{"id":55406,"date":"2025-11-11T15:59:37","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T20:59:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine\/?p=55406"},"modified":"2026-06-11T15:51:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T19:51:31","slug":"the-perfect-blend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine\/changemakers\/the-perfect-blend\/","title":{"rendered":"The Perfect Blend"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Despite the current rise of cocktail culture, it\u2019s 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 \u201918. King\u2019s role as distillery manager\u2014the person responsible for running all operations\u2014at Bulleit Distillery in Shelbyville, Kentucky, has her thinking about bourbon most hours of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u201cWe are a 24-7 facility,\u201d King explains. \u201cI may go home each night, but the plant doesn\u2019t stop running.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n

\u201cI can\u2019t imagine not being in this industry. I love it. It\u2019s like that perfect blend of engineering and art.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Courtney King<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

King\u2019s 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\u2019t 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, \u201ca lightbulb moment.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keeping in the back of her mind her family\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After completing three one-year rotations in manufacturing, project management, and what Diageo calls \u201cManufacturing Excellence\u201d\u2014a deep dive into learning the company\u2019s business model\u2014as part of the company\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A distillery manager, says King, does \u201ca little bit of everything.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She evaluates the quality of grain used to make the liquid\u2014industry speak for the variety of products a distillery produces\u2014and builds out annual plans that help her extrapolate the amounts of raw material, including grain, yeast, enzymes, and barrels the distillery will need. \u201cWhen we\u2019re actually in the weeds of production,\u201d says King, \u201cI look a lot at our conversion efficiency\u2014how well are we converting our starches in the grains we\u2019re receiving into sugars and then alcohol. I\u2019m looking at the quality of that liquid and making adjustments as needed.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although much of King\u2019s current work focuses on planning and special projects, she says she calls on her chemistry and engineering backgrounds on a regular basis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bulleit\u2019s 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. \u201cI took a materials class at Hopkins as an elective,\u201d King recalls. \u201cAnd I remember going through a lot of those analytical instruments, and here I am using them again.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got data that I\u2019m analyzing all the time,\u201d says King. \u201cI look at quality data, temperatures, flow rates, proofs, mass balances, and heat balances.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I first started in the industry, I knew separations and heat transfer from my classes at Hopkins,\u201d she says. \u201cIn fact, our professor used distillation and whiskey production as examples for separation! Still, I didn\u2019t expect to use these lessons on a day-to-day basis as much as I do.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

King adds that in retrospect, another required class at Johns Hopkins\u2014focused on soft skills and taught by Bob Graham in the school\u2019s Center for Leadership Education<\/a>\u2014made a significant impact on her career. \u201cI\u2019ve had five roles in six years,\u201d she says. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t 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\u2014those things are core to what I do now.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI can\u2019t imagine not being in this industry,\u201d she says. \u201cI love it. It\u2019s like that perfect blend of engineering and art,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Data is key for distillery manager Courtney King.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":55409,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"issue":[104],"class_list":["post-55406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-changemakers","issue-fall-2025"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Perfect Blend - Johns Hopkins Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Data is key for distillery manager Courtney King.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine\/changemakers\/the-perfect-blend\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Perfect Blend - 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