THE BOOT ST O R I E S F R O M T H E T E X A S H I L L C O U N T RY
H O W A B U S I N E SS W O M A N A N D P H I L A N T H R O P I ST ST R I V E S TO P R ES E R V E H I STO RY
A CO U P L E ’ S H O M E F I L L E D W I T H FA I T H A N D FAV O R I T ES
2022 | ISSUE 3
A FO R M I D A B L E W H I S K E Y T E A M A N D T H E K E YS TO S U CC E SS
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Photo is courtesy of Milam & Greene ABOVE:
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Milam & Greene founder Marsha Milam
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THE PERFECT BLEND OF SKILL AND SPIRIT STORY BY JOHN KOENIG
With prizewinning products and a formidable female leadership team, this Blanco distillery has a unique recipe for success.
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n 2015, Marsha Milam went to Cleveland with a longtime client and friend, blues rock guitarist Jimmie Vaughan. The reason: to attend the induction of Jimmie’s late brother, guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. John Mayer was there to induct Stevie Ray. As was Paul McCartney, to induct Ringo Starr. And Stevie Wonder, to induct singer-songwriter Bill Withers. Milam hung out with all of them that weekend. And for the woman who’d built a 30-year career as a concert promoter and music industry publicist, it was a “mountaintop experience.” Yet, it also left her wondering if she hadn’t peaked, if it weren’t time for a change. “I always had this itch in the music business that I could never get scratched,” Milam says. “I’d do a show and have 10,000 people there. And I’d be like, ‘Well, it’s still not 75,000 like ACL (the Austin City Limits Festival).’” A month later, she took a break to tour whiskey distilleries on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. She found herself in a dimly lit, nine-story warehouse (or rickhouse, in whiskey parlance) staring at hundreds of oak barrels full of bourbon, stacked on racks, floor to ceiling. “It was so peaceful, so quiet,” she recalls. “I could smell the dirt, the wood, the bourbon. I looked around and realized that all that was happening there was bourbon aging. And it just blew me away. I fell in love with the whole concept of something taking its own sweet time to do what it wanted to do.”
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Milam returned home to Austin sure of what she wanted to do next in her life: make whiskey. Two years later, Milam had a building in the Hill Country town of Blanco for a distillery and tasting room. She had a brand name, that of an ancestor, Ben Milam, who’d been a hero of the Texas Revolution. She had bottles and labels designed. What she lacked was bourbon from her own distillery that had been aged the required minimum of two years before it could be brought to market. Like many whiskey start-ups, she overcame that by finding a source in Kentucky to provide aged whiskey to her taste for the initial product release of Ben Milam bourbon. Unbeknownst to her, an employee entered it in the 2017 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. It won a Double Gold medal, the competition’s highest award. Milam says the ensuing publicity had the fledgling distillery’s phone ringing 10 times a day with orders from liquor retailers wanting to stock the prizewinner. Despite that out-of-the-starting blocks success, Milam realized she’d have to surround herself with people who knew much more about making and marketing whiskey if she was to achieve her vision for Ben Milam whiskey. And her vision was ambitious. She didn’t want to sell only in Texas. “I wanted to be a national brand, but maybe not everywhere,” she says. “I wanted a quality product that’s findable, available on a national level. But not in every liquor store, just in the five finest liquor stores. Or not in every bar, but in the five best steakhouses. I wanted to have a bourbon that people love and aspire to.” Serendipity delivered experts who could help her make that happen. Milam knew she’d need a good distiller, the best she could get. A woman in that role would be nice, she thought, but gender was not critical to her. Still, an acquaintance knew of a woman in Kentucky who just might fit the bill. Her name was Marlene Holmes and she’d been a distiller for Jim Beam for 27 years. Holmes was talking about retiring to her farm, but had also told the acquaintance she might like to work at a small craft distillery where she could make whiskey more creatively. Milam brought her to 28
Austin for an interview in 2018. “I laid it on as thick as I could,” she says. She took Holmes to dinner, to a show at one of Austin’s live-music venues, and to the first Texas Bourbon Festival, which just happened to be taking place at that time at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. Before boarding the plane for her return flight, Holmes agreed to move to Texas. The next step for Milam was expanding her line of whiskeys. A friend from the music industry knew of a former singer-pianist who’d become a whiskey expert, a woman named Heather Greene. Between performing and recording a few albums, Greene had studied whisky-making in Scotland (where it’s whisky, not whiskey), and become the whiskey sommelier at the revered Flatiron Club in New York City and a brand ambassador for Glenlivet Scotch. She’d also written a book, Whisk(e)y Distilled: A Populist Guide to the Water of Life. It was the first book Milam had read when she set out to learn about whiskey. Renowned not only for her vast knowledge but also for her extraordinary senses of taste and smell, Greene was then working as a consultant. She traveled the country from her home in New York, advising whiskey makers on how to make and market products that consumers would love. Milam sought her advice in 2018 for development of the product that would become the distillery’s Triple Cask bourbon. By Greene’s
third consulting trip to Texas, Milam had seen enough. She offered Greene the jobs of master blender and chief executive officer, as well as a partnership in the business. Greene moved to Texas with her husband and dog in early 2019. And thus, Ben Milam became Milam & Greene. Texas didn’t have a single whiskey distillery—at least, not a legal one— until 2006, the year Garrison Brothers was launched in the Hill Country hamlet of Hye. Now there are more than 60, according to the Texas Whiskey Trail, which organizes distillery tours. The proliferation of distilleries here is being mirrored nationwide, partly in response to soaring consumer demand. U.S. whiskey consumption has doubled since 2009. Several Texas distilleries have won awards for their products in competitive events, like the one held each year in San Francisco. But few, if any, have garnered more attention from the national news media than Milam & Greene. The firm’s website contains links to 30 articles that have appeared in the past two years in publications ranging from Wine Enthusiast and Food & Wine, to Forbes and the New York Times. Some of the articles focused on the novelty of women running a whiskey distillery. The Times published an article last July that ran under the headline, “In the Male World of Whiskey, More Women Are Calling the Shots.” A large photo of Greene and
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CEO Heather Greene wrote the book on whiskey.
