There were many faults to this “business” logic, but the core issue was that those suits and ties didn’t understand that bourbon was not a widget produced on an assembly line that had an easy on/off switch. It was a process, a unique and special culmination and expression of trial-and-error choices that had been made and refined over a period of over two hundred and fifty years: You had to cultivate the bourbon’s taste, coax out the flavors and the balance, guide the elements to their apex of existence—and then send it out to your customers under a label of distinction. Hell, he took as much pride in safeguarding the No. 15 brand, the company’s most successful but less-expensive line, as he did the higher-cost, longer-aged products, such as Black Mountain, Bradford I, and the ultra-exclusive Family Reserve.
If he interrupted production now? He knew damn well they were going to come back to him in six months and tell him to mislabel the barrels.
Six months to the suits was just half a year, twenty-six weeks, two seasons.
But to his palate, he could distinguish a nine-and-a-half-year bourbon from a ten-year and one-day bourbon. And maybe a lot of their customers couldn’t tell the difference, but that wasn’t the point, was it. And the fact that many of their competitors mislabeled on a regular basis? Hardly the standard to follow.
If Edward were here, he thought, he wouldn’t have to worry about it. Edward Baldwine was that rarity in the Bradford family—a true distiller, a throwback to the early era of the august lineage, a man who valued the product that was produced. But that presumptive heir to the throne was now not involved with the company anymore.
So there was nowhere to go with this.
And the fact that the memo had just been left on his desk to be found? It was typical of the way things had been running ever since Edward’s tragedy. The pussies at the business center knew he’d have a fit over this, but they didn’t have the balls to come and tell him in person. Nope. Just write a memo and throw it on top of all the other papers, like it wasn’t going to fundamentally affect the core of the business.
Mack went back to staring up at the rafters that were made out of old-growth timber felled a century ago. This was the very oldest of the company’s storage facilities, and it was used to house the very special barrels. Located by the original still site—which was now both a museum for tourists as well as where his office was housed—this place was a damn shrine.
The soul of his father walked these corridors.
Mack was convinced he could feel his old man at his heel right now.
Convinced, too, that on a quiet day like today, when the only things in the warehouse with him were the sunlight that drifted in from the cloudy windows, the sound of his boots on the concrete, and the mist of the angels’ share drifting in and out of those shafts of illumination … he was one of the very few champions of tradition left in the company.
The new kids that were coming in—even the ones who wanted to get where he was—professed love for the rituals and the fundamentals and claimed to be committed to the process, but were really just corporate minions in khakis rather than suits. They were from a generation of special snowflakes who expected trophies for showing up, and everything to be easy, and for everybody to care about them and safeguard them as their parents would.
They had no more depth than their Facebook posts. Than their relentless egoism. Than their soulless frivolities.
In comparison to the forebearers of this company, who had shepherded this product through famines and wartime, disease and the Depression … through Prohibition, for godsakes … they were boys trying to do a man’s job.
They just didn’t know it, and with a corporate culture like this? They never would.
“Mack?”
He looked over his shoulder. His secretary, Georgie O’Malley, who had run his father’s office before Pops had died, had come in behind him without making a sound. At the ripe age of sixty-four, she was forty-one years with the company and showing no signs of slowing down. A self-professed farmer’s wife who was without a husband or a farm, she was a kindred spirit in the war against the current climate of everything being disposable.
“You okay, Mack?”
Mack looked back up at the angels’ share wafting in and out of the shafts of light so high above.
The angels’ share was sacred: Each white oak barrel was charred on its inside before being filled with fifty-three gallons of bourbon. Stored in a place like this, in an environment that was purposely not climate controlled, the wood of the barrels expanded and contracted seasonally, the bourbon inside becoming colored and flavored by the caramelized sugars from that burned hardwood.
A not-insignificant portion of those gallons evaporated and was absorbed into the barrels over time.
That was the angels’ share.
It was what his father had considered the sacrifice to the past, the serving that went to the forebearers to drink up in Heaven. It was also the pay-it-forward to your own passing … the hope that the next shepherd of the tradition would do the same for you when you were dead and gone.
“There’s going to be nothing left of us, Georgie,” he heard himself say.
“Whatchya’ll talkin’ about?”
He just shook his head. “I want you to tell the boys to shut down the sills.”
“What.”
“You heard me.” Mack lifted his fist over his shoulder so she could see what he’d wadded up. “Corporate’s putting a freeze on corn orders for the next three months. Minimum. They’ll let us know when we can make more mash. Any rye, barley, and wheat we got right now is to be repurposed.”