Max Shapira
“Second Generation President”
Max Shapira was the only son of Ed Shapira, one of the five brothers who founded Heaven Hill Distillery following the repeal of Prohibition. Max has been with Heaven Hill for 48 years, and as the head of the bourbon behemoth, a period of rapid growth, expansion, and brand acquisitions took place. Max helped make Heaven Hill the world’s second-largest bourbon distiller by volume.
Dating back to 1935, five local Bardstown businessmen, including Ed and David Shapira and Mr. Joseph L. Beam (Jim Beam’s cousin), put their heads and their wallets together and started a distillery. The Shapira’s initial investment was 40% of total start-up costs and equaled $17,500 (Mr. Joe had a 20% share at $8,750) into a company that had no still, no warehouses, no brand names, and no inventory. That amount is the equivalent of $330,000 in today’s monetary value. Nevertheless, on December 13th, 1935, the first barrel was filled at Heaven Hill Distillery. The name of the company was chosen from William Heavenhill, a farmer who previously owned the land where the distillery was built. An old wives’ tale claims that when one of the partners applied for the distillery permit, he typed the name wrong as two words instead of one. In any case, the name stuck. Ed later went to all his other brothers and asked them to join him financially as partners. Around 1939, the five Shapira brothers (David, Ed, Gary, George, and Mose) all agreed to invest another $20,000 to buy out their partners and keep the business running. The Shapira Brothers were inducted posthumously into the Bourbon Hall of Fame as a collective group in only its second class of 2002.
Two of the sons of the five Shapira brothers followed in their collective fathers’ footsteps. Max L. Shapira (1943-present), Ed Shapira’s son, came aboard Heaven Hill at the age of 28 in 1971. Max became the first member of all the Shapira grandchildren to join the family business. His cousin Harry Shapira (1947-2013), who was David Shapira’s son, would also go to work the family business two years later.
Max Shapira was born in Louisville in 1943, and for most of his childhood, he grew up in Bardstown near what would become Heaven Hill Distillery. Shapira left the family in Bardstown and went away to college, earning his bachelor’s degree from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, in 1965. He then went on to earn his master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School in 1967. Among all his siblings and cousins in the Shapira family, it would be Max who eventually assumed a leadership role for the second generation of Shapiras. When he joined Heaven Hill, he became the Director of Corporate Planning after five years at J. P. Morgan on Wall Street, working in corporate acquisitions.
Early on in his days at Heaven Hill, he was thrown into learning all aspects of the distillery business, but specifically, he worked with his father side by side until his father died in 1982. The longest-surviving of the five Shapira brothers was George Shapira, Max’s uncle, who passed away in 1996. At that time, Max took over as President of Heaven Hill in George’s place. Shapira would become the captain of the Heaven Hill ship, guiding it through both good and bad times.
Bourbon was a tough business in the 1980s and 1990s because the whiskey industry was at the bottom of all liquor sales, and almost disappeared. However, under Max’s stewardship, Heaven Hill diversified. It made or bought a branded liquor product in every spirit category. It started buying up other brands when almost everyone else was selling. Max encouraged Master Distiller Parker Beam to ramp up research and development inside Heaven Hill’s laboratories to find new products. They also built upon their current route structure to leverage their new and acquired products with their existing distributors.
In September 2018, Max Shapira became only the third recipient of the Kentucky Hall of Fame’s Parker Beam Lifetime Achievement Award. Only legendary bourbon leaders Jimmy Russell of Wild Turkey and Bill Samuels Jr. of Maker’s Mark had preceded Max in earning the award. The award was named in 2015 for Parker Beam, who joined Heaven Hill in 1960 as a sixth-generation distiller.
Tragedy struck Heaven Hill during Max’s reign as President. On November 7, 1996, a warehouse fire began which eventually destroyed nearly 100,000 barrels of bourbon. The fire began in one of the dozens of wooden warehouses that stored thousands of barrels of aging whiskey. Once it had started, the fire became almost impossible to stop.
The fire then jumped between warehouses, incinerating the wooden holds fed by their extremely flammable contents. Hundreds of firefighters rushed to the scene to be met with walls of flames 20 stories high, which quickly gave way to an 18-inch deep river of burning bourbon. The weather conditions, which included 70mph winds that day, enraged the fire. The responders eventually gave up trying to put out the fire and focused instead on preventing other warehouses from succumbing to the flames.
Miraculously, no one was hurt or killed. Investigators were unable to confirm the cause of the fire, given the extent of devastation, but some believe it was a lightning strike or possibly faulty electrical wiring that caused the blaze.
Seven warehouses holding millions of gallons of whiskey were destroyed, as well as the distillery itself. When accounts were finally tallied, around 2% of the world’s whiskey, and 15% of Heaven Hill’s storage capacity had gone up in flames. In total, the value of the losses totaled $30 million. The Shapiras rebuilt Heaven Hill, and with help from local bourbon “competitors” who stepped in and distilled for their wounded comrades, the distillery was running at full capacity again within a few years. The fire, however, changed several regulations about distilling, including limiting how high future rickhouses could be constructed.
On September 1, 2022, then-President Max L. Shapira assumed the new role of Executive Chairman at Heaven Hill, while his daughter Kate Latts and her husband Alan Latts stepped in as co-Presidents of the distillery from their prior roles of CMO and COO, respectively.
“Over the past twenty years, I have been proud to watch Kate and Allan grow and develop into roles of leadership and increased responsibility,” said Max. “They have added immeasurably to the company’s successes and built a foundation for future generations. They bring the passion for this business that has been a hallmark of our company for 85-plus years. I am highly confident the best is yet to come.
Three remarkable offerings that were released at Heaven Hill during Max Shapira’s leadership tenure.
Contributed by Colonel Craig Duncan, Columbia, Tennessee
