Tom Bulleit

The Bulleit family has been in and out of the whiskey business for six or seven generations and as it was something Tom Bulleit grew up with.

While his father pushed Tom to be a lawyer first, he stayed fascinated with the distilling business and the family legend that his great, great grandfather Augustus had a recipe, or a mashbill, for a bourbon that hadn’t been adopted by anyone else since he stopped a long time ago (according to legend).

After years of practicing law, Tom spoke to his father about distilling and his father said “well, that’s between you and your banker Tom.” Tom had to go on his own in 1987. Starting out, Tom sought counsel often from Bill Samuels at Maker’s Mark. 

In 1995, He contracted Buffalo Trace to make Bulleit and mostly intended to sell it in Japan, where he was already doing business as an attorney. Seagram’s wanted to launch a brand with a frontier name, originally planned as “Bullet”, but decided instead to buy Tom’s brand, and Seagram's Bulleit Bourbon was born under Four Roses distillate.  Decades later, Tom was inducted into the Bourbon Hall of Fame in 2009.