When I visited the Jim Beam distillery and visitors center (known as the American Stillhouse), in Clermont, Kentucky, this past June, the guide started by explaining that we would all be addressed by the last name Beam while on the tour. As I walked among the huge, sour-bread-smelling fermenting tanks, and poked my head among the rows of aging barrels in the rackhouse, and watched hundreds of squat glass bottles get filled on an assembly line, I was Ian Beam, descended from the seven generations of Beams who have had a hand in the family business. It began, so the story went, when Jacob Beam, the son of a German immigrant, started selling the corn-whiskey recipe created by his father. The business was slowed down by Prohibition, but reëmerged under the guidance of James Beauregard Beam, the namesake of the current brand. History, pride of place, the idea of belonging—these are as essential to the drinking experience, the folks at Beam insisted, as the corn, rye, and barley that go into the bottle.

Many people seem to have made this kind of personal connection with Jim Beam, judging by the angry reaction to this week’s news that Beam’s parent company had agreed to sell itself to Suntory, a Japanese distilling and brewing conglomerate. Some of the responses reflected a generalized ideological suspicion of foreign investment in domestic concerns. But many of the complaints were at once specific to Beam and rather vague in their uneasiness: there was just something wrong about it. A Beam spokesman this week promised that there would be no changes on the ground in Kentucky, saying, “It’s business as usual.” The company wouldn’t be moving its distilleries to Japan, or messing with the formulas of its famous products. It would still make its bourbon in Kentucky. But something had changed—at least, for the people who promised online that they’d never drink Beam again. The company had broken the spell of its own mythology.

Much of that myth has to do with a feeling of intimacy. The Beam tour emphasizes the enterprise as a cozy family affair. But at the tour’s final stop, in the tasting room, visitors are reminded of the true scale of Beam Inc. On my visit, there were dozens of different bottles available to sample—in managed pours that did not appear to exceed an ounce or so. (It was not much after ten in the morning.) There was the familiar assortment of basic Beam options, along with the company’s line of small-batch offerings, like Booker’s and Knob Creek. In addition, we could try infused whiskeys, such as Jim Beam Honey and Red Stag.

These were just the Beam products that the company put on display; Beam also produces the wonderfully named Old Grand-Dad, Old Overholt, and Old Crow whiskeys, and owns the iconic bourbon brand Maker’s Mark, which is distilled in Loretto, about forty-five minutes down the road. All told, until this week, Beam owned dozens of alcohol brands from around the world, ranging from the widely respected Laphroaig Scotch to a neon-colored Canadian liqueur called After Shock. It was this stable of assets that enticed Suntory to offer Beam sixteen billion dollars.

There is a reason that many of those products were hidden from sight: the tour seems constructed to downplay how big Beam, the company, has become. Instead, it focusses on how small, and relatively simple, the process of making bourbon remains. We were shown flowing water, diverted from the “limestone spring” that produces the same “iron-free, calcium-rich” water that bourbon-makers in central Kentucky have been tapping for generations. The main building, which houses the gift shop, is styled as a replica of a nineteen-forties stillhouse. It’s a touch too slick and modern inside, but, viewed from the outside, it makes a handsome picture. Next door is the old family home, painted bright white, with rocking chairs on the porch. In an hour or so, we tracked an entire cycle of production, and we didn’t walk much more than a quarter mile, revealing just how little ground the product covers from start to finish. The whole place was remarkably quiet.

I would never have known, based on my morning in Clermont, that Jim Beam could produce enough bourbon to sell seven million cases’ worth in 2012. That’s because it doesn’t make all its bourbon in Clermont. A big chunk of the production takes place at less picturesque distilling plants in nearby Boston, Kentucky, and in Frankfort, where no tours are offered. (Beam ages its barrels in rackhouses in several locations throughout the state.) The best-selling Jim Beam white label, aged four years, tastes a lot like other entry-level bourbons. Its case, for me, at least, is significantly helped by the fact that, when I see the bottle, I don’t imagine those nondescript factories churning it out around the clock. Instead, I recall the sounds of insects, and the early-June Kentucky heat, and the smiling faces and laid-back ways of the members of the Beam “family” I met. A few years ago, Jim Beam used the advertising slogan “Here’s to what’s inside.” But what’s outside matters, too—the sense of place that is conjured with each sip.

To take another example, the Narragansett Brewing Company has, in recent years, enjoyed a renaissance among beer consumers in southern New England. It was founded in 1890, in Rhode Island, and enjoyed years of high visibility as a sponsor of the Boston Red Sox. My father fondly remembers hearing the announcer Curt Gowdy plugging the beer with the catchphrase “Hi, neighbor, have a ’Gansett!” But Narragansett moved its brewing to Indiana, in 1981, and its popularity as a regional beer fell off sharply. In the middle of the last decade, however, investors in Rhode Island brought the brand back to life. Now, when I drink a ’Gansett tall boy, I feel linked to my dad’s childhood and old Sox broadcasts and the light summer breezes of seasons gone by. As the back of the can notes, “If you’re not drinking Narragansett, you’re not from New England.” Does it matter, then, that the beer I’m drinking was not brewed in New England at all but in Rochester, at the Genesee Brewing Company, which is owned by Cerveceria Costa Rica S.A., a subsidiary of the Florida Ice and Farm Company, headquartered in Heredia, Costa Rica?

Walker Percy wrote that “bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.” Distillers have been appealing to this feeling—something visceral and personal that transcends price points or mash bills—for years. It connects to the collective cultural consciousness: the myths of tax rebels sticking it to Alexander Hamilton; or outlaws at their stills, deep in the hollers of Kentucky; or Junior Johnson outrunning the law on the back roads of North Carolina, packing illegal hooch in the trunk. It is the stuff of cowboy saloons and city dive bars and a thousand country songs. This narrative, of course, is told in the codes of (largely white) masculinity—and aimed at and perpetuated by the kinds of drinkers, mostly men, I suspect, who hope that their poison of choice tells a story about them, and who are worried that it might not be the right one. Bourbon seems like a sturdy marker of a freedom-loving American identity, but that narrative is mostly a pleasant fiction. The truth of the tale lies in mergers and holding companies and transnational distribution rights. George Jones never sang about any of that. The real story of the modern whiskey industry is less romantic but no less American. The country’s “native spirit,” as bourbon is often called, is one of capitalization and consolidation.

Photograph by Luke Sharrett/Getty