Jim Rutledge on 60 Years in Bourbon, From Reviving Four Roses in the U.S. To Building New Brands
This month marks 60 years in the bourbon industry for distilling legend Jim Rutledge. His claim to fame is bringing Four Roses Bourbon back to the United States after decades of only being sold in Japan and other foreign markets, a move that has earned him a venerated place among whiskey geeks. But since retiring from Four Roses in 2015 he’s continued to build his legacy, helping to launch numerous brands including Cream of Kentucky and Echoes of Oak, the latter of which he distilled at Castle & Key Distillery.
Over the last six decades, Rutledge has seen everything from computers replacing handwritten ledgers to extreme changes in demand, enduring a number of booms and busts in the market. He’s credited with rescuing Four Roses Bourbon from certain oblivion, and even retirement couldn’t stop him from continuing to shape the distilled spirits landscape in the U.S. The unwavering passion Rutledge has for bourbon continues to reverberate through the industry. Even after a lifetime working in bourbon, Rutledge takes every opportunity to work closely with distilling and to share his experience with those coming up in the industry.
The Seagram’s Days
In 1966, Rutledge took a job at Seagram’s Calvert Distillery on 7th Street Rd. in Louisville. After graduating from the University of Louisville and working at Sears for two years, he’d landed two offers: one at tobacco manufacturer Phillip Morris, where one of the perks was that he could smoke all the free cigarettes he wanted at lunch, and another at Seagram’s.
“I didn’t want to take the first job that was offered,” Rutledge recalls. “I was hoping to find something a little more interesting, and hopefully a career.”
He worked in research and development then as a case goods shipping supervisor, and eventually as a bottling line planner. Though he started gaining some experience in distillery production, he’d often get called back to bottling during the holiday rush. Back in those days, he says operators would use pencil marks on the valves to control the optimal temperature and flow on the stills, something that is controlled by computers now.
“But I never really had enough time to learn the distillery business,” he says.
In November of 1977, shortly after managing the transition to palletization in the warehouses, he was transferred to New York.
An Unexpected ‘Promotion’
“[One day] I snuck out [of work] about 20 minutes early to go bowling,” he recalls. “The guard stopped me as I was walking out the gate. He said, ‘Jim, the plant superintendent wants to see you.’ I said, ’Oh my gosh, how did he know I was leaving early?’ And so I walked down to his office carrying my bowling ball and sat down.”
The superintendent told him he was getting promoted to chief industrial engineer in New York. While that would ordinarily be cause for celebration, Rutledge was wary of the move, reluctant to uproot his family. But back in those days, he says, it was take the job or take a hike, so he took the job.
“I went bowling, and I bowled the worst game I’d ever had in my life,” he laughs.
He couldn’t sleep that night, envisioning never seeing a park or a softball field ever again. What’s more, by the time he got to New York the job title was changed from chief industrial engineer to assistant manager of the budgets and standards department.
He spent 15 years in New York working for Seagram’s, all the while pining for the production floor. Finally, in 1990, his reviewer asked if he was serious about wanting to go back to production, sharing that he would be retiring in the next couple of years and was looking for someone to head up the Four Roses Distillery in Kentucky.
Two years later he was called to a meeting in Louisville. The topic: returning to Kentucky to get back into the production side.
The Four Roses Years
Rutledge spent his first two years back in Kentucky in Cox’s Creek, turning the tiny bottling operation into the massive warehousing and bottling facility it is today. In November of 1994, Rutledge was slated to shift his focus to the Four Roses Distillery in Lawrenceburg, but he received some troubling news from the higher-ups at Seagram’s.
“They told me the quality, what comes off the still before it goes into a barrel, was so bad and had been so bad for about three and a half years that if it didn’t improve by summer shutdown the second week of June 1995, they would have to fire everybody at the distillery.”
At that time Four Roses Bourbon was only sold in foreign markets. In 1959 the brand had shifted its focus to international consumers, mainly Japan. The product called Four Roses that was for sale in the U.S. was a blended whiskey made in both Indiana and Maryland, and it was widely regarded as a bottom shelf product.
“The guy I was replacing stayed on through the end of the year,” Rutledge recalls. “I got to know the distillery operations and the people, the atmosphere at the time was just very, very caustic.”
Knowing that the distillery had no option other than to improve the quality, Rutledge remembers subtly pushing the distillery floor to refine its process. “Once everybody left for the day, I’d go over and spend the next shift entirely with the distillery operators, listening and learning,” he says. “I couldn’t tell anybody that the distillery was going to be shut down if we didn’t turn the quality around. I just told them I believe in quality and we’ve got to improve”
He’d arrive each day around 7 a.m. to prepare for the morning shift to start at 8 a.m. He’d walk through the distillery at least three times a day, getting to know everyone from clerical to maintenance. He wanted to get a feel for how things worked, what wasn’t working, and where improvements could be made, and for him that meant starting with the people.
“I remember one of the guys saying, ‘You know, all you management guys say that, but none of you ever mean it.’ And I said, ‘You’ll see.’”
“One of the things that he told me was to go talk to the guy that’s been running the still for 20 years and see what you could learn,” says master blender Ashley Barnes, who worked with Rutledge at Four Roses and is now an industry consultant. “He was always ready to share his knowledge and teach me something, and willing to be patient and answer all my questions. I started working with Jim in 2014, and full circle is I’m getting to work with him again on Jacob Spears.”
Rutledge says there was a rigid structure to a union shop, so much so that if he walked into the distillery and a valve needed to be turned he could not turn it himself — he’d have to find someone in maintenance to do it. But that’s precisely why he felt he needed to learn the system so fully, because everyone’s success depended on it.
“That’s the kind of atmosphere I’ve always believed in, working together. I felt like they might report to me, but I worked for them.”
