Despite the current rise of cocktail culture, it’s a good bet that most of us order our Old Fashioneds or Manhattans without a lot of consideration about how the spirits in our glass are produced. But not Courtney King, Engr ’18. King’s role as distillery manager—the person responsible for running all operations—at Bulleit Distillery in Shelbyville, Kentucky, has her thinking about bourbon most hours of the day. to their student days.
“We are a 24-7 facility,” King explains. “I may go home each night, but the plant doesn’t stop running.”
“I can’t imagine not being in this industry. I love it. It’s like that perfect blend of engineering and art.”
— Courtney King
King’s path to the distilling world was serendipitous. While still a chemical and biomolecular engineering student at Johns Hopkins, she knew she wanted a career focused on manufacturing but couldn’t pinpoint the right field. When her father casually joked that if she took a job far from her Virginia home, she should be living somewhere and doing something that would make her family want to visit. It was, she says, “a lightbulb moment.”
Keeping in the back of her mind her family’s love of food and drink, and focusing her search on companies that had leadership training, King discovered Diageo, the parent company of high-profile beverage brands like Tanqueray, Guinness, and Johnnie Walker. She submitted an online application, was called the next day for an interview, and was hired soon after.
After completing three one-year rotations in manufacturing, project management, and what Diageo calls “Manufacturing Excellence”—a deep dive into learning the company’s business model—as part of the company’s supply leadership development program, King moved to Bulleit Distillery in 2022 as a distillery team lead. Just under a year later, in January 2023, she was promoted to distillery manager, where she oversees the entire production process from the intake of raw materials through mashing, fermentation, and distillation.
A distillery manager, says King, does “a little bit of everything.”
She evaluates the quality of grain used to make the liquid—industry speak for the variety of products a distillery produces—and builds out annual plans that help her extrapolate the amounts of raw material, including grain, yeast, enzymes, and barrels the distillery will need. “When we’re actually in the weeds of production,” says King, “I look a lot at our conversion efficiency—how well are we converting our starches in the grains we’re receiving into sugars and then alcohol. I’m looking at the quality of that liquid and making adjustments as needed.”
Although much of King’s current work focuses on planning and special projects, she says she calls on her chemistry and engineering backgrounds on a regular basis.
Bulleit’s quality control team routinely uses HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography) to identify components in a sample and NIR (near-infrared spectroscopy) to analyze starch content in grains. “I took a materials class at Hopkins as an elective,” King recalls. “And I remember going through a lot of those analytical instruments, and here I am using them again.”
There’s also more engineering involved in distilling than most people might think, says King. Historically, bourbon production has focused more on the art of production: Each producer would tweak a traditional method or combination of ingredients to produce a signature style in small batches, she explains. With the rise of larger companies relying more on automation, she says, the depth and breadth of available production data to analyze and track have grown.
“I’ve got data that I’m analyzing all the time,” says King. “I look at quality data, temperatures, flow rates, proofs, mass balances, and heat balances.”
“When I first started in the industry, I knew separations and heat transfer from my classes at Hopkins,” she says. “In fact, our professor used distillation and whiskey production as examples for separation! Still, I didn’t expect to use these lessons on a day-to-day basis as much as I do.”
King adds that in retrospect, another required class at Johns Hopkins—focused on soft skills and taught by Bob Graham in the school’s Center for Leadership Education—made a significant impact on her career. “I’ve had five roles in six years,” she says. “I wouldn’t be where I am without the soft skills. The technical stuff you can learn. To communicate effectively, to have difficult conversations, to write an email professionally—those things are core to what I do now.”
King says she is thrilled to be a part of Bulleit and to work with people who share in the joy of producing a quality product.
“I can’t imagine not being in this industry,” she says. “I love it. It’s like that perfect blend of engineering and art,” she says.
photograph courtesy of Bulleit Frontier Whiskey