In less than twenty years, Jim Beam lost over 3 million gallons of their Kentucky Bourbon due to warehouse fires. As a fan of whiskey, that makes me sad. The Irish variety is my thing, but I also dig bourbon, and sip on some Beam from time to time.

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The roots of the Jim Beam product go back to founder Johannes Böhm who was a German immigrant born in 1760 that settled in Kentucky. The guy later known as Jacob Beam was a farmer that started selling his corn whiskey around 1795. This first effort was known as “Old Jake Beam Sour Mash”.

For the nearly the next hundred years, most customers got Beam’s whiskey by bringing their own jugs to the distillery to be filled. By 1880, bottling finally began under the brand “Old Tub” and people actually bought a spirit with such a name.

James Beauregard Beam managed the family business before and after Prohibition. The Old Tub brand was renamed Jim Beam in his honor in 1943. Shortly thereafter, the company was sold in 1945 after 150 years in the same family. It was sold again to American Brands in 1968. Members of the Beam lineage would continue on as Master Distillers, however.

A period of expansion came in 1987, when Jim Beam took over other known brands like Old Crow and Old Grand-Dad. Things were pretty normal in the Jim Beam story until 2003.

On August 4th of that year, lighting struck an ageing warehouse (a building for ageing whiskey, not an elderly structure) in Bardstown, Kentucky. The resulting fire produced flames that rose more than 100ft (~30 meters). 15,000 barrels of bourbon were destroyed, which is 795,000 gallons (3,010,000 litres).

Unfortunately, the firefighters were not experienced with massive alcohol blazes and used tremendous amounts of water in an attempt to extinguish the flames. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of gallons of bourbon being washed into the nearby waterways killing 19,000 fish.

In 2014, the Jim Beam company was sold to a Japanese investment group called Suntory Holdings Limited. Yep, a company that makes alcohol that can only legally be produced in the U.S. (and still be called bourbon) is owned by a company from Japan.

As bad as the 2003 fire was, that was nothing compared to what came next. On July 3rd, 2019, yet another Jim Beam warehouse went ablaze. This event was three times worse: 45,000 barrels or 2,385,000 gallons (9,030,000 litres) ignited. There were fish kills in the Kentucky River and Glenns Creek, but these were relatively limited since lessons were learned in 2003. Instead of flushing the flaming alcohol into the water, firefighters let the whiskey burn itself out.

Despite the massive loss, the product was relatively young, so consumer supply was not affected. It is estimated that this most recent fire cost that Japanese investment firm around $45 million.

So what does 60,000 barrels translate to in regular bottles of Beam you get at the store? Well, a barrel of whiskey is 53 gallons, and a standard bottle is one-fifth of a gallon. That’s nearly 16 million bottles of Kentucky Bourbon lost to fire in less than 20 years. At twenty bucks a bottle retail, we’re looking at $318 million in what would have been sales.