The reservation confirmation said dinner started at 7:00 PM. By 6:45, the parking lot at James B. Beam was quieter than I'd ever seen it — no tour buses, no families with kids, no visitors in matching group t-shirts working through a bourbon trail passport. Just a dozen cars and the smell of something cooking inside The Kitchen Table that I couldn't quite identify.
That's by design. The Clermont Supper Club is a monthly event, capped at a small number of guests, built around a single bourbon expression and a four-course menu developed to match it. James B. Beam runs more consumer events than any other distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail — Gym Beam Day, Baker's 90th Birthday celebrations, Horses & Heritage — but the Supper Club is different. It's slower. More intimate. The kind of evening where the chef comes out between courses and Freddie Noe ends up at your table talking about his father.
January's dinner was built around Little Book Chapter 10.
ABOUT LITTLE BOOK CHAPTER 10
Little Book is Freddie Noe's personal project — the expression that he gets to define from scratch each year, unconstrained by the requirements of any established brand. Every chapter is a blended whiskey combining straight whiskeys of different grain types and ages, selected and assembled by Freddie himself.
Chapter 10 continued that tradition with a blend that included a high-rye bourbon, a wheated bourbon, and a Tennessee whiskey, aged between four and fourteen years. At 121.1 proof, it's the kind of whiskey that rewards water — not because it needs to be tamed, but because opening it up reveals layers that full-proof concentration keeps compressed.
Freddie described it at dinner as the chapter where he started trusting his instincts more than his notes. Whether that reads as confidence or nostalgia probably depends on where you are in your own relationship with bourbon.
THE MENU
The Kitchen Table's chef designed the four courses around a specific characteristic of each pour — not pairing food to bourbon the way you'd pair wine, but using the food to draw attention to something in the whiskey that might otherwise go unnoticed.
First Course: Smoked Trout Rillettes
Paired with: Little Book Chapter 10, neat
The smokiness of the trout echoed the char note in the bourbon without competing with it — a subtle reference rather than a mirror. The effect was to make the vanilla and dried fruit in the whiskey more pronounced by contrast. It was a clever opening: restrained, educational, setting up the flavors that would carry through the rest of the meal.
Second Course: Butternut Squash Bisque with Spiced Cream
Paired with: Little Book Chapter 10, two drops of water
Adding water to a high-proof whiskey isn't dilution — it's unlocking. The water breaks the surface tension and releases aromatic compounds that proof keeps bound. The bisque pairing made this visceral: the sweetness of the squash amplified the caramel notes that emerged in the opened-up pour in a way that was almost embarrassingly direct.
This was the course where the table started talking to each other.
Third Course: Dry-Aged Duck Breast with Sour Cherry and Toasted Grain Jus
Paired with: Little Book Chapter 10 over a single large ice cube
The grain jus was the move here — a reduction made partly with spent grain from the distillery, tying the food to the production process in a way that felt earned rather than decorative. The duck's richness stood up to the whiskey's proof. The cherry cut through both.
Fourth Course: Bourbon Bread Pudding with Salted Caramel
Paired with: Little Book Chapter 10, neat
The bread was made with the Beam yeast — the same strain maintained since 1795. By the time dessert arrived, the dinner had been a two-hour conversation about process, family, and flavor. Ending on the bread made from that yeast felt like a closing argument.
THE CONVERSATION WITH FREDDIE
Freddie Noe moves through a room the way someone does who grew up in a room like this — comfortable, unhurried, genuinely curious about who's at the table rather than performing interest. He stopped at every seat during the dinner, but he lingered at ours when someone asked about the difference between blending for consistency and blending for expression.
The short version of his answer: blending for consistency means starting with the target and working backward. Blending for Little Book means starting with the whiskeys and seeing where they want to go. The craft is in knowing when to stop.
The longer version involved his father Booker, a story about a warehouse fire that changed the profile of one batch permanently, and an observation about how the bourbon industry has changed in his lifetime that he asked us not to repeat publicly. We won't. But it reframed how I thought about the glass in front of me for the rest of the evening.
HOW TO ATTEND
The Clermont Supper Club runs monthly at The Kitchen Table at James B. Beam Distilling Co. Each dinner is ticketed separately and sells out quickly — typically within the first few days of availability. The format varies: some evenings focus on a single expression like Chapter 10, others are structured as comparative tastings across multiple releases.
Tickets and event announcements are posted at beamdistilling.com and shared via the distillery's mailing list. If you're not on the list, get on it.
The Kitchen Table Restaurant
James B. Beam Distilling Co.
526 Happy Hollow Rd, Clermont, KY 40110
Reservations and event bookings: beamdistilling.com
The Clermont Supper Club is the version of the distillery experience you don't find in the tour brochure. It's quieter, slower, and more expensive than a standard visit. It's also the version where the bourbon starts to feel less like a product and more like a place — and you understand, maybe for the first time, why the people who make it keep coming back to work every day.
The next Clermont Supper Club dates are listed at beamdistilling.com. Availability is limited.
