Fred Rosen, Creator of the Modern Booze Superstore, Has Died

 

Fred Rosen, former CEO of Sam's Wine and Spirits, the first booze superstore.

Forty years ago, when I was contemplating a move to Chicago, a friend from my Louisville days, a Chicago native, advised me on many matters. He helped me get a lawyer, told me where to buy my suits, and because his father-in-law had been a liquor distributor in Chicago, he told me about Sam's.

Sam's was named for its founder, Sam Rosen, who started it in 1942, but it was his son, Fred, who put Sam's Wine and Spirits on the map, building it into a local institution, described by some in the industry as the first liquor superstore. Fred Rosen died on February 4 at age 88.

The original Sam's was on Halsted Street at North Avenue, then a much more marginal neighborhood than it is now. The legend, according to my Louisville friend, was that there was no glass in the windows, but the store was never robbed because it was guarded by ferocious German shepherds.

As Ashok Selvam wrote in his appreciation of Rosen on Eater, "He transformed a cut-rate liquor store into a destination where out-of-towners would visit and fill up their trunks with booze they couldn’t find anywhere else."

Fred Rosen moved the store from Halsted into a much larger space in a new shopping center further west on North Avenue, then into an even larger space in the same complex. A few branch locations followed. Binny's bought Sam's in 2009. The Marcey Street Binny's is the former Sam's.

Chicago has a long tradition of colorful booze merchants, beginning in the 19th century with Gardner Chapin and Jim Gore, whose Chapin & Gore store and saloon dominated the Chicago market until Prohibition.

In the post-WWII era, three names stand out. In addition to the Rosens at Sam's, you had Harold Binstein, founder of Binny's, and "Max the Hat" Zimmerman.

Binstein opened his first Gold Standard Liquors store in 1948, one block south of Wrigley Field. Binny's house brand is Clark & Sheffield, a reference to that first store's location. Harold died in 1995. His son, Michael, runs Binny's today. 

"Max the Hat" Zimmerman had the biggest store in downtown. It's now the Binny's on Grand Avenue. Zimmerman opened his first liquor store in Chicago in 1933, as soon as he could after Prohibition’s demise. It was in the old Cambridge Building on North Wells. He mostly sold whiskey and other spirits at first. The only wine in the store was in pints. “Sweet wines were big, stuff like Mogen David,” Zimmerman told a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1992. Known as “Max the Hat” for his trademark Stetson, Zimmerman died in 1998. 

Fred Rosen's youngest son, Brian, is the founder of InvestBev, the nation’s largest beverage alcohol private equity fund.

Hitchcock, "Blackmail," and Sliced Bread

The crucial scene in "Blackmail" (1929).

There is a new documentary out called "Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail." It is currently available on TCM and MAX. It shows how director Alfred Hitchcock in "Blackmail" (1929) and other early films was developing his signature style.

"Blackmail" was Hitchcock's first 'talkie' and, in fact, the first film by a British studio that was entirely synchronized. There had been earlier films with lip sync in maybe one scene. So-called 'talking pictures' were so new and unproven that "Blackmail" was also released in a silent version, with title cards in place of spoken dialogue.

That's not what this post is about.

After watching the documentary, I wanted to see "Blackmail" itself. It's interesting for many reasons. The murder for which the heroine is blackmailed is actually self-defense, to stop an attempted rape. With nearly Victorian modesty, the attempt takes place entirely behind a curtain. Because there is sound, we can hear the struggle. Suddenly, we see a hand reach out through the curtain in desperation. On the bedside table is a loaf of bread and a bread knife--the murder weapon!

This is where I got distracted. Was it realistic, in 1929, to show an unsliced loaf of bread, needing to be sliced at table with a knife? Or was this a cinematic contrivance, a way to introduce the murder weapon? Was sliced bread still that uncommon in 1929?

It turns out, the answer is yes. One-hundred years ago, if you wanted a sandwich, you took a loaf of bread from the bread box, got your bread knife, and cut off slices of the desired thickness. This was not something you did once in a while, with a home-baked loaf or something special from the bakery. This was every day. Bread did not come sliced. If you wanted a slice of bread, you sliced it yourself.

(Whether or not a bread knife would be sufficiently stabby is a different question.)

