ONCE A DISTILLER, ALWAYS A DISTILLER

When Jim Rutledge retired from his position as master distiller at Four Roses in 2015, he had been in the Bourbon industry a year shy of half a century. He started out in the research and development department at the old Calvert Seagram Distillery in Louisville in 1966, spending time at the company’s offices in New York, and eventually landed at Four Roses Distillery, where he went on to become the master distiller in 1994.

Seagram owned five distilleries in the United States, but by the late 1990s the company was facing bankruptcy and sold all