A drink with… Jim Rutledge, Four Roses

Four Roses master distiller Jim Rutledge talks distillery capacity, age statements and why a flavoured Bourbon will never happen on his watch.

Jim Rutledge says Four Roses will never make a flavoured Bourbon while he is master distiller

You’ve been in the business for almost 50 years, what’s the biggest change you’ve seen during that time?

We’ve come light years since I first worked at the Four Roses distillery as a shift supervisor in 1969, when everything was done manually. If we wanted to increase the flow rate between the fermenter and still, we’d have pencil marks on a valve and it would take us an hour or so to adjust things. But today we just punch it in the computer and boom, it’s done. Everything has become automated and we’re so much better off than back in the 70s because there’s not as much room for human error. The quality of Bourbon has improved dramatically.

Surely another change is the demand for Bourbon?

I’ve seen the demand go up and down like a rollercoaster ride, but over the last 5-6 years the demand for Bourbon has been increasing at a steady rate and that’s here to stay. It started when the Bourbon business began to move away from standard products to focus on premiums like single barrel or small batch and limited editions; that brought more focus and attention to the quality of the product. Social media has also had a big impact. If you introduced a new brand 25 years ago you had to use the traditional billboard, magazine, and newspaper route and it would take a year or two for word to get around. Now it happens overnight.

How well placed is Four Roses to meet that demand right now?

Over the last three years domestic sales in the US have gone up by 42% (2010), 58% (2011) and 71% (2012). Those are numbers you can never ever plan for, especially when you’re planning for 10 years down the road. But the economic downturn had a huge impact on our business. We were number one in Spain, Italy, Greece and a lot of other markets that have never recovered from the recession. That freed up a lot of barrels to use in domestic sales. So we might be able to weather the storm. It’s extremely unfortunate what’s happened in the global economy, but that’s the only reason we’ve been able to sustain our level of growth.

Will Four Roses be increasing capacity soon?

We will have to expand our distillation, fermentation and cooking capacity in around four years’ time to keep up with this growth. Right now we’re looking at a low-range global sales forecast, which the increased US demand is driving. Japan is our number one market, France is number two, but we expect the US to overtake Japan within two years.

Why is Four Roses so big in Japan?

It happened back in 1988, when our industry had been declining by 3-5% a year since the 60s. The rest of the world stayed on track, but Japan shot through the roof. We were already number one but it caught our entire industry with our pants down. So we made some changes and picked up some inventory to satisfy demand. Four years later the rest of the world began to trickle up.

Four Roses doesn’t carry an age statement. Was that a strategic move?

Some distilleries choose to put an age statement on their whiskeys but I’ve refused to let that happen, because sometimes you get yourself in trouble by waiting on birthdays of barrels; you can never hit your target flavour profile. More often than not it has a negative impact rather than positive, and for that reason we’ve chosen not to put age statements on bottles. A lot of people in the Scotch industry are shying away from it too, as they are now in a position where they can’t sustain the age and are trying to catch up with their stocks.

Four Roses currently doesn’t make a flavoured whiskey, but would you like to?

If someone wants a blackberry-flavoured Bourbon drink, ask your bartender to make you one. It’ll be a hell of a lot better than something out of huge bulk tanks and put in bottles. If you ever see a bottle of Four Roses with cherry flavour, you know I’m retired, because before that time it will never happen. I believe Bourbon is good enough to stand on its own two legs.

Would you call yourself a traditionalist, Jim?

Yes, absolutely.