Few people have worked in bourbon as long as Max Shapira. The executive chairman of Heaven Hill Brands is the son of Ed Shapira, one of the five brothers who founded the company in 1934. He’s spent more than 50 years guiding the business through the industry’s many ups and downs, including an era of dismal sales, closures and consolidations, the arrival of international conglomerates, the craft distilling boom, and the rise of internet culture which catalyzed the 21st-century renaissance.

During that time, Heaven Hill has grown from a relatively modest distillery to the largest privately-owned spirits company in the United States, offering a stable of whiskeys that starts with budget favorite Evan Williams and extends all the way up to the rare one-offs of the Heaven Hill Heritage Collection.

“When I started, we were a much smaller company,” Shapira recalled. “You could wrap your hands and head around almost everything that was going on and make decisions in that kind of fashion. As we grew, we had to structurally change how we operated.” That evolution has resulted in a business with roughly 1,300 employees “who are dedicated to doing their very best every single day.” It’s a major point of pride.

Although he grew up doing small jobs around the distillery, Shapira initially went to work on Wall Street after earning an MBA from Harvard. That experience informed his re-entry into the family business in the early 1970s, a decade that would see American whiskey’s fortunes slide to their lowest point in history. Tasked with overseeing corporate planning, Shapira realized that Heaven Hill would need to diversify to remain healthy. During his tenure, the company has grown to encompass not just Kentucky bourbon and other whiskeys, but also vodka, gin, tequila, rum, and other spirits.

Much of that diversification has come via acquisition. Henry McKenna, for example, was a Seagrams brand before Heaven Hill picked it up in 1989. The Elijah Craig trademark came from Commonwealth Distillers, whose T.W. Samuels portfolio Heaven Hill acquired in 1976 (the bourbon formally debuted a decade later with a 12-year-old offering). The company has long held a portfolio of smaller brands that are sold only in certain markets—names like Quality House, T.W. Samuels, and Stephen Foster rye, which aren’t touted on Heaven Hill’s corporate website but can be found on shelves in different regions of the country.

These brands, Shapira noted, were often developed at the behest of distributors to serve local demand. But with the might of Heaven Hill’s two distilleries and vast stocks of aging whiskey behind them, many have the potential to go national. “We take great pride in nurturing smaller brands and keeping them alive until it's the right time to put them back in the marketplace in a big way,” he said, citing Old Fitzgerald as an example.

A wheated bourbon originally made at Stitzel-Weller (and Old Judge Distillery before that), Old Fitzgerald became part of Heaven Hill in 1999. For a couple of decades, the bourbon was produced in limited quantities and largely overlooked by bourbon enthusiasts. But in 2018, Heaven Hill launched Old Fitzgerald’s Bottled-in-Bond decanter series, a semi-annual release that consistently garners top scores and high demand from drinkers and collectors. And in 2025, the company debuted a new flagship for the brand, a 7-year-old bottled-in-bond bourbon with regular availability and an attractive $60 price tag.

The Fire and Its Aftermath

Guiding a bourbon-focused business through the late 20th-century downturn was challenging enough, but Shapira’s leadership faced a devastating test in 1996 when Heaven Hill’s Bardstown distillery burned to the ground, taking 100,000 barrels of aging whiskey with it. Such a loss might have overwhelmed other executives, but not Shapira. Business continued with then-master distiller Parker Beam overseeing production at United Distillers’ plant in Bernheim, a facility that Heaven Hill bought outright three years later. Today, pre-fire Heaven Hill whiskey is highly sought-after among collectors, but Shapira is not tuned into the fervor, or prices, it commands. “I don’t really keep up with all that,” he said.

Heaven Hill’s trajectory since 1999 has been almost entirely ascendant, swept up in the tide of enthusiasm for American whiskey, and pulling it along too. Although the Bernheim distillery can churn out 1,300 barrels of whiskey a day, years ago the company saw the need for more capacity to support its expanding portfolio. The new Heaven Hill Springs Distillery opened in 2025, bringing all aspects of the family business back to Bardstown where it began. The opening came three years after Shapira handed over the office of president to his daughter and son-in-law, Kate and Allen Latts, and stepped into the role of executive chairman.

Shapira remains an active part of the business, often among the first to arrive at the office. His long tenure and experience ensure stability of operations and strategy even as American whiskey faces another moment of uncertainty, with demand failing to keep pace with an abundance of aging stock. Shapira said he keeps a lesson from his father at the forefront of his mind. “Patience and perseverance is what my dad always said back when the company was just getting started,” he recalled. “Those are watchwords that are embedded in our mind today, and our culture and the way we go about it.”

