Booker Noe's Tribute Cache Traditional Cache

Frederick Booker Noe II....former master distiller of Jim Beam and the sixth generation of the Beam family to make bourbon, died on Feb. 24, 2004 at his home in Bardstown, Ky. He was 74 years old.

A grandson of the distiller Jim Beam, Booker Noe worked at Jim Beam distilleries in Boston, Ky., and nearby Clermont for almost half a century.

In 1988, with the creation of Booker's Bourbon, a premium bourbon, he helped revitalize the bourbon business, which had been battered by the rising popularity of "white goods," like gin and particularly vodka, in the 1960's and 1970's.

Small-batch bourbons like Booker's did for bourbon what single malts did for Scotch, creating a new market. Booker's bourbon was undiluted, unfiltered and, in Mr. Noe's terms, "straight from the barrel," the way bourbon used to be.

Not that Jim Beam itself had suffered in the postwar rush to vodka. When Mr. Noe was named master distiller in 1965, Jim Beam was the world's top-selling bourbon, and under his direction, production increased twelvefold.

Mr. Noe, who attended the University of Kentucky, joined the company in 1950 as an assistant distiller, though he had helped out around the distillery since he was a teenager, according to "American Still Life: The Jim Beam Story and the Making of the World's #1 Bourbon" by F. Paul Pacult (John Wiley & Sons, 2003).

At 6-foot-4, Mr. Noe was a commanding figure. He retired in 1992 and spent the rest of his life traveling and fishing around the world and acting as an ambassador for Jim Beam, playing host at bourbon tastings and entertaining audiences with reminiscences and anecdotes.

At home in Kentucky, he was the host of parties and dinners featuring his own bourbon, of course, and Kentucky hams, which he cured in a backyard smokehouse.

The Beam family name was originally Boehm, according to Mr. Pacult's book. The family came to America from Germany in the late 18th century and settled along the East Coast. The first Boehm in Kentucky was Johannes Jacob Boehm, who arrived in Kentucky in 1787 or 1788. He preferred to be called Jacob Boehm and later Jacob Beam. Mr. Noe was his great-great-great-grandson.

Jacob Beam sold his first barrels of corn whiskey around 1795. The whiskey was first called Old Jake Beam, and the distillery was known as Old Tub.

Eventually the whiskey took the Old Tub name and kept it until the early 1940's, when it became Colonel James B. Beam and then Jim Beam, honoring James Beauregard Beam, Jacob Beam's great-grandson, who ran the company from 1892 until 1944.

Mr. Noe was the son of Jim Beam's daughter, Margaret Noe. More importantly, he was Jim Beam's grandson, keeping the family line intact. In 1995, the company added his picture to the Jim Beam bottle, along with those of Jacob, David, David M., Jim and T. Jeremiah, the five Beam distillers who, from father to son, had preceded him.

The family has not owned the business since 1941 -- it is now owned by Fortune Brands Inc. of Lincolnshire, Ill. -- but the family has remained involved in its management and production. Mr. Noe's son is now Jim Beam's overseer of small-batch bourbon production.

Frederick Booker Noe III (1957-Present) became the seventh generation Beam family distiller in 2007 and regularly travels the world to educate consumers on America’s Native Spirit. September, 2007, was declared “National Bourbon Heritage Month” by an Act of Congress, further recognizing bourbon as the only spirit that is uniquely American.