Vendome Copper & Brass Works Inc.

For one hundred plus years the Vendome Copper and Brass Works has been fabricating and supplying equipment to distilleries and other industries needing stills, cookers, vats and other metal apparatus. Vendome located throughout its history in downtown Louisville, Kentucky is a family owned business founded by W. Elmore Sherman, Sr. and now overseen by the fourth generation of Shermans.

Vendome’s Antecedents

Before starting Vendome, Elmore Sherman had learned the distillery equipment fabrication trade at Hoffman, Ahlers & Co., which began business in Louisville in 1879. Hoffman, Ahlers was a successful Cincinnati copper company with a history going back to the 1830s. Beginning in 1872 Louis Hoffman and George Ahlers, specializing in distillery equipment, became its sole proprietors, and in 1879 they sent Hoffman’s son, Isaac A. Hoffman to establish the Louisville branch. Sherman, born in 1878, was first associated with the company in 1901 when he is listed in the city directory as its bookkeeper and when, on January 1 of that year, as one of six stockholders, he signed incorporation papers for the Louisville branch of the company. In the next few years, Sherman advanced in the company, being listed from 1903 to 1909 in the city directory as the company’s vice-president. During that period, George Ahlers, the president, was in Cincinnati suggesting that Sherman was in charge of the Louisville operation.