The Unicorn Review spoke with Shapira about how that patience shapes brand development, the importance of keeping Parker Beam’s legacy alive, and whether there will ever be a whiskey named after him.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The Unicorn Review: During your tenure, Heaven Hill expanded from being primarily a bourbon business to encompassing spirits brands of all kinds. Was that driven by a need to diversify during bourbon’s downward slump in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, or was there more to it?

Max Shapira: It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. When I came back to the company, I had the title of director of corporate planning. That was purposely given to me as a way of engaging in all segments of the business, whether it was human resources, sales, marketing, finance, or whatever. I could find some kind of a project that would allow me to engage with all of our teams in those respective areas.

I've always liked the sales side of the business, and I've always believed in developing relationships. I initially focused on understanding the people at your distributors. These relationships were hugely important. They said they liked doing business with us. They knew that they could count on us to develop really good, quality products, and were asking us to bring new products to them.

But in addition, during that period of time, bourbon was not really doing all that well. It was the time when you had the analysts on Wall Street talking about that great whiskey store in the sky, and while the category wasn't going to go away, it was probably not going to have a whole lot of growth along with it. So that was always on your mind—although I will tell you, all during this time of the downward trend in bourbon whiskey, we had a brand that was building its way, and that was Evan Williams. During this period of the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, despite what the American whiskey category in general was doing, Evan Williams was growing every single year.

You always have to plan for many years ahead in this business, but did you ever imagine that after 55 years you’d still be in that chair, having overseen a huge bourbon renaissance?

When you're planning, it's one thing to have a three-year plan or a five-year plan. Those are difficult enough to put in place and to make sure that you stay on track to meet the goals that you set. But when you're looking down the road at six years and seven years and eight years and 10 years, that's a really difficult chore.

So the easy answer to your question is, no, we never envisioned this. But along the way, you have a period of time to adapt and adopt. For example, we could see that Evan Williams, instead of just being a 500,000-case brand, then it would be a 750,000-case brand, and then a million-case brand, then a million and a half–case brand, and even bigger than that today. We had to cautiously expand our production footprint and the way we would go to the consumers, and to understand what their wants and desires are. But we had time to do this, and we could adapt along the way.

Would we have liked to have done it sooner? Probably so. But the fact is that controlled, consistent, patient growth has been a major factor in how we've operated our business.

Keeping Parker Beam’s Legacy Alive

Parker Beam was an important part of Heaven Hill’s legacy, but people who started drinking bourbon in the last few years may not know anything about him beyond his name on Parker’s Heritage Collection. It’s been almost a decade since he died. Do you plan to keep telling his story through the whiskeys you release every fall?

We plan on continuing the Parker's Heritage Collection for years down the road. It's not easy to find something so special and unusual and so out of the ordinary every year. We have roughly two million barrels of whiskey aging, up to whiskeys that are 21, 22 years old. Within that broad range of products, we are looking for something that's unbelievably unique to tell the story [of Parker].

I think when the history books about bourbon are written, somebody doing sound, solid research will be led back to Parker Beam. He was one of those individuals who led and who was responsible for the renaissance of the entire category. We plan on keeping that name totally alive, and consumers will hopefully look forward to understanding who he is and learning more about him.

Collectors prize pre-fire Heaven Hill because there’s no way to make that liquid ever again. When you think back to the period of time following the fire and before you acquired Bernheim, was there concern about being able to make whiskey that was to the same standard and of the same flavor as before?

The industry was in a different place than it is today. We had calls from our distillery neighbors—competitors, but they were willing and wanting to help out. Our concern was always about quality. We’ve got to make sure it can taste just like what we’ve been making.

At that time, United Distillers, which is Diageo today, had the Bernheim distillery located in Louisville, and were not using it at capacity. We made an arrangement with them. We said we need to have our master distiller embedded—employed by Heaven Hill, but working within your organization to be able to keep his eye on how the product was made. You have to use our original mashbills. We were fortunate to save some of the yeast, so you have to use our yeast.

They agreed to do this. So while it wasn't our ownership of the Bernheim distillery at that point, we were going to have it all be conducted under the watchful eye of Parker. We could see early on that the whiskey was going to taste just right. Usually you don't taste it every month that it’s in a barrel, but early on, I think there was a degree of nervousness and there was lots of tasting going on.

