Sam Cecil Talks About The Beam Family.

The Beam Family Reunion is coming up on September 8, at the Jim Beam Distillery in Clermont, Kentucky. If you are descended from Jacob Beam, you should check it out.

Like most of the Beams, Sam Cecil was born and raised in Nelson County, Kentucky. Like so many of them, he spent his entire career in the whiskey business. In his case, the career spanned more than 40 years. Even after he retired in 1980, Cecil worked occasionally for Heaven Hill, giving history-oriented tours of Bardstown and vicinity.

In 1999, he published The Evolution Of The Bourbon Industry In Kentucky, an invaluable historic resource. Cecil died in 2005.

In 1992, he was interviewed for the documentary "Made and Bottled in Kentucky," which you will see is available for purchase in the column to the right. If you live in Kentucky, you can probably catch it on KET, where it first aired 20 years ago and is still in heavy rotation.

In this excerpt, Sam Cecil sorts out the many threads of the whiskey-making Beam family.