Marlene Holmes, Milam & Green Master Distiller

My distilling journey started in the summer of 1990. I owned a small 30-acre farm in central Kentucky and during this time period, aquaculture was become a thing to take the place of farmers raising tobacco. Now, I wasn't a tobacco farmer, but I loved to fish and loved a good fried catfish meal. I went to my local county extension agent to gather information. He told me during our chat that a guy at the local Boston Jim Beam distillery was experimenting with using dried grain or distillers' grain as fish food. Distiller grain was already being used as livestock food, so why not catfish food? Now the guy heading up the experiment at the Jim Beam distillery was Booker Noe. A few days later I met with Booker. It was the first time to met him. We ate lunch and chatted for about an hour, mainly talking about fishing as Booker loved to fish as well. Before we parted ways that day he asked if I would help out with his experiment. He needed someone to come in daily and feed the catfish, I agreed to do so. I was the fish feeder for that summer. Booker had purchased 1,000 catfish fingerings and had the maintenance crew at the distillery build a cage to hold them. The cage was dropped in one of the chill water spray ponds right behind the distillery building.

I had never been inside a bourbon distillery, so I was very curious. First of all, there were very few people around. On some trips down I would only see the security guard at the front gate. It amazed me that so few people could run an operation of that size. 50,000 gal. beer well, 10,000 gal. whiskey tank, big grain silos, rooms filled with fermenting tanks... it was pretty cool. On occasion, there would be one of the employees out back behind the maintenance shop with the grill cooking ribs, burgers, steak... I'm thinking about where you can work and pull a grill out to cook like this.

Over time I met several of the employees. It seems like a very close-knit group in a pretty casual laid-back environment. As the summer drew to an end, one of the guys mentioned that they were hiring. The whiskey business had been in decline for several years but was starting to pick up again. Booker was to play a big part in this resurgence with the creation of The Small Batch Bourbons; Bookers, Bakers, Knob Creek and Basil Hayden.

I applied for the opening they were hiring for. My first day on the job at the Booker Noe Distillery was November 11, 1990.

I spent 27 years in various positions but mainly in the distillery operating the column stills.

It quickly became a love, not a job!

I left Beam in April 2018 after meeting Marsha Milam, founder of Milam and Greene Whiskey. Marsha was in need of a distiller and I had often wondered my last few years at Beam how neat it would be to help build a brand with a craft distillery. Marsha is a serious whiskey lover who wanted to create a premium whiskey brand. She told me " We don't settle for ok, we want to be the best"! I was hooked!