by bourbonv » Sat Jun 16, 2007 10:53 am
Mike,
Chuck is correct when he states athat Julian Van Winkle was not a distiller but he is mistaken when he implies that W L Weller and Sons acquired A Ph Stitzel Distillery. They came together in a partnership so it would be equally as wrong to say that A Ph Stitzel Distillery acquired W L Weller and Sons.
What happened was that when prohibition came along Stitzel had a license to sell and W L Weller and Sons piggybacked upon that license as well. They could do this because the A Ph Distillery officers were A Hp. Stitzel - Pres., Alex Farnsley V.P., Julian P. Van Winkle Sec.-Treas. and the Officers of W L Weller and Sons was Julian P Van Winkle Pres., Alex Farnsley V.P., and A Ph. Stitzel Sec.-Treas. This developed into the formal partnership and merger of the companies after prohibition.
Van Winkle was the salesman of the group. He had a talent for marketing and sales as well as being very good at managing salesmen. Farnsley was the money man who also was an executive at the Bank of St. Helens in what now is Shively. Stitzel was the distiller who came fro a distilling family. His father and uncles had founded Stitzel Bros. distillery and the Glencoe brand before selling out to the Hollenbach family. His uncle staid on as distiller until prohibition. Another uncle of his designed the barrel ricking system used in warehouses today. He opened his own distillery on Story Avenue and that distillery (DSP17) was the distillery that made whiskey during the latter part of prohibition for not Stitzel and Weller companies, but also Frankfort Distilleries and Brown-Foreman.
Stitzel was a distiller but by the time that the distillery started making whiskey in 1929 he was hiring people to make the whiskey for him. He hired Elmer Beam in 1929 and I do believe that it was Elmer Beam and A Ph. Stitzel who designed what would become the Stitzel-Weller wheat recipe for bourbon. It is interesting that so many people today say that wheated bourbon has to old, as in over 6 years old, to be good. It was designed as a bourbon that would taste good at ages as young as 1 month old. It was Stitzel's way of filling the shelves with their whiskey when prohibition was over.
When the Stitzel-Weller distillery was built, I presume that Elmer Beam stayed with the new owners of the Story Avenue Distillery, Frankfort Distillery. Stitzel-Hired Will McGill as distiller andthere were several Beams that came to work for him. There were also some Medley and Dant relatives as well. In many cases the they were a combination of the three families.
It all comes back though to the fact that Pappy Van Winkle was a marketing man before his time. He and his crew at Stitzel-Weller came up with many new, interesting concepts such as barrel proof W L Weller. It was because of the successfull marketing crew led by Van Winkle that Will McGill and the distillery crew were able to make the whiskey, because if you can not sell bourbon and make money at it, you don't make bourbon and a lot of people become unemployed.
Mike Veach
"Our people live almost exclusively on whiskey" - E H Taylor, Jr. 25 April 1873