The first practical bread slicing machine was invented in 1928, so right about when "Blackmail" was being made. It caught on so quickly that by 1933, 80 percent of all bread was sold already sliced. It was a big deal and led to a saying you still hear today, when some new invention is dubbed "the best thing since sliced bread."

It never occurred to me, when I heard that expression from my grandparents, that they remembered when bread was not sliced.

The transformative power of technology is nothing new and does not need to involve computer chips. Some innovations can change our lives so quickly we forget how it used to be in a generation or two. I'm old, so I remember when television was brand new.

To veer back into my usual lane, another technological change that occurred during that same period was to bottle-making. Bottles have been around since antiquity but until the early 20th century, bottles were all individually hand blown and expensive. Products like whiskey were not routinely sold in bottles. If they were, the bottles were likely filled by a dealer, not by the distillery. Brown-Forman began to sell Old Forester Bourbon in bottles in 1870. The Bottled-in-Bond Act was passed in 1897, but bottling didn't become common until Michael Owens invented the first commercially successful, fully automatic bottle-making machine in 1903, in Toledo, Ohio. When alcohol was re-legalized in 1933, bottling was not only common, it was mandatory. By law, distilled spirits like whiskey could only be sold in sealed bottles.

I also remember 78 RPM records. They were already old-fashioned when I was a kid, but my mom had quite a few. One of our favorites was the original cast recording of the "Peter Pan" musical, which we also enjoyed on TV. Captain Hook, in those broadcasts, was played by the actor Cyril Richard, who was the rapist in "Blackmail."

After 20 Years, Old Commonwealth Bourbon Is Back (Sort of)

 

The original.

In 2019, three entrepreneurs purchased a historic distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky and several brands associated with it. One of those brands, Old Commonwealth, was the distillery's name when Julian Van Winkle owned it and that’s the name the new owners are using. Last year, they relaunched the Old Commonwealth brand.

The distillery had other names and owners in its long history. Before Van Winkle it was most associated with the Ripy family. The most famous brand made there was Ezra Brooks Bourbon, which the Ripys never owned. Neither do the new owners of Old Commonwealth. Ezra Brooks is owned by MGP and made at their Lux Row Distillery in Bardstown.

When Van Winkle owned Old Commonwealth, the stills and related equipment were long gone. He used the offices, bottling hall and warehouses. Van Winkle bought bulk whiskey from Stitzel-Weller, his family’s former distillery, and other sources, which he bottled as Old Rip Van Winkle and other brands. Some of those were store brands, created for a customer. His biggest customer in those days was The Berghoff, a German restaurant and bar in downtown Chicago, for whom he bottled Berghoff Bourbon.

The Old Commonwealth brand was created for Joe Congiusti (Joe C), the legendary whiskey buyer at Sam’s Wine and Spirits, a huge, single-location retailer in Chicago. Joe C wasn’t just a buyer, he was a whiskey enthusiast who participated in the burgeoning whiskey community. When Congiusti moved to Binny’s in 2002, Old Commonwealth Bourbon became available there too. 

Also in 2002, Julian Van Winkle closed the Old Commonwealth Distillery and moved his operation to the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort. 

Binny’s bought Sam’s in 2009, but both Joe and Old Commonwealth were long gone by then. Joe died in 2004. Old Commonwealth Bourbon had died a few months earlier.

Old Commonwealth was a 10-year-old bourbon. It was introduced in 1999 or thereabouts and sold for about $20 a bottle. (For context, a bottle of Jim Beam cost less than $10 then.) I knew from Julian Van Winkle that it was wheated bourbon from Stitzel-Weller, the same batch he was bottling as 10-year-old Old Rip Van Winkle, which was selling for about $30 in those days. I became a regular purchaser of the Old Commonwealth version. Joe C worked out of the Binny’s Lincoln Park location, so I started to buy my Old Commonwealth there, because that store was more convenient for me than Sam’s, and I liked chatting with Joe. 

One day in fall of 2003, I was at Binny’s, talking to Joe, and picked up a bottle of Old Commonwealth to buy. “You know, Julian has discontinued that,” said Joe. “Those are the last two cases.” I bought one of them on the spot.

