Starting a whiskey business in the mid-1990s, when bourbon was in the doldrums and rye nearly extinct, required a certain amount of faith. Good thing, then, that Joseph Magliocco got his undergraduate degree in religious studies. “There’s a Holy Spirit and there’s spirits,” he jokes.

Luckily, Magliocco already had some background in the wine and spirits industry, having grown up helping at his dad’s import and distribution business. He bartended in college and, despite a side track to law school, returned to wine and spirits in the 1980s, working for a Connecticut distributorship led by former Four Roses president Charlie Wells.

It was a tough time to be entering the business. “If you were a distributor and were down 12%, you were beating your chest because the other guy was down 14% or 16%,” Magliocco recalls. “The goal was to do less badly than the other guys.”

By the mid-1990s, Magliocco was working for a small startup called Chatham Imports, casting about for spirits that would fit a niche amid the prestige vodkas and sweet liqueurs that were popular at the time. Though the glut of the 1980s was past, whiskey distilleries were still happy to offload barrels of aged stock, which seeded the gamble that Magliocco made: buying the trademark for the historic Pennsylvania brand Michter’s and reviving it with 10-year-old Kentucky bourbon and rye—styles that were not exactly bestsellers at the time.

That was what Magliocco calls phase one: bottling sourced whiskey. The next phase began when Michter’s started to lay down its own new-make, running its custom recipe and specs through an unnamed distillery’s plant. By the mid-2010s, the company was distilling at its own site, located in Louisville’s Shively neighborhood: phase three. And in 2019, Michter’s opened a prestige tasting room and mini-distillery on West Main Street in Louisville.

Nowadays, it’s hard to find a whiskey drinker who doesn’t enjoy Michter’s. The brand is the only one to be named “World’s Most Admired Whisky” by Drinks International twice. But it’s taken Magliocco and his company nearly 30 years to get to this point, and the journey wasn’t always smooth or straightforward. Michter’s faced criticism over the years for everything from the use of a historic name to distilling the whiskey at someone else’s site.

The Unicorn Review talked with Magliocco about what it meant to take a risk on bourbon and rye back in the 1990s; whether the haters ever got to him; and just how old the bourbon in Michter’s 10-year really is.

The Unicorn Review: When you got into selling American whiskey in the 1990s, it was not popular at all. Did you guess that demand would eventually swing back again?

Joseph Magliocco: I wish that I’d had the foresight to know how bourbon and rye were going to grow over the next 25 years. I had no clue in reality. I wish I could take credit for that. I can't.

In the 1990s, Chatham Imports was a startup and just trying to figure out how to stay in business and hopefully grow a little bit. I didn’t have a lineup that anybody really wanted. So one of the things that I decided to try was American whiskey.

I knew that you could make great American rye and that there was great American rye out there. I thought that maybe a category that was declining [as rye was], that was way too small for a big supplier to focus on or worry about—that small amount of business might be meaningful to a startup. And so I decided I was going to concentrate on American rye. There really was very little American rye on the market and it wasn't the same as the ryes on the market nowadays.

[Michter’s executive vice president] Steve Ziegler and I went to distributors and told them our plan and that we’re going to do just 10-year-old rye. They said, “You're nice young guys, but you're really stupid. You're not going to sell anything, so at least do bourbon.” So the first two types of Kentucky Michter’s that we came out with were 10-year bourbon and 10-year rye.

How did you come across the Michter’s trademark?

I actually sold Michter’s as a summer job between sophomore and junior year [of college]. My job was to close out gold-plated King Tut mini [decanters] of Michter’s—the distributor of New York was overloaded with them. It was my first sales job. I was familiar with Michter’s Sour Mash, which was their lead item in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I liked it. I was very familiar with the brand and the brand history. And it just disappeared. It seemed like a shame—I thought it had one of the great histories for American whiskey.

After extensive due diligence [in the 1990s] with our law firm, they said, “Look, the way to acquire this is just go to the U.S. patent trademark office. Anybody in the world can do it. And if you really want to own the Michter’s name for whiskey, pay $245.”

So we paid the $245 and we became the owner of the Michter’s name. We had no whiskey, no formulas, no packaging, nothing—just the name and an idea.

What was the process of acquiring those first barrels of bourbon and rye?

It was Steve, me, and Dick Newman [a bourbon industry veteran who was working for Michter’s as a consultant]. This is the 1990s. There was little to no market for age-statement bourbon in those days. Everybody was just thrilled to get rid of inventory and everybody was especially thrilled to get rid of old inventory. And they were ecstatic to get rid of rye.

Dick kind of knew everybody. We went to a bunch of good distilleries and tasted around their stuff. There was wonderful stuff, different styles, and Steve and Dick and I picked a style that we liked and that if we were ever lucky enough to have our own distillery, we wanted to make ourselves. That was the plan, and that's how we got started.

