Freddie Johnson is a man who needs no introduction. He’s been a fixture at the Buffalo Trace Distillery for more than two decades, and the number of tours he’s given in that time has to be in the thousands. He’s the third generation of his family to work at the distillery — his grandfather worked with Colonel Blanton — and his own grandson, Osiris, has been present at two of the last millionth barrel celebrations, another long-standing family tradition. Johnson was inducted into the Whisky Magazine Hall of Fame in 2024. On a recent trip to Rothes Glen in Scotland Johnson was able to show his grandson his image on the Hall of Fame wall, and on that same trip while changing planes in Paris Johnson was recognized as “that guy from Buffalo Trace.” Now Johnson is transitioning into a new role at Buffalo Trace: global brand ambassador.
“I started playing here when I was five years old,” Johnson recalls. “Our family used to come down to the boat ramp, and we would fish down there with my dad and my granddad. I remember going into warehouse D, which is right on the bank of the river, and at the time I went in there, they still had the ramps and stuff in place where horses used to walk down through the middle of it, and you would horse the barrels from one level to the next. And that was before they even put in the old belt-driven rick elevators in that structure. So I got a chance to see the original way that they moved the barrels around like they would do over in Scotland and Ireland with a block and tackle and a horse. And I got to see the old-fashioned rick elevators that you had to put tanning soap on the leather belts. Otherwise, with the weight of the barrel, they would slip and drop. So pretty cool fond memories of this place.”
Johnson’s grandfather, Jimmy Johnson Sr, started at Buffalo Trace in 1912, but he and Colonel Blanton were already friends after fishing together on the riverbank in their youth.
“They played around here as kids,” Johnson says. “The Blanton family owned all the land around this part of the distillery, and our family farm was on the lower part, well, actually, the upper part of the river since the Kentucky River flows north instead of the south. But what we would call down below the distillery was where our family farm was. And they met as a couple of kids and became friends. And they were here for 52 years.”
His father, Jimmy Johnson Jr, began his career at Buffalo Trace in 1936.
“The distillery had a working relationship with the employees that when they went off to the war, they would still maintain their salary, and that would go to the family so that the family didn’t suffer while the employee was doing their service duties,” Johnson recalls. “That was in the 1940s, and that’s when Dad and Elmer were in the Air Corps at the same time. They later realized Dad was making landing strips on remote islands and taking care of POWs, and Elmer was a bombardier and his planes were landing on Dad’s landing strips that they were creating during the war.”
Johnson says they discovered their connection many decades later when Mark Brown first began hosting dinners at Buffalo Trace and Elmer T Lee and Jimmy Johnson Jr got to talking. Leadership had tried to get oral history from the two before that, but they were more comfortable telling stories around a bottle of Kentucky bourbon than into a sterile microphone.
Freddie Johnson joined the team at his dad’s behest. He’d worked in the telecom industry his entire life, but when his father got older and started to need more help, Johnson decided to move home to Frankfort. Johnson’s dad had a tradition of gifting Ancient Age sweatshirts emblazoned with “I Get Better With Age” to the wives of his deceased friends on their birthdays, and on one trip to pick one up from the gift shop he was talked into bringing his son along to roll out the next millionth barrel. Before long, Freddie Johnson was giving distillery tours and on his way to becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the Kentucky bourbon industry.
Freddie Johnson has always been active in his community, and in recent years he has become deeply involved in the restoration of the Green Hill Cemetery. When he began, it was believed that it was an African-American cemetery, but as the brush has been cut back the team has discovered it’s the final resting place for all creeds and colors. Buffalo Trace has supported the effort by donating a portion of sales from Freddie’s Root Beer to help fund the maintenance efforts, and because of the attention Johnson’s project has gotten donations have been pouring in from other sources, as well.
“Because of the amount of sodas that have been sold, it has provided enough money that we were able to use the same technology that they’re using in the military,” Johnson says. “We have mapped the old part of the cemetery and what we thought were only about 1,500 grave sites, we have discovered over 5,000 hits. There were 5,000 bodies buried in that old cemetery. So we now have another group that we’re engaging, and they are putting metal plates in the ground. We’ve had certified drone operators give us physical shots of the cemetery. We’ve mapped that against the geophysical hits from the sonar units. We’ve assigned the numbers, and those numbers connect with GPS coordinates. So you can now load somebody’s name into the system, this platform that we’re building, and it will tell you exactly where that person is in the cemetery. It’s the only site like it in North America.”
Johnson has been amazed at the interest his project has drawn because of the connections he has made through the distillery. Through this work he’s met a descendant of the Franklin County plantation owners where his father’s family originated.
“What I’m learning about this whole process is if you take your time and you tell your story in such a way that it gives them a moment to mentally visualize what you’re talking about or what it might be like, it’s amazing how they will take that journey with you,” Johnson says. “And then they start sharing their stories. And that’s when you know you’ve made a connection...”
Johnson has done off-site events throughout his career, but most of the time he’s connecting with people at the distillery site. In his new role, he’ll still be at the distillery sometimes, but he will be traveling more to do public appearances both nationally and internationally.
“I love the global ambassador role, but I also realize that part of that role means that when people abroad have a chance to interact with me, their hope is that at some point they may be back here visiting Buffalo Trace and they’d love to be able to share that experience in coming here and actually being with me here at the distillery,” Johnson says. “These folks that come to Buffalo Trace from other countries, they’re even more excited about me even having the opportunity to come to their countries than I am!”
He’s had people from all over the world invite him to visit them in places like Australia and Japan, and it just so happens that his grandson, Osiris, is learning Japanese on top of going to school for engineering. Johnson’s family legacy at Buffalo Trace doesn’t look to be ending any time soon.
“I’m doing him like my dad and my granddad did me,” Johnson says. “I had helped dad roll out the five millionth and the six millionth barrel, and there was a period of 10 years between those two. We were only doing a million barrels once every 10 years. He’s helped me with the seven millionth and the eight millionth barrels like I did Dad with the five and the six millionth barrels. He will have exceeded me and the number of millions of barrels that he will be able to handle because I think the nine millionth barrel is going to come up later on this year.”
For Johnson, the bourbon world has always been about bringing people together through shared stories and pours, and the deeper the stories go, the greater the impact.
“That’s why I’m excited about all this,” Johnson says. “I think that the global ambassador role will help bring a lot of these cultural differences that seem to be pulling everybody apart right now. I’m hoping that this role will allow me to at least plant some seeds that will help others to realize we’re not as different as you think. That’s part of what I hope that the global role will allow me to do is just bring folks closer together and help make this world a little bit of a better place.”
Click here to read more from this issue of American Whiskey.