Later that day I went to the bar Delilah’s to interview its owner, Mike Miller, whose own Delilah’s 10-year-old bourbon was some of that same stock. I mentioned seeing Joe and told him about the Old Commonwealth situation. I later learned that as soon as we finished talking, Miller drove over to Binny’s and bought the remaining case. There may have been a bottle or two left on the shelf, but that was effectively the end of Old Commonwealth Bourbon.

The new Old Commonwealth is also a 10-year-old bourbon, but not a wheater. The new label is very similar to the original, except the new neck label says “Cask Strength” instead of “Small Batch.” The shape is a little different and the subtle 'VW' logo is gone, naturally. The new version is 131.83° proof whereas the original was 107°. Another difference is the price, $20 in 2004, $200 in 2024. 

True Crime Among the Bourbon Barons

 

After Prohibition, Old Crow advertising emphasized the brand's history.

The tale of the 1895 Brown-Gordon murders may seem like a stretch for a publication devoted to American whiskey, but the involvement of a principal in America’s most successful whiskey company makes bourbon part of the story. 

W. A. Gaines & Co., makers of Old Crow Bourbon, revolutionized how whiskey was made and distributed in the United States. They took corn whiskey, a product disdained by most sophisticated drinkers, rebranded it as bourbon, and crushed the old-style rye and malt whiskeys from back east. 

The scandalous 1895 murder of a governor’s son and bourbon baron’s sister-in-law shocked the state and scandalized the nation. It was so consequential it inspired “Careless Love,” a popular song still performed 130 years later. 

We started this story in the previous issue of The Bourbon Country Reader and conclude it in the new one, out now. (Volume 22, Number 6)

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Brown-Forman No Longer Makes Barrels. A Historical Perspective

 

Made in Louisville, but on their way to Tennessee.

Brown-Forman started its press release today by reminding us that the company is 155 years old. That’s one way to say they take a long view. In part, that’s their business. They are one of the four companies that produce about 70 percent of America’s whiskey, a beverage that takes years to make. 

The press release describes several changes at the company, including to executive leadership, although Lawson Whiting remains as CEO.

Leadership changes are routine. The bombshell is the announcement of a 12 percent reduction in the company’s global workforce. That’s about 650 people. About 200 of them currently work at the company’s Louisville cooperage, which will close permanently.

Brown-Forman began as a whiskey company and, ironically, a non-distiller producer of whiskey. As the industry changed and making whiskey from scratch, rather than buying it, made more sense, they became distillers.

From the beginning, where Brown-Forman really excelled was in marketing, especially branding. Old Forester was named for a prominent Louisville physician and marketed as medicine. Brown-Forman was a leader in developing western markets for whiskey at a time when most of the nation’s population lived east of Louisville. The company stayed in business during Prohibition as a medicinal whiskey supplier.

Brown-Forman is still controlled by its founding family, the Browns and their branches, but it is a public company. As you would expect for a 155-year-old firm, it has gone through many changes.

In the 1950s, the Browns teamed up with the Motlows to make Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey the leading American whiskey in America and the world, and Jack now challenges Diageo’s Johnnie Walker for supremacy among whiskeys of all kinds. When the #1 bourbon doesn’t have the word ‘bourbon’ on its label, you know you are dealing with branding geniuses.

After WWII, Brown-Forman decided to make its own barrels, and founded a cooperage not far from its Louisville headquarters. At the time, bourbon was booming. Historically, many distilleries made their own barrels, in some cases on site. When Brown-Forman started its cooperage, not far from its distillery and headquarters, several other distillers were doing the same thing, including Schenley, then the largest U.S. distilled spirits company. Its cooperage was also in Louisville.

Fast forward to the late 20th century. The American whiskey industry contracted dramatically in the 70s and 80s, and every distiller except Brown-Forman sold or closed its cooperage. Brown-Forman, and likewise Jim Beam, had most of their marbles in the American whiskey basket, so the first thing they had to do was broaden their portfolios. They did that but in the 1980s, that was no longer diversification enough, so Brown-Forman bought some other companies, all luxury goods, positioning themselves as a mini LVMH. 

Then fashions changed again. Wall Street no longer liked diversification. Investors wanted ‘pure plays,’ so Brown-Forman went back to concentrating on its distilled spirits portfolio and, most of all, its brands. The company has a massive revenue stream just from licensing the Jack Daniel’s logo. 

