When Jacob Beam cooked up his first batch of bourbon back in 1795, debts were settled with duels. The American Dream was still taking shape. And you added more horsepower by, well, adding another horse. A lot has changed over the past 213 years. But at Jim Beam things have remained more or less the same. They've spent all that time painstakingly and passionately perfecting Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. Proud that the world's finest bourbon is still made by the same family, pretty much the same way. That's how it's been for generations.

Jim Beam's jug yeast is a closely guarded family secret, so important, that Jim would take some of it home with him on the weekends. A tradition that continues today, through the efforts of Jim Beam's great-grandson and seventh generation Beam family distiller, Fred Noe. It's the same strain of yeast used since prohibition, more than 75 years old. It ensures the same Jim Beam consistency in every bottle, the bottle of Beam in your granddad's picture carries the same DNA as the bottle you can buy right now just about anywhere in the world. The jug yeast is placed in a tank and is fed a hearty diet of ground up grains to create dona yeast, used in the fermentation process once the mash has been cooked up