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EXPLORING
KENTUCKY - November 2004 by Katherine Tandy Brown Bourbon and Chocolate - A Capital Idea
That sign greets sweet-toothed visitors to a venerable downtown candy factory just beyond the shadow of Kentucky’s State Capitol. They come for the tours and to inhale the aromas of childhood memory. They come to taste and to take home treats that know no age, gender or political bias. In short, they come for chocolate, and in particular, for bourbon balls. Just like Ruth Hanly knew they would all those years ago. Celebrating its 85th year, Rebecca-Ruth Candies fills a welcoming white frame house with scarlet shutters, a red-and-white striped awning and a bronze of a jockey astride a Thoroughbred. An eclectic mix of antique and modern, the company is run by a third generation, hands-on owner who’s passionate about his family business. “Our first location was in the barroom of the old Capital Hotel,” says Charles Booe, owner and manager of Rebecca-Ruth since buying it from his dad, John, in 1997. “It was closed for Prohibition at the time, and my grandmother Ruth and a friend, Rebecca Gooch, began dipping chocolates on the marble-topped bar.” As two twenty-something, headstrong substitute teachers with more of a bent for making sweets than imparting knowledge, Rebecca and Ruth decided in 1919 to buck the patriarchal system and start a candy enterprise. Blessed with outgoing personalities, the two rented the bar and promoted their goodies, often chatting loudly on street corners or in movie houses about a luscious new candy they had “tried,” called Rebecca Ruth. Ruth married Douglas Booe in 1924 and had a son, John Charles. After Douglas died from World War I injuries, she moved back to Frankfort and bought the company from Rebecca just as the Depression hit. Undaunted by a resulting drop in sales, Ruth continued to experiment with new sweets, persevering in 1933 when her home and factory were destroyed by fire. Though no banks would loan her any startup capital, a hotel housekeeper named Fanny Rump (really) loaned the feisty entrepreneur $50 and she was back in business. When in 1936 a friend proffered that the two best tastes in the world were “a sip of bourbon and Mrs. Booe’s mint candy,” Ruth spent two years perfecting the still-secret recipe for Bourbon Candy Colonels, or bourbon balls. So beloved were the treats that during World War II, customers brought her their personal sugar rations and coffee tins. Son John took the reins of Rebecca-Ruth in 1964, developing more liquor-filled chocolates, expanding the factory and mail-order business, increasing production and developing the wholesale business. These days, he and Charles together steer a company that cranks out around three million bourbon balls a year. “Nobody here knows that secret recipe except me and my father,” says Booe, “and he’s getting kind of forgetful.” Much to the surprise of diehard bourbon ball aficionados, Rebecca Ruth makes more than 120 different confections – some 100,000 pounds per year – in what Booe describes as a “small kitchen.” What’s cooking in the giant copper kettle on the 1910 model stove varies daily. An enormous mixer blends 80 to 100 pounds of candy at a time. Trays of detectible delights fill the granddaddy of all walk-in freezers. And the massive curved marble slab bar, circa 1854, that Ruth bought for $10 in 1917 is now the factory centerpiece. The current staff numbers 20, including four who hand-make and wrap all the pull candy, which doesn’t lend itself to mechanized wrapping. “We have an employee policy that you can eat whatever you want to eat,” says the affable, ample-girthed Booe. “My limit is about a half pound a day. When it comes to bourbon balls, I can eat a box or two at a sitting…but I have a high tolerance.” Store samples are called Boo-Booes, and visitors can tour six days a week, January through November. The Christmas season rocks at Rebecca Ruth with Booe leading the band. “They say the third generation usually runs a business into the ground,” he laughs. “If it survives me, we’re probably in pretty good shape!” Survival is highly likely, considering the fact that Rebecca Ruth garnered 2004 Small Business of the Year from the Frankfort Area Chamber of Commerce, and Booe’s bourbon balls landed on Southern Living magazine’s 2004 best food products list. For salivatin’ information, call (800) 444-3766 or visit www.rrcandy.com
Katherine Tandy
Brown is a staff writer for The Lane Report. |
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Copyright 1996-2004, by Kentucky Business Online. All rights reserved. Editorial content
is copyright 2004, Lane Communications Group The Lane Report is a trademark of Lane Communications Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
"British author Anthony Trollope wrote that Frankfort was ‘as quietly dull a little town as I ever entered,’ but that was in 1862, before Rebecca-Ruth’s bourbon balls.”
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