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Chief distiller Marlene Holmes.
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The copper pot still custom made for Milam & Greene in Kentucky
Holmes standing before an array of whiskey barrels accompanied the story. To Milam, Greene, and Holmes’ pleasure, more media attention of late has focused on the quality of their whiskey rather than their gender. Forbes reported last August, for instance, that their port-finished rye beat out 550 other contenders to win Best of Show at the annual tasting competition of the American Craft Spirits Association. It also reported that the rye had previously won a double gold medal at the San Francisco competition. That media attention has paid off handsomely. While Greene won’t reveal figures, she says sales have doubled in each of the past two years—this despite a pandemic that has repeatedly shuttered many of the restaurants and bars that Milam & Greene counted on to introduce its whiskeys to customers. The Milam & Greene distillery in Blanco is a modest complex—just two nondescript, mid-size buildings on a three-acre plot tucked behind a NAPA Auto Parts store. The main building houses fermentation tanks, a large copper still, and bottling equipment. Part of it is walled-off and decorated like a dark,
cozy tavern to serve as a tasting room for visitors. Fifty feet away, across a barren patch, stands the barn-like rickhouse where whiskey ages in wood barrels. On a bright Monday afternoon, Greene and Holmes convene in the tasting room to introduce this interviewer to the art and science of whiskey production. And of course, whiskey sniffing and tasting is a required part of the lesson. We sample all three of their mainline products: the Single Barrel, Triple Cask, and Port-Finished Rye whiskeys. Milam & Greene also offers some limited-edition whiskeys, which Greene concocts while experimenting in a laboratory in Austin, where she lives. What is it about Texas that makes Milam & Greene whiskeys different than those produced elsewhere? “It’s not about Texas, it’s about the Hill Country,” Greene corrects. “The Hill Country is its own climate, its own humidity, its own temperature variations throughout the year. Marlene still distills in Kentucky, as well as right here, and we bring back that spirit right away and we get to see how it ages differently than it does in Kentucky. People like to say it ages faster here, but that’s not quite it.
It just ages in a different way. For us, it seems richer, sweeter, more caramelly.” The different flavors and aromas come not from additives, but from the way whiskey interacts with the wood of the barrels in which it’s stored. As outdoor temperatures rise, the whiskey expands, pressing into the wood. And as temperatures fall, the whiskey contracts, pulling flavors back out. The Hill Country’s substantial temperature swings make for a lot of movement. “I tell people it’s like an accordion,” Holmes explains. “Down in Texas, you’re doing the polka. It’s really moving, that accordion is. Up in Kentucky, it’s a little slower. You’re doing a slow dance up there with it.” Their award-winning rye whiskey starts out in Indiana, where the grain is grown, and the whiskey is distilled and aged in oak barrels for three or four years. Then it’s brought to Blanco where it’s finished in barrels that previously held port wine. Holmes expected the rye might have to remain in the port barrels for a year or two before it achieved the flavor they were seeking. But the first batch was ready for market in just two months. “What we got was this best-in-show whiskey that you couldn’t replicate anywhere else,” Greene says. “It’s because of the Hill Country. It’s a representation of how the environment drives flavor uniquely into that product.” Greene and Holmes now direct the art and science of Milam & Greene’s whiskey production. And what about the role of Marsha Milam, the original visionary who brought them to Texas? “We now have people who are far better at everything than I am,” she says. “The one thing I love to do is go see our customers. To go up to Chicago and walk into those liquor stores and see Milam & Greene Single Barrel and Milam & Greene Triple Cask and Milam & Greene Port-Finished Rye, it’s just marvelous. I’m a proud mother.” Milam’s itch that could never get scratched in the music business? It’s getting scratched now, with a chaser. ISSUE 3
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