Al Young

Al Young was born in Louisville, Kentucky in June of 1942, married to his wife Gretchen for 52 years, and worked at Four Roses for 52 years before he passed away on Christmas Day in 2019.

Al joined Four Roses in 1967 working different jobs over the years in the distillery. In 1990, he became distillery manager and 2007 became the brand ambassador. As ambassador he would travel the world and spread the word about Four Roses. Al wrote a book on the history of Four Roses, “Four Roses: The Return of a Whiskey Legend” which came out in 2010.  In 2015, Al was inducted into the Whiskey Magazine Hall of Fame. In 2011,he became a member of the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame.

When Al joined Seagrams in 1967 he was working at Louisville’s Actors Theatre company and about to marry his wife Gretchen. When he was hired, he thanked them and said he needed time off for his wedding and  honeymoon. They allowed him to and he thought this was a pretty good place to work. One of his earliest jobs was working in the sensory lab and then became a lab assistant in charge of setting up samples for the nosing and blending team. Al worked with Jim Rutledge and they both found themselves in Lawrenceburg at the Four Roses Distillery. Jim as the master distiller and Al as the distillery manager. With the two of them working together they lead Four Roses back to prominence after years of decline under Seagram’s. They would travel the country urging consumers to try their bourbon. Jim would tell how it was made while Al told the story of Four Roses.

In his book, he covered not only the brand’s rise to prominence in its pre-Prohibition days, but its decline under decades of Seagram’s ownership as the Bronfman family switched Four Roses from a classic Bourbon into a cheap “bottom-shelf” blended whiskey. 
In 2017, the distillery celebrated his 50th anniversary with the release of a limited release small batch bourbon named just for him. In addition to using some of the whiskey distilled during his tenure as distillery manager, that bottling also revived the 1967 vintage bottle design and label that he had preserved in the Four Roses archive.

Contributed by: Stuart McEnerney, Hartford, Connecticut

with support from Daniel Snyder, Whiskey Founders Sub Committee Chair, Champaign, Illinois