You have a lot of brands named after people. Even the name Heaven Hill comes from 19th-century farmer William Heavenhill. Will we ever see a Shapira whiskey?

I doubt that. We do have a brand called Five Brothers, which is sold only in our visitor center in Bardstown, that does have the five Shapira brothers’ picture on the label.

Now I will say this: It’s been years since they all have passed away, but I think if they were all alive today, they would never have condoned what we did. They would've never wanted their faces on the labels. Not because they were embarrassed, but they just didn't want the publicity or the notoriety.

I don't know that there's going to be a Max Shapira bourbon or a Kate and Allan Latts bourbon or Max’s Special or something like that. I wouldn’t count on it.

Developing New Whiskeys and Setting Trends

I don’t often see Heaven Hill whiskeys chasing trends. Is that due to being family-owned, having the patience you mentioned—each product is careful and deliberate?

It's a bit of a mixture. For example, early on, we could see some potential in single barrel products. We brought out Evan Williams Single Barrel, and lo and behold, people liked it, and connoisseurs graded it, and we won [Whisky Advocate’s] whiskey of the year several times. I wouldn't say that we were a leader in that, but we thought, "Hey, that sounded like a pretty good idea." So we did, to some degree, follow that trend.

But we've always wanted to put something on the market that would be uniquely different, unusual, and out of the ordinary, and we were able to do that with extra age products [like Elijah Craig 18- and 21-year-old] and different alcohol strengths [like the extensive bottled-in-bond portfolio and barrel-proof whiskeys].

We're always interested in bringing new products to market, like Heaven Hill Grain to Glass which has several variations. I don't know if that's following a trend. It took a long time. From the inception of that project to the time we actually put whiskey on the marketplace was probably a decade. What kind of a crazy business is this when you have something like that? It takes 10 years to get something from an idea in somebody's head to the time the consumer can actually drink the product.

It’s a cool brand, especially since the grain-to-glass concept had been owned by craft distillers up to that point.

That trend has certainly added some vitality to the business. People ask me, "What do you think of the craft [industry]?" They have brought some vitality and different tastes and styles to the industry. But actually at Heaven Hill, we feel like we've been in the craft business from day one. We have different mashbills. We make a variety of American whiskeys. They're all different and proprietary.

I guess most consumers understand craft as shorthand for small, which Heaven Hill definitely is not. The first time I visited Bernheim I was wowed by the size of the fermentation tanks. I think it’s incredible to see how very good whiskey can be made consistently on that scale.

It's interesting you bring that up. We have our new distillery in Bardstown, Heaven Hill Springs, and there’s a rather large room that's dedicated to research. Even as large as that distillery is, we have the ability to make some smaller batches of uniquely different whiskeys. The distillers are a little like mad scientists trying to think of something new and different and unusual that we can produce.

Does master distiller Connor O’Driscoll get to oversee that?

He’s the maddest of the mad scientists.

Persistence and Passion

In the last decade, a lot of bourbon has been laid down by private equity and other investors who don’t have a background in the whiskey business, which has contributed to the current oversupply in the market. Does that affect a private company like Heaven Hill?

What you said is true. There's too much whiskey in places where I don't think there is as much brand vitality out there to utilize it all. That is a worrisome piece that we just don't exactly know how that's all going to end.

Our business is a branded business, with brands that are developed out in the marketplace and relationships with individuals, companies, distributors, and retailers who want to sell those brands. What others may do doesn't affect us very much because we control our own destiny. We're looking at the future. We have a library of brands that we sell in a few places that we have been just nurturing along, waiting for the right moment to bring them out [on a wider basis].

With family intertwined so deeply with work, does it get tough to separate them? Do you even need to separate them?

The board of directors is always in session here. I don't know if that answers the question or not. Let me just say this. A family business is a uniquely different corporate enterprise in the United States. It's literally a 24/7 job. You're always thinking about it. It's an all-encompassing kind of activity.

I assumed the position of executive chairman, turning over the title of president to Kate and Allan a few years ago. We wouldn't have done that unless they were not eminently qualified. But there's a difference between being eminently qualified and having the knowledge to run a business of any type, let alone Heaven Hill.

You have to have the passion and the desire, and that's what they have. It's not the fact that they're very smart and very talented and understand the mechanics of running a business. They have the passion to bring that to the office every day, to always ask questions, to always wonder, to always be curious about what's the next good thing? What's the next opportunity out there? They’re always looking at that. I'm always looking at that as well.