Growing up at the distillery – we spend the day with Freddie Johnson at his second home, Buffalo Trace Distillery
Written by Maggie Kimberl
“Believe it or not, Maggie, I still do walkabouts,” Freddie Johnson says to me as we are sitting in an empty tasting room in the second floor of Buffalo Trace’s visitor center. “I try to envision even today some of the things that I had discovered when I first started coming around here with my dad and my granddad. And I’m still amazed. It’s like trying to grasp what it really must have been like coming in here without all the tools and technology that we have today and still be able to create a story like Buffalo Trace.”
Freddie Johnson was the first tour guide I’d ever had at Buffalo Trace, nearly a decade ago. In 2015, I worked with Johnson and Buffalo Trace to put together a tour geared toward kids, an idea I’d come up with after hearing Johnson talk about growing up at the distillery with his dad and granddad. He’d taught the kids about why settlers chose that location to build a distillery (it was a natural convergence of wildlife trails and a river), taught them about why barrels were shaped the way they were, let them roll barrels around an empty warehouse, and taught them about the engineering and science knowledge needed hundreds of years ago to create a distillery that still functions in basically the same manner today.
He also told the kids the same story that had piqued my curiosity – about evading his dad and granddad in the rickhouse climbing through all the barrels.
“Well, that was a fun thing for me, it was a disaster for them,” he laughs. “As a kid, you don’t really think about the dangers that are associated with those 550-pound barrels. And the rails in these old warehouses, you’ve been to a number of them, you know, they’re just like tobacco barn rails and some of them are bowed out a little bit. And a lot of those barrels are sitting out there just right on the edge. But… I discovered vertical aging warehouses, they’re basically designed for airflow. And as a kid, you could run between the different barrels on different levels and you could actually go on top of one barrel and come out on another floor, which I thought was fascinating.”
It’s hard to imagine running through the maybe one-foot gaps between rows of barrels as an adult, and for Johnson at that time, that was part of the fun.
“The fun part was, you know, just like pet owners, they say after a period of time, the pet owners and the pets start to kind of look alike. Well, that’s what happened to my dad and my granddad. So after a period of time, they had taken on the profiles of the barrels. And I realized they couldn’t squeeze between the rails and I could go down through there. My granddad would grunt and say, ‘Come here, boy. Come here!’ By the end I would be looking around laughing at him because I knew he couldn’t catch me.”
Johnson recounted this story in the documentary Neat.
“Warehouse C is where a lot of those activities took place. That’s what prompted me to flip the script in the documentary Neat. Maggie, I had no idea of the number of lives that would touch. There are fathers and sons that will come in here now, families. I just did a tour, it was four generations – great grandfather, the grandfather, the father, and the son, and their significant others. I guess I might as well add the Holy Ghost! So, the spirits were with them, but they were on a journey and what they had come to realize [was] they could all sit down together and create a memory just sipping and they said, ‘We want to come to Buffalo Trace and do a tour with you and share with you what that moment meant to us.’”
Johnson grew up in Frankfort, Kentucky, where generations of his family had lived. When he graduated from high school he took a job as an engineer for the telephone company, which took him far from home for decades. But when his father started to get sick, Johnson made plans to return home to care for him – not knowing that his father had already made plans of his own.
“Oh, that was a disaster! I didn’t know that he had already encountered Mark Brown,” Johnson laughs. “I had made a promise to my dad that I would try to work at this distillery. I was thinking during my lifetime, he was thinking during
his lifetime.”
At the time, Buffalo Trace was known as Ancient Age, but it was going through the rebranding to Buffalo Trace.
“They’re swapping out the Ancient Age shirts and sweaters for Buffalo Trace items,” Johnson recalls. “Dad had lived longer than his buddies, and he had inherited all of their wives. So his job was to take [them] to the beauty shop and take them on their doctor’s appointments and shopping and all that. But the event of the day was whenever one of them had a birthday. That person would go to the beauty shop and get fixed up, and then they would all go to lunch together. Dad would come back and pick up one of the old Ancient Age shirts, and on the shirt on the front it says, ‘I get better with age.’”
