. "I'm behind the glass, so they don't know that the person who made the liquid is behind there. One of the consumers was like, 'Are you sure this wasn't a mistake?'" One of the job's challenges is that most bourbon ages for at least HEATHER DAINES JOSH SMITH GREG ROSHKOWSKI