Brown-Forman always had a policy that its brands had to either be #1 in their market segment, or #2 with a strong shot at #1. Brands that didn’t meet those standards were sold or discontinued. The only exception was Old Forester, for sentimental reasons. 

By the 1990s there were just two cooperages supplying new barrels to the entire whiskey industry, as well as some percentage of the wine industry. The biggest, then and now, is Independent Stave (ISC), founded by the Boswell family in 1912 and still owned and run by them. The other was Bluegrass Cooperage, owned by Brown-Forman.

As the 21st century began, and with it the bourbon boom, Brown-Forman decided to stop selling barrels outside the company. It needed all it could make for its own hot whiskey brands, which in addition to Jack Daniel’s were Early Times, Woodford Reserve, and a resurgent Old Forester. Since they no longer needed to hide behind the independent-sounding Bluegrass Cooperage name, they rechristened it Brown-Forman Cooperage. 

The plant they’re closing now is in an industrial area just east of the Louisville airport. It includes some open space for letting wood season outdoors, usually for six months to a year. The property’s footprint is about the same as it was in 1945, and there is no room to expand. Over the years they crammed as much as they could into that facility, ultimately doubling its output. For probably half of the cooperage’s existence most of that output has been put onto trucks and shipped to Lynchburg, Tennessee. Even as the Kentucky-based brands grew, Jack grew more. In 2014, Brown-Forman opened a new, modern cooperage in Alabama, 80 miles from Lynchburg instead of 250.

That probably spelled the end for the Louisville facility, but when Brown-Forman decided to sell the Alabama place last year, that signaled the company probably would exit the cooperage business altogether, which it is doing now.

Back at the end of the 20th century, when ISC and Bluegrass were the only cooperages supplying whiskey-makers, Brown-Forman didn’t necessarily want to be in the cooperage business, but neither did it want to be at the mercy of a monopoly for such an essential input. So, they made and sold barrels. And the other Kentucky distillers bought them for the same reason, even though it meant doing business with a direct competitor. Now, although ISC is the largest and clearly dominant, they don’t have a monopoly. There are alternatives. No longer must Brown-Forman be one of them.

The way the cooperage business works is this. Although ISC owns some forests, most growers of oak for barrels are independent property owners. They hire independent logging crews to harvest the oak and haul it to the nearest stave mill. There are many stave mills, and they are located near the forests. Although the cooperages don’t own the forests or the logging companies, they do own the stave mills. As the name suggests, stave mills cut logs into barrel staves and head pieces, which are sent to the parent cooperages for seasoning and manufacture. Most barrels for American whiskey are charred, and the cooperage does that too. ISC is based in Missouri but has cooperages in Kentucky. As long as so much whiskey is made in Kentucky, it will only make sense to make barrels there too.

So, while it sucks for the 200 people who will lose their jobs, and it’s sad to see an 80-year-old business close its doors, Brown-Forman is just sticking to its knitting. Brown-Forman is a brand builder. They tried to make “we make our own barrels” a brand attribute, but it didn’t resonate. In truth, barrels are a commodity, much like corn and rye. Perhaps in the future they won’t even make all the whiskey themselves. For Brown-Forman, shareholder value is in the brands. Everything else is incidental.

Witness to a Long, Slow Fade

 

A Lazarus newspaper ad from a little before my time (1928).

It was fifty years ago, yet I remember the moment. 1975. I had just joined an advertising agency in Columbus, Ohio, to work on the Lazarus account. I was with some Lazarus executive, and we were walking through their print advertising department, which was a room with maybe 50 artists, hunched over paste-up tables, working on newspaper ads. 

I don’t remember the exact context, but the executive knew I was new and was giving me an overview of the business. He commented that department stores had been in decline ever since World War II. Many stores had closed. Most others had consolidated. Columbus still had Lazarus, Cincinnati still had Shillito’s, and Dayton still had Rikes, but they were all part of Federated, along with many other stores across the country, all still nominally autonomous, but slowly becoming mere brand names. I came to the job from one of the few remaining independents, Dayton’s Elder-Beerman.

The fact that this conversation took place in the store’s print ad department was a coincidence, but symbolic of the changes underway. In the 70s, Lazarus had something like 20 pages of ads in every daily paper and probably three times that many on Sunday. The store did all their print advertising in house, a department of probably 100 people, but they farmed out their radio and TV commercials to the agency where I worked and there were, like, three of us on the account. The decline of newspapers paralleled the decline of department stores, their primary advertisers. I was there at the beginning of the shift from print to broadcast.