Did you always have in mind that you would build a distillery for the brand?

In 2003, we started working with a company where we put together a distillation program. Technically we were a non­­-distiller producer because we did not own the facility, but it was a lot more than just buying stuff that somebody else made. A certain number of days were Michter’s days. The same yeast that we use now, the same mashbills we use now, our barrel specs, and physically, we would go there.

I say it was more like a chef that can't afford his own restaurant yet doing a popup in somebody else's restaurant. That was phase two. Everybody was operating under capacity then. But then as the brand grew a bit, and as the whiskey business turned, it became more apparent that if we wanted to continue that we really would need our own distillery.

Now that Shively has been laying down whiskey for a decade, is everything 10 years and younger from the distillery?

Unless you find some straggler bottle of US*1 that's many years old on the shelf, it's going to have Michter’s Shively whiskey. Andrea Wilson, our master of maturation and COO, and Dan McKee, our master distiller, they really watch the barrels. We release stuff when the two of them feel that it matches the flavor profile for what we want it to be. You may have a barrel of US*1 that's ready at five and a half years; you may have another barrel that takes seven years to be what we want it to be. The US*1s are typically five to seven years.

Our 10-year-olds are typically older than the age statement on the label. A lot of people know that. For example, in 2022, [we tasted] the whiskey that they were thinking about releasing as 10-year bourbon. It was 13½ years old at the time. Steve and I thought it was great. Andrea and Dan said, “It is great, but if you let us hold it one more year, it'll blow your mind.”

So for one year, we sold no 10-year bourbon, even though we had 13½-year-old stuff that I thought was really outstanding that we could have sold. But we let them be the gatekeepers. So we released it at 14½ years old. And we've had 10-year bourbons that are older than that.

Michter’s received criticism from some whiskey drinkers in the 2010s, when there was less widespread understanding of non-distiller producers than there is now. Did that bother you?

Everybody's entitled to their opinion. And fortunately, the commentary over the years has been much more positive. It wasn't just us. There were people who were very critical of anybody that didn't have enough money to own their own distillery. We just didn't have the financial resources. But I'm very proud of the stuff that we sourced in phase one. I'm very proud of the stuff that we made in phase two.

When all is said and done, I think that the hallmark of a company is the product that they put out. We have tried very hard as a team for years to make sure that anything we put out is something that we think is really good. We've said for many years, whether we're doing it or not, the goal is to try to produce and offer the greatest American whiskey. And that's what we've been trying to do. But again, certainly when you go on the internet, there's a lot of different opinions.

When Celebration came out in 2013, it was priced far higher than any other American whiskey up to that point—somewhere in the range of $3,400 to $3,600—and that decision took some flack from critics. What was your thinking?

There's a wonderful store called Wally's in Southern California. In 2011, I'm looking at the Wally's Christmas catalog, and I'm seeing these beautiful scotches and cognac blends for thousands of dollars a bottle. I said to Willie Pratt, who was our first Kentucky master distiller, could you put together something that's really special and nuanced and complex and can rival the best stuff from anywhere? He said, “Sure I can.” And he did. By the time that he got done with the blending and we released it, it was 2013. And yes, the price was unheard-of for American whiskey at that time, but we've heard of bottles of the 2013 release being sold for $40,000 a bottle [nowadays].

Celebration has company in the ultra-luxury price band now, like Double Eagle Very Rare. Is it good to have that kind of competition?

I think it's great for the category. We're exporting to over 80 foreign jurisdictions right now, and Michter’s is well received around the world. We've tried hard, as have other great distillers in America, to show the world that American whiskey can really be one of the world's great, great, great spirits. And I think that there's a growing appreciation of that around the world to a degree that wasn't there 15 or 20 years ago.

You’ve never appeared to be in a hurry to rapidly expand. But at some point, Michter’s crossed over from a slow burn success to achieving almost cult-like status with whiskey drinkers. Is that an accurate read?

We started really, really small. The 10-year bourbon and 10-year rye, our first two types released, came in a three-pack, as they still do. And the first month that we sold 50 three-packs total in the entire U.S.—150 bottles, it's kind of pitiful—we threw a party in the office. We were so excited.

We've always gone for controlled growth. There's a lot of things you can do in the whiskey business to put more out more quickly and less expensively. But that's just not us.

We made a conscious decision that even if we grow more slowly because of it, we are going to do nothing to compromise the quality. We're not going to try to release stuff that's minimum age. We're not going to lower the proof as some companies have done.

The most recent rickhouses we built, the walls are 14 inches thick. It's reinforced concrete in between. We do a lot of things and take a lot of expensive steps that are way beyond industry standard, but we do it because we're trying to put out a whiskey that's different. Of course, we're hoping to grow—not fast growth, but to grow with maintaining the quality and, if anything, just continue to make it better.