But during the rebrand the shirts were nowhere to be found, which led to Johnson’s father’s first encounter with Mark Brown.
“That’s when Mark Brown found out that dad was the one that handled all the millionth barrels,” Johnson says. “He also found out that I was coming back to take care of him, and he wanted to make sure that this legacy continued.”
Johnson ended up being hired as a tour guide at Buffalo Trace Distillery.
“It was a relationship that I think epitomizes Buffalo Trace today. It was inclusion,” he says.
Since then, Johnson has made it his mission to make sure that every person he encounters at Buffalo Trace feels like they are part of the family.
“When you start touching lives, you don’t really understand the significance of what you’ve done,” Johnson says. “I could have continued my career with AT&T and tried to take care of my dad. But when I saw what his treatments were doing to him, he was terminally ill. I apologized to my dad. I said, ‘I’m coming home.’ Coming back here, walking around this place, letting him share all the knowledge granddad acquired, all the things that he had learned, to be here with them, to be able to share bits and pieces of that with others that come here on the
tours – it brings it to life. A lot of the tour guides, a lot of folks that they meet here, share those experiences, they get folks emotionally connected.”
… Johnson has made it his mission to make sure that every person… feels like they are part of the family
These days, Johnson starts his day at home checking on his tour schedule around 6:30am. He tries not to schedule himself earlier than the first rush of people who come in to buy bottles when the gift shop opens. He doesn’t want to negatively impact the flow of the day because people will often jump off tours to take pictures with him.
And that’s exactly what was going on when I showed up to do my interview –
he got stuck downstairs talking to people who wanted to meet him and take pictures with him.
Johnson is leveraging his status to give back to the community he calls home. Through his church years ago he became involved in restoring a historic cemetery in Frankfort, the Green Hill Cemetery, where generations of his own family are buried.
“I thought when I took on [the] cemetery, I was doing it as a labor of love, because family was buried up there,” Johnson recalls. “We started doing research and found out that a lot of folks that worked here – at one point [there] were like over 1,000 people working [at] Buffalo Trace – some of those families were buried up there. It was never discussed. We start trying to restore the cemetery and we found out that we’ve got Confederate and Union soldiers. Then we started finding out about the African-American troops. The perception was that Green Hill Cemetery was an African-American cemetery.”
What Johnson discovered was that Green Hill Cemetery was one of the oldest cemeteries in Franklin County. It was the final resting place to people of all colors and backgrounds. One day as he was working in the cemetery three vans pulled up and a white woman in her mid-90s began pointing to several graves. It turned out that she was born to a blind mother and she and her siblings had been taken away because the local townspeople didn’t think a blind woman could raise them, but they ended up finding each other later in life. She had brought her family to the cemetery to make sure they knew where they came from.
When Mark Brown learned that Johnson was working to restore the local cemetery, he asked why Johnson didn’t come to him for funding. Buffalo Trace was, after all, part of this community, too, and they wanted to support Johnson’s efforts. That’s when Sazerac came out with Freddie’s Soda, a line of soft drinks from which a dollar of every four-pack goes to Johnson’s 501c3 that supports local restoration efforts.
“We’re going to help you restore these old historical sites around this area, and
you don’t have to just focus on the Green Hill Cemetery,” Johnson recalls from
his conversation with Brown. “After you get done with that, you can pick out
another one. And we will continue this. This will be your legacy, like your dad and your granddad.”
As we wrapped up our interview we walked downstairs to an eager group of tourists excited to have THE Freddie Johnson as our tourguide that day. We walked through the back side of the distillery, learning about bungs, seeing barrel dumps, and spending time in Blanton’s Hall where a batch of Blanton’s Gold was being bottled. We walked through a warehouse, where Johnson explained that the bourbon being made today wasn’t for us, it was for the next generation.
We ended up in the tasting room, where Johnson shared some final nuggets of wisdom he’d learned during his nearly two decades at Buffalo Trace. The most important thing, he said, is to pull out your best bottle of bourbon when you have company to show how meaningful your relationship is and when you aren’t in a rush. Share the best whenever you can because you can’t take it with you and, most importantly, the distilleries are always going to be making more.
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