Most cities of any size had multiple department stores in their 19th century heyday, but by the 1970s most were down to one or two. Columbus had just one, Lazarus. Their executives joked that their primary competition was their own Budget Store. In fact, what was killing them were specialty stores. One of the first big successes was The Limited, whose first store was in Columbus, one block north of Lazarus on High Street, across the street from the state capital. The Limited was revolutionary because they only carried what were known as junior sizes. They had cherry-picked one of the department store’s most profitable departments. As time went on, every department was poached in this way.

My college girlfriend was, by then, an assistant glove buyer at Halle's, a department store in Cleveland. Department stores were in my blood. My grandfather ran the maintenance department at Sterlings, another Cleveland department store. His mother-in-law, my great-grandmother, worked there as a salesclerk. Coincidentally, I think she sold gloves.

But I was 22 years old when that conversation at Lazarus took place. What I took from it was that I probably should get out of the department store advertising business as soon as possible, which I did eventually. It took me a couple of years, and I never got completely out. When I moved to Chicago in 1987, it was in part to work on a project for Montgomery-Ward, then still a moderately important national department store. I never worked on the Sears business, also based in Chicago, but had a close relationship with a studio that did most of their ad photography. I worked with chain drug stores for most of my professional career.

Although only 22, I had already made one major change in my work trajectory. Many more would follow. Looking back, I think I tended to follow this wisdom from Issac Wolfe Bernheim, a 19th century bourbon baron. “Wealth, in my humble opinion, is not a thing of luck, or the result of a deliberate and carefully fought campaign of industry, but rather the good judgment to take advantage, at the right time, of opportunities when they present themselves.”

The Business of Creativity Can Be Tough

 

In this stock image, 'business' is represented by a guy in a white shirt and tie while 'creativity' is represented by a lightbulb bursting with color, which is some pretty lazy creative.

About ten years ago, I wrote about what happened when a very creative micro-distillery owner got into a conflict with his investors. The company survived and thrived, and so did he, separately, so there is no reason to rehash that incident, but back then it got me thinking about what sometimes happens to creative people in business. 

Creativity is a characteristic that is valuable in any pursuit, in business or just daily life. But for some people, being creative is the job. I spent most of my career in the world of advertising and marketing communication, where 'creative' is a job title, the name of a department, and the term used to describe the work product itself, as in, "have you finished the creative for the new campaign yet?"

The person in charge of all that stuff is called the creative director.

In organizations of all kinds, managers sometimes think of employees as mere cogs in a machine, each essentially the same, easily interchangeable and replaceable. That's always a mistake, because every person is unique. Managers who think that way often do so because they are convinced it is they who make all the difference, not the people who work for them. But mostly it's a problem that happens when managers who come from one discipline are charged with managing people from a different one.

I was raised to be sensitive to this. Dad was an engineer for an appliance manufacturer. He complained often about the 'bean counters' who cared too much about cost and not enough about product quality. 'Bean counters' to dad were pretty much everyone in the offices except the engineers, so that was management, accounting, sales, and marketing. 

For me as a freelance creative working in marketing, I had to be wary of prospective clients who shop for creatives like they're shopping for a new phone. Hiring the right creatives is more about the ability to connect and communicate with that person than it is about how much they cost or even whether or not you like their past work. When it was apparent that a prospective client had no real idea what I do, I backed away. You have to, because it's bound to become a problem eventually. A client, or boss, who fundamentally doesn't understand what you do can't direct you productively or evaluate you fairly.

Sometimes it's just an irritant but it can become a nightmare.

Creatives, therefore, have to develop the ability to spot bad bosses in advance and avoid them, but in a long career you inevitably miss a few. That can amount to a serious career setback or, at the least, a real solid period of unpleasantness, but you have to be true to yourself and pay the price to get back on track. You learn from it and move on. But, for God's sake, learn from it. Examine what blinded you to the warning signs. From my experience it's usually money, or fame, or prestige, or power, or something that looks like an easy score. Some or all of these seduce you and you don't recognize what you later realize was obvious from the beginning.

But if you learn from the experience, then it's worth it.