John and Shauna are on the floor at James B. Beam Distilling Co. in Clermont, Kentucky — the largest American bourbon producer by volume and the home of more than two hundred thirty years of Beam-family distilling.

The visit is the canonical Beam stop — production floor, rickhouse, tasting bar — with the additional context that the campus has been undergoing a $400-million-plus reinvestment under Suntory Global Spirits, including the Fred B. Noe Craft Distillery on the same grounds. The Beam family-line continuity is what makes this distillery different from any other American whiskey producer.

Every later visit to a craft distillery — New Riff, Widow Jane, Chattanooga, Hilton Head, St. Augustine — reads in part against the baseline that Beam sets for what scaled American bourbon looks like.

What is the James B. Beam Distilling Co.?

James B. Beam Distilling Co. — the formal name reintroduced in 2019 for the Clermont, Kentucky campus — traces its roots to Jacob Beam, who sold his first barrel in 1795. The company was reincorporated as the James B. Beam Distilling Co. in 1933 by Col. James B. Beam after Prohibition. The Suntory Global Spirits acquisition (formerly Beam Suntory; Suntory Holdings acquired Beam Inc. in 2014) put the company under Japanese ownership while preserving the family-line distilling continuity.

Master Distiller Fred Noe is the seventh-generation Beam Master Distiller; his son Freddie Noe III, the eighth generation, heads the Fred B. Noe Craft Distillery (FBN) on the same campus — the small-scale, experimental site where the Little Book series, Knob Creek special releases, and Booker’s small-batch limited bottlings come from. The flagship lineup includes Jim Beam White and Black, Knob Creek, Booker’s, Baker’s, Basil Hayden, Old Grand-Dad, and Old Crow.

Beam’s scale is real, but the seven-generation distilling line is what makes this campus unlike any other in American whiskey.

The Noe family — Booker, Fred, Freddie III — is the longest unbroken master-distiller bloodline in the bourbon industry. Booker Noe’s creation of the small-batch category in 1992 (with Booker’s and the rest of the Small Batch Bourbon Collection) is one of the inflection points in modern American whiskey. His grandson now runs the experimental program. That continuity is the story Beam tells, and it is the reason the Clermont campus is the appropriate baseline visit for any bourbon-curious adult coming up to Kentucky for the first time.

For the Drunken Unicorn class material, Beam supplies the entry-point examples — what mass-market bourbon does well, where it sits on the price ladder, and why understanding the canonical lineup is the precondition for understanding what the smaller craft programs are reacting against.