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When Brent Elliott learned in June that he’d be the next master distiller at Four Roses Bourbon, the news was delivered with about as much ceremony as a dictated memo. His bosses called him to a meeting in which he was told the brand’s veteran master distiller, Jim Rutledge, would retire at the end of August and that Elliott would be his replacement.
Despite the significance of the news, there was no celebration or shared cigars or congratulatory dinner of cracked crab and Cabernet. Recalling it, Elliott describes it as less an offer of promotion and more a verbal update to his current job description.
“They said … ‘You will be the master distiller.’ It wasn’t a question in their mind of whether I’d accept it,” Elliott recalls. Adding with a smile, “I guess that showed their confidence in me.”
The meeting’s lone disappointment was his parting instruction to not tell anyone other than his wife about the promotion.
“I had to wait two weeks before the press release came out before I could say anything to anybody but her,” he says. “So the excitement was killing us both.”
At 41, Elliott replaces Rutledge, an industry icon who’s 72. His appointment as master distiller marks the ongoing and gradual replacement of the bourbon industry’s old guard with younger charges, most of whom are in their 40s: Greg Davis at Maker’s Mark; Eddie Russell at Wild Turkey; and, it’s generally assumed, Fred Noe IV, at Jim Beam. When 31-year-old Marianne Barnes turns on the stills next year at Old Taylor Distillery in Millville, Kentucky, she’ll be the state’s only woman master distiller.
The significance of this shift isn’t lost on Elliott.
“That makes this even more of an honor for me and distillers my age,” Elliott says.
Without their forerunners, they’d not be ready for such lofty positions, he adds.
“People like Jim and the guys in the older generation have been mentors for everyone,” Elliott says. “We’re grateful to them.”
A chemist by trade, Elliott was working in tobacco sensory evaluation in Nashville 10 years ago when a job as Four Roses’ assistant manager of quality control opened up. And while wife Amy Elliott quips about him “covering all the vices in his career,” she said he’d longed most for a job in the bourbon industry since before they married.
“We’re both from Kentucky, so a job at Four Roses was a good chance for us to get back home,” she says. “He did hope he could become a master distiller someday, but at that point, that idea was way out there.”
At the time, so was Elliott’s awareness of Four Roses. He’d never heard of the brand until the job opening was posted.
“I got a bottle of it on the way [to the interview],” he admits. And it was love at first taste.
“I’d always liked bourbon, and so I knew right then that it was very high quality.”
For the next decade, as Elliott worked to grasp bourbon production from grain analysis through to distilling, aging and bottling, he sharpened his tasting and nosing skills in search for imperfections in the whiskey.
“This job is all about producing quality liquid,” Elliott says. “I know ‘liquid’ sounds impersonal and scientific to people outside the industry, but that’s how we look at it when we’re evaluating it in the lab.”
Rutledge put it another way: “Put the best distillate possible into the barrels and you don’t have to worry about what comes out. Brent knows how to do that.”
That’s good news, because in his new role, Elliott will have to learn how to make twice as much distillate per year as Rutledge produced.
This spring, Four Roses announced it will invest $55 million over the next few years to double its bourbon production in Lawrenceburg and add rickhouses and a new bottling line at its Cox Creek, Kentucky, facilities. Elliott won’t be involved in the construction of those facilities, but he’ll be required to scale up the size of his quality control team to manage the increased volume.
In addition to his master distiller’s duties, he’ll retain all his current responsibilities as director of quality at the brand, a job that already requires overtime hours. Assuming Rutledge’s duties as well will require excellent time management.
“I wouldn’t want to relinquish what I do on a day-to-day basis and risk quality,” he says.
With two children, ages 5 and 7 years old, in the house, Amy Elliott says she’s concerned about the amount of time her husband will have to devote to his new job.
“But I’m more excited about it than I am cringing about it,” says Amy Elliott, who works for an electrical cooperative. “I think even Brent would tell you he’s a little nervous about being a master distiller. But I know he believes the director of quality role is so important that he can’t let one supersede the other.”
Rutledge says Elliott was by far the best candidate available on Four Roses’ staff to become master distiller upon his departure.
“Brent’s an excellent choice … because he’s extremely quality conscious,” Rutledge says. “With Brent, there’s not a bit of ego or arrogance in him at all. … He gets along well with people.”
Not that Rutledge didn’t. He’s widely regarded inside and outside the bourbon business as one of the industry’s true gentlemen. Elliott calls him a thoughtful instructor who communicates well.
“The time that he’ll take to reply to an email question is amazing given how busy he is,” he says. “It’s a lot to live up to, I can say that.”
Amy Elliott agrees, yet she views Rutledge’s work to make Four Roses an iconic bourbon as paving a smooth road for her husband’s future work.
“Jim Rutledge is such an integral part of Four Roses that his is not a face that’s going to be forgotten soon,” she says.
Old Taylor’s Barnes empathizes with the pressure now on Elliott, as a member of the new generation of master distillers, to uphold the standards of a beloved legacy brand. But she believes he, like his peers, find the stress motivating.
“It is intimidating at first to think about living up to the greats in this business,” says Barnes, who was Brown-Forman’s master taster before joining Old Taylor. “But that’s also one of the most exciting things about it, knowing they’ve cleared the way for you. … After that, it’s our job to not screw it up, to keep making good whiskey.”