There’s the clatter of machinery, the buzzing of saws and pounding of hammers — all inside a 1920s brick and wood factory, where Brown-Forman Cooperage workers make 2,700 whiskey barrels each day from white oak.
With Brown-Forman investing $135 million to expand its Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey and Woodford Reserve Kentucky Bourbon brands, the 230 production workers at the Louisville barrel-making assembly line are getting overtime, even as the company plans to open a new cooperage in Alabama this spring to keep up with demand.
“Our production is as high as it’s ever been,” more than 600,000 barrels a year, said Darren Whitmer, operations manager at the plant on the west side of Louisville International Airport on MacLean Avenue. “It gets tougher and tougher for us every day.”
The growing popularity of bourbon and whiskey worldwide is helping to bring back Kentucky’s forest and wood-products industry from the recession that caused it to tank in 2009, said Jeff Stringer, a UK forestry extension professor and co-author of Kentucky Forestry Economic Impact Report for 2013-14. Stringer and three other UK professors — Billy Thomas, Bobby Ammerman, and Alison Davis — co-wrote the report made public Thursday.
“The most fragile part of this whole thing is logging,” because the cost of fuel, tires, and equipment “put them in a squeeze,” he said. But the industry, he said, “is coming back.” It is adding jobs and money to the economy after some segments of it saw production cut in half a few years ago. “Our analysis indicated it provided more than 59,000 jobs and a total economic impact of $12.8 billion in 2013,” Stringer said.
From The Courier-Journal: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/money/personal-finance/economy/2014/04/03/kentucky-annual-forest-industry-report/7254397/