Female Master Distiller Sips Success in Spirits Industry

"I didn't know much about whiskey, other than the taste,” she recalls, “but I figured, if I like it, great. If I don't, I'll move on to something else. That was 30 years ago."

A whiskey ‘dream team’ of women

In her current position, Holmes oversees the aging, blending, batching, proofing, sourcing, finishing and bottling of whiskeys sold under the Milam & Greene Whiskey brand, a flagship brand of Ben Milam Whiskey producer Provision Spirits. At the 2020 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, the distillery earned double gold medals for its Milam & Greene Straight Rye Whiskey finished in port wine casks and Ben Milam Barrel Proof Straight Bourbon.

The distillery is owned and run by women, an anomaly in the male-dominated spirits industry. CEO and master blender Heather Greene is a world-renowned whiskey expert, the first woman to serve on the Scotch Malt Whisky Society tasting panel in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a current judge on other prestigious tasting panels. Entrepreneur and partner Marsha Milam helps create expansion plans for the company and is an integral member of what she calls the “whiskey dream team.”

The fact that women lead the distillery has been an advantage, Holmes says. “Women are generally very detail-oriented. They're very organized. They follow through,” she says. “We keep each other on our toes."

But that doesn't mean it's easy to be a woman in the industry. Holmes purposefully uses her initials instead of her first name in her email address because she doesn't want to reveal her gender.

"I like to surprise people when they walk into the distillery and find out the head distiller is a lady and not a guy,” she says.

The distillery world was a patriarchal one before craft distilling burst onto the scene in the early 2000s and more women became head distillers. It's an evolution that doesn't surprise Jake Norris, a Denver-based distillery consultant and founding head distiller for well-known Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey.

"The industry was always headed up by rebels and nonconformists,” Norris says. “People who are attracted to this industry tend to like to do things their own way. They don't necessarily wait for someone else's permission."

Courtesy of Marlene Holmes

Pandemic not curbing business

For Holmes, the transition from Jim Beam to Milam & Greene has been smooth. She already knew about fermentation and the need to start with high-quality grains and could speak the lingo. The only difference was switching from continuous distillation to batch distillation.

Not long after Holmes was hired at Milam & Greene, she took a whiskey-blending class for in-house staff, taught by Greene. With input from Holmes and the rest of the participants, including others on the company payroll, Milam & Greene's 94-proof Triple Cask Straight Bourbon Whiskey was born.

While many craft distilleries have been hit hard by the pandemic, given closed bars and massive unemployment, Milam & Greene Whiskey is entering new territory. As of October, the company sold products in its home state of Texas as well as California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma and Washington, D.C. The brand expects to be in at least one more market — and add more labels — by the end of 2020.

Holmes does get to travel back to her home state of Kentucky: Milam & Greene is aging some of its whiskey in a distillery there to bump up inventory. Holmes recently helped make 300 barrels in a week's time at the Kentucky site to get a better understanding of how heat affects the aging process differently than in Texas.

The job demands strength and fortitude. The barrels Holmes rolls, once full of whiskey, can weigh as much as 500 pounds. “I'm banking on it keeping me in good shape,” she says.

The business is also experimenting with different mash bills (the grain mix used to make whiskey) and different barrel sizes and char levels (barrels are toasted and charred before they hold whiskey, influencing taste and aroma). Holmes loves the variety of flavors that can be created. One new wheated whisky from Milam & Greene smells like banana nut bread.

"It's in a barrel now,” she says, “doing its thing in the rickhouse."