Iom Bullock was an African American bartender who was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1872. He worked at the Pendennis Club in Louisville for a time before moving on to work at a country club in St Louis and then as a porter on the railroad, but his claim to fame is that he wrote one of the first bartending manuals in history, The Ideal Bartender. Today, Evan Williams tour guide George Harrison reenacts the Ideal Bartender Experience several times a week for visitors at the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience on Main Street, blocks away from where Bullock worked when he wrote his book.
“There’s not really a lot of written history about him, which we discovered when we started putting the show together back in 2020,” says Harrison. “By about 1927 or 1928, he sort of disappeared from a lot of written history. We do know