Seagram’s had a ratings system for new make distillate that ranged from one to five, one being the worst and five being the best. For the last three plus years before Rutledge got to Four Roses the average score was one. By the third week of January of 1995, Rutledge was sending then plant manager Al Young up to the Seagram’s distillery in Lawrenceburg, Ind. with distillate samples almost daily for evaluation by Jim Warner and Pat Loach.
Rutledge was averaging 16 to 18 hours a day when the call finally came. “Jim said, ‘Guys, what are you doing down there? This is unbelievable. I haven’t smelled a distillate like this in years!’ And my heart jumped. But then he laughed and said, ‘I just wanted to call you and let you know you just had your first four-rated quality in over three years.’”
But the brand wasn’t out of the woods yet. Number crunchers in the parent company had all but decided that it would be a huge cost-savings measure to shut it down. The majority of what the Four Roses Distillery was doing at that point was making blending whiskey for Seagram’s Seven Crown domestically and Crown Royal Seagram VO in Canada, and they certainly had plenty of other facilities that could make it. Fortunately the corporate quality department stepped in and said we can’t afford to lose Four Roses because the quality is too good.
Rutledge and his team had done it. He was awarded the Seagram’s Top Quality Award. He tried to share the prize with the union stewards but was denied, so instead bought everyone at the distillery matching Four Roses jean jackets and used the remaining funds to stock the vending machines in the break rooms.
Changing the Course of Four Roses History
At this point Four Roses Bourbon still was mainly sold in Japan, but Rutledge was determined to bring it to U.S. markets. “When I got back to Kentucky, it became a burning passion to get Four Roses back in the United States. I didn’t hesitate. I pushed people. I would talk to people, directors of marketing and sales, all the time. If they called me about something I always managed to steer the conversation toward getting Four Roses back in the United States.”
He managed to get the Four Roses Single Barrel on the market in 20 states by 1999. And in 2002, when Kirin took over the business from Seagram’s, Rutledge finally got a chance to make his big move.
The first week of January 2002, the CEO and CFO of Four Roses as well as representatives from Kirin spent a week in Lawrenceburg at the distillery. ”At the end of the week they said, ‘Jim-san, we’ve been asking questions of you all week. Do you have any questions for us?’” Of course, the first thing he thought of was to try to remove the legacy Seagram’s blended whiskey from the lineup and bring the Four Roses bourbon home to the U.S. To Rudlege’s pleasant surprise, they accepted the idea. “It was years later one of the Kirin personnel told me, ‘Jim, they weren’t going to say no to anything you asked.’ He was always kidding with me. I said, ‘If I’d have known that, I’d have asked for a lot more money!’”
Rutledge began his uphill battle of replacing the old blended Four Roses with Four Roses Bourbon throughout the country starting close to home.
“We started Four Roses in Kentucky,” he recalls. “If we can’t be successful in our home of Kentucky, how can we be a success in California or New York any, anywhere in between?”
Over the next 11 years, Rutledge pounded the pavement bringing the story of Four Roses to bartenders, whiskey fans, and anyone who would listen. His work helped to usher in a golden era not only for the Four Roses brand but also for Kentucky bourbon as a whole, often appearing alongside other legendary bourbon distillers like Jimmy Russell and Booker Noe.
Retirement Doesn’t Always Mean Retirement
In 2015 Rutledge retired from Four Roses. Kirin wanted him off the production floor and on the road full time in an emeritus role with no meaningful tie to the distillery’s operations. But he wanted to continue his work as a distiller, so after leaving he quickly got back into the game. By February 2016 he had the opportunity to work on a project at Castle & Key for a Louisville philanthropist.
“I always told people I’d like to end my life leaning over a fermenter, checking the quality, smelling it, tasting it, you know, putting my finger in and getting too big a whiff of CO2 and it’s all over, you know, my life, career, and everything,” he laughs.
In addition to staying on the production side, Rutledge continued building his legacy by mentoring others. Dixon Dedman, founder of Kentucky-based 2XO Whiskey, has long looked up to Rutledge, and still calls on him for blending advice.
“We talked through the philosophy of blending and how things work, why things work, why things don’t work, and the mystery of why some things that should work don’t work,” Dedman says. “I consider him a mentor, my mentor. We had a connection, but he didn’t need to share the time, share the knowledge, share the wisdom with me that he did. I am eternally and forever grateful for that because he just really helped me figure a lot of things out.”
And that is a story that echoes across the industry. Rutledge is the kind of person who will always answer the phone — gatekeeping is not in his vocabulary.
In 2021, Pennyroyal Distillery co-founder Ross Hutchison began helping some friends build a distillery in Adair County, Ky. Eventually Rutledge visited the site and agreed to work with the company, which began by sourcing barrels of whiskey. Fortunately there were plenty of barrels available that Rutledge had distilled at Castle & Key that had reached maturity, so Echoes of Oak was born.
“I remember sitting in his truck and riding over there, and he was telling me some stories as if I didn’t know who he was,” Hutchison says. “I absolutely knew who he was and how important he was. But Jim just kind of nonchalantly will mention things and talk about various people he’s met or things he’s done in a casual way, not a boasting way.”
Rutledge is showing no signs of slowing down. He’s working where he can, lamenting the downturn of the distilling industry. But he says that if things turn around he’d love to be back in a distillery making whiskey again, a sentiment he says is echoing through all of the distilleries with paused production right now.
“No matter where I worked, there’s a lot of hard jobs, a lot of heartaches sometimes, but I love the industry,” Rutledge says. “And I’ll go as long as I can, as long as I have something to do. I hope I don’t run out of things to do.”
The article Jim Rutledge on 60 Years in Bourbon, From Reviving Four Roses in the U.S. To Building New Brands appeared first on VinePair.