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...