Alcademics

As part of a visit to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, I visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries in September. Today I'll talk about the bottling line at Jim Beam.

I've seen a lot of bottling lines in my day, and not one of them has been interesting until this one. At Jim Beam, the huge operation and tons of machines were really cool. And loud.

They bottle something like 300 bottles of Jim Beam per minute on this line, plus other products like Canadian Club and Mount Gay Rum that may be blended and bottled on site. We walked through several rooms of machines bottling regular Jim Beam, minis, and other products. There were machines for wax dipping, ones that build boxes around the bottles, ones that fill the bottles, and labeling machines at the end. Here are a couple of videos I took.

The first video is of the line where boxes are built around the bottles of Jim Beam.

And the second one is just some fast bottling in action.

Bonus videos of a rapidly fermenting vat of what will become Jim Beam is here, and a giant box-wrapping machine here.