Frederick Stizel

Frederick Stitzel was born in Germany to Dominick and Magdelena Stitzel. Frederick emigrated to the U.S. with his family at the age of 14. His father and two brothers, Philip and Jacob. The Stitzel family was first recorded living in Louisville, Kentucky area in 1855.. 

The three brothers eventually opened their own distillery in 1872, appropriately naming it Stitzel Brothers Distillery. There, they conducted experiments with different mashbills of bourbon. They produced brands such as Fortuna, Glencoe, Mondamin, and “Old Fred Stitzel.” They also experimented using wheat instead of rye in their bourbons. They never commercially produced the wheat mash bill, but instead passed that information on to Jacob’s son, Arthur Stitzel, when he opened his own distillery in 1903. The Stitzel Brothers distillery itself remained open until Prohibition.

Frederick Stitzel was rated by Whiskey Magazine as one of the top 100 “greatest whiskey people” in history.  In 1879, Frederick gained a patent for a tiered storage system that would allow air circulation around the barrel and become the standard for most rickhouses in the United States. Before this, barrels were stacked directly on top of each other, which was very risky, setting the possibility for many problems to occur. Each barrel held about 53 gallons of whiskey, and filled weighed around 550 pounds, so that direct stacking often caused major leaks, risk of fire, loss of product, wood splitting, and collapses. 

Frederick’s new system consisted of what he called rails; basically, these are small shelves attached to heavy-duty framing to support the weight. The rails are spaced far enough apart so that when a barrel is placed on its side, each end would be supported by a rail. A warehouse worker could then easily roll a barrel all the way down to a bottling area without lifting it. The system also allowed for the barrels to be turned from time to time, assisting the aging process. Stitzel also designed it so that the system is constructed in independent sections. This made it more portable and easier to configure in a warehouse. On the contrary, warehouses using pallets to stack barrels on top of each other does not allow the air to fully circulate around the barrel to encourage the maturation process.

1880 patent of Frederick Stitzel’s ‘Barrel Tiering Design for Whiskey Storage’

Not only did Fredrick invent the tiered rack system that is used in warehouses today, he also invented a signal system for the railroad industry that would require circuits to be placed at the beginning and ends of a block of rail, so that when the train drives over the circuits it will send a signal for caution or danger to the conductor and to other potential traffic on the rail line.

Frederick died in 1924 and was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville. His nephew, Arthur Philip Stitzel, would go on to make a name for himself with the A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery. Then, later, tet another moniker for the distillery came about when W.L. Weller & Sons combined with the A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery to form the distillery known since as Stitzel-Weller. The Stitzel name remains legendary in bourbon, leaving its mark in history when it produced the Pappy Van Winkle product line. The ever-popular Van Winkle product caused the Stitzel-Weller Distillery to earn the nickname “The Cathedral of Bourbon.”