How Four Roses Went From the Brink of Ruin to Bourbon Icon With the Help of One Man
Back in 1994, when master distiller Jim Rutledge walked into the Four Roses distillery in Lawrenceburg, KY, the situation was dire.
“The quality had gone bad, and it had been going really bad for about three years or more,” he recalls. “They were making two or three changes a day to the distillation process. Nothing worked.”
This decline was especially jarring given that the brand’s parent company, Seagram’s, was famous for its exacting standards and obsession with consistency. Across its global operations, Seagram’s drilled into employees the mantra of “Do it right the first time,” whether that meant pulling a bottle with a crooked label from going to a customer or paying farmers above market rates to secure the best grain. Perfection was the expectation.
The problems began when Seagram’s pulled Four Roses Bourbon from the U.S. market and replaced it with a blended whiskey—a small amount of straight whiskey stretched with a large amount of neutral spirit. The move cheapened the domestic product and damaged the brand’s reputation.
At the same time, the straight bourbon being made in Kentucky had slipped in quality as Seagram’s shifted the distillery toward volume and away from the meticulous standards it applied elsewhere.
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Rutledge had been asking for years to return to distillery operations. During one annual review in New York, his boss finally asked if he’d been serious about wanting to go back.
“No,” Rutledge joked, “I’ve just been kidding you for the past 11 years.”
He was transferred back to Kentucky in 1992, first overseeing the barrel warehouses 50 miles from the distillery and spending as much time as he could inside the plant.
In April 1994, a Seagram’s executive vice president visited him in Kentucky and laid out the crisis: the distillate quality at Four Roses had been poor for more than three years, and the company was preparing to shut the distillery down and contract production elsewhere. When Rutledge returned from a short assignment in New York that fall, he was put in charge of the distillery and immediately set about trying to save a site whose roots stretch back to the 19th century.
“We went through one change at a time,” he says, describing altering the temperature settings and pressure levels, as well as making adjustments to the yeast and mash. He spent nights alongside operators as a way to build their trust. “They knew things weren’t right, but they had no say. I wanted them to have as much say as me and tell me what they knew.”
Every day, Seagram’s would rank the unaged spirit the distillery made on a one to four scale. By February 1995, Four Roses had its first top‑rated distillate in more than three years.
“In 1997, we won the top-quality award for Seagram’s,” Rutledge says. “We had 257 or 258 lots of bourbon that year, and four were threes, the rest were fours. The average for three prior years was 1.96. We came a long way in a short time.”
That marked a critical turnaround moment for the brand. “From that point until June, we continued to get better and better,” Rutledge says. In the end, the quality team in New York refused to let the distillery be shuttered, arguing Four Roses’ whiskey was too good to abandon.
“Without Jim’s persistence to bring Four Roses back to the U.S. and his relentless support once it returned, there's no question that the brand would not be where it is today,” says Brent Elliott, the current master distiller of Four Roses.
The success of turning around Four Roses capped his long and decorated career at Seagram’s, which started in 1966 at its Calvert Distillery in Louisville. But his decision to originally join the company was almost accidental. “I had two offers, ironically, on the same day—one was Philip Morris, one was Seagram’s. Philip Morris offered me $500 a month. Seagram’s was $550. That was the decision, $50 a month,” he says. “It wasn’t that I had family tradition or anything. In fact, I think my mother almost disowned me when I started working for a beverage alcohol company. But I couldn’t have made a better move. It was luck, and luck panned out.”
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Rutledge started out running the bottling line but he also spent stints in shipping and ultimately production. He proved to have a real knack for distilling and in 1977 was transferred to Seagram’s office in New York. There, he served as the company’s chief industrial engineer and later assistant manager of the production division’s budgets and standards department.
“I was able to work with all the distillery production facilities," he remembers. He’d “go to each plant for budget reviews and begin to see a lot more about quality.” He also handled long‑range planning for barrel inventories, which was a role that proved critical when global demand for Four Roses surged in the late 1980s.
Rutledge carried those lessons back to Kentucky. At Four Roses, he rebuilt quality by focusing on fundamentals and by listening to the people on the floor. “I talked to them, got to know them, let them get to know me,” he says. “By the end of it, we were really tight. I felt like I had the best team. I never saw anybody better.”
Looking back, Rutledge says the awards mattered less than the people. “I was offered money, a cash award, and I said I didn’t do this. It was all of us together,” he recalls. Instead, he used the money to buy everyone jackets with the Four Roses logo.
Rutledge retired from Four Roses in 2015, but he never really left. He stayed on as a mentor to new distillers, offering guidance long after his contracts ended—a reflection of his deep devotion to the brand. He also briefly partnered on a post‑retirement venture called J.W. Rutledge Distillery, but the project is no longer active.
For Rutledge, the proudest achievement wasn’t just reviving a whiskey but saving jobs by keeping the Four Roses distillery from closing. “Quality is excellent, but it takes all of us focused together,” he says. “That’s what I’ll never forget.”