Authors: Reid Mitenbuler
For James Crow, however, the achievements in efficiency weren’t matched by gains in quality. Any diaries Crow might have kept are lost, but letters written by those who knew him indicate a refined intellect and an obsession with improving his whiskey. He produced volumes of notes recording the particulars of fermentation, distillation, hygiene, and temperature. He constantly asked why things happened as they did and recorded both his successes and failures so that his methods could be improved upon. For Crow, God was in the details.
Crow was a wizard of tools ending with the suffix
-ometer
—saccharometers for sugar, hydrometers for alcohol, thermometers for temperature—and used them to solve problems others considered mysteries. Crow scrutinized the particular qualities of limestone-filtered water and was the first to realize that the limestone removed iron salts that can ruin distilled spirits. He also recorded the different temperatures involved in the fermentation process, which affects the development of different chemical compounds. Controlling temperature allows a distiller to influence how many chemicals and impurities are included in the spirit. Just enough lend whiskey complexity and nuance; too many and it’s undrinkable. For instance, diacetyl is a chemical compound with an intensely buttery flavor that is produced during fermentation; distillers attempt to remove most of it by limiting how much of the foreshots they allow into the middle portion of the run. Trace amounts of diacetyl give whiskey a pleasingly rich and oily mouthfeel tasting faintly of butterscotch; but too much diacetyl reeks unpleasantly of movie theater popcorn. Crow realized that balance and control were
needed as he navigated his whiskey through a tangled jungle of factors and effects. Distilling wasn’t just a straight line—beer in, alcohol out—it was a quilt stitched together in interconnected webs. You pull on one tiny part, and the whole thing shifts. Crow wanted to know how everything was connected.
But he couldn’t start until his work environment was clean. The first thing Crow did at Pepper’s distillery was to improve sanitation by moving hog and cattle pens away from the distillery. For most distilleries at the time, a side business of fattening hogs and cattle on spent mash was lucrative but introduced a fuming mix of bacteria, microorganisms, wild yeast, and other biological invaders that destroyed consistency between batches.
Up to that time, contamination and bacterial infections often wreaked havoc on whiskey. In the early 1820s some distillers had begun guarding against these setbacks by implementing the sour mash process, which is how almost all bourbon today is made. In the sweet mash process, used by Thorpe and other early distillers, yeast is simply added to the cooked grain to begin fermentation. The sour mash process, however, involves adding spent mash that has already been fermented and distilled during a previous run. The spent mash is more acidic, and adding it to a new batch helps prevent bacterial infections, maintains consistency, and helps yeast thrive. “Sour Mash Whiskey” isn’t a separate style of whiskey, as is sometimes thought, it simply refers to the methodology used to make almost all American whiskey on store shelves today. Crow didn’t invent the technique, although he is sometimes credited, but he studied it, improved upon it, and promoted it until it became a widely implemented standard.
Crow didn’t keep his methods a secret (even though all of his original records are lost, he gladly passed his discoveries on to his colleagues). He warned others against trying to get too much alcohol from a single bushel of grain, and that doing so would undermine its quality. For the best whiskey, Crow claimed that no more than two and a half gallons of whiskey should come out of one bushel. He also aged his own whiskey, an uncommon practice that helped him ensure quality. Most
distillers of his day sold their unaged whiskey immediately, leaving aging to be accomplished by retailers who weren’t always trustworthy.
Crow’s boss, Oscar Pepper, charged almost double the going rate for Crow’s whiskey, which was increasingly known among drinkers as Crow or Old Crow, and was recognized for its higher quality. Slowly other distillers followed suit and during the 1830s began branding the distillery name on the end of the barrel, helping give rise to the term “brand name.” Saloons displayed the barrels over the bar so that customers could see them. Among this early crop of nationally recognized brands, Old Crow was an exemplary producer, attracting specific praise from the likes of Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, William Henry Harrison, and Henry Clay.
As Crow was helping build bourbon’s reputation, use of the term “bourbon” continued to gain prominence. During the 1840s, a variety of colloquial names were still used to describe bourbonlike spirits. In
Moby-Dick,
published
in 1851, New Yorker Herman Melville compared the gushing blood of a whale to the reddish color of aged whiskey, but he didn’t call it bourbon. Instead, he mentioned “old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela!” “Old Monongahela” referred to the style of rye whiskey common from Pennsylvania, but “Orleans whiskey” and “old Ohio” likely referred to whiskey shipped from the western Ohio River Valley down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. This was probably bourbon.
In the same way that regional dialects merge together as nations form from fiefdoms, colloquial names were eventually abandoned as “bourbon”
became the accepted designation for the Ohio River Valley’s corn-heavy style of whiskey. Around 1861, Napoleon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte (who played up his family ties to Napoleon Bonaparte I by calling himself Prince Napoleon) was given a glass of whiskey while visiting New York from France and was told that it was called “Old Bourbon.” Considering that his namesake had supplanted the Bourbon dynasty for a period, Prince Napoleon replied, “Old Bourbon, indeed. I did not think I would like anything with that name so well.”
Even though brand names were still rare, bourbon was in a sense
branding itself. Melville and Napoleon’s hosts were making distinctions between different styles. In Thorpe’s time, terms like “aqua vitae”
and the Gaelic
uisge
were often used as catchalls to describe any type of spirit. Then whiskey became the accepted norm for any type of grain spirit. Then terms like “old Monongahela” and “bourbon” began to define specific styles of that grain spirit, just as Crow’s brand name was used to distinguish single exemplary producers.
Crow died suddenly in 1856, and for a short time Pepper controlled the fledgling brand. But he too soon died, and ownership of the brand passed between a series of investors and other distilleries, all of whom maintained its reputation well into the twentieth century. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, Old Crow’s recipe changed and its reputation crumbled. The brand remains drinkable but it is no longer a legend, occupying a space near the bottom shelf of most liquor stores. No known portraits of James Crow have ever been found, and the image on bottles carrying his name today is just a bird. A crow, to be exact.
• • •
The Woodford Reserve Distillery today makes a mint julep enshrining the legacy of both Frederic Tudor and James Crow. The company once invited me to witness Chris Morris, the brand’s master distiller, create a mint julep designed to reestablish the sense of extravagant luxury that once characterized the drink. Only a small handful of these special juleps are sold every year at the Kentucky Derby. They cost $1,000 a pop, and each is so decadent that even Marie Antoinette would covet a sip.
*
First, Woodford has upgraded the ice, just as much of the ice used in high-end cocktails today has been upgraded. In the century following Tudor’s death in 1864, ice became routine, even boring. Artificial refrigeration eventually replaced Tudor’s ice-harvesting empire and put what was once a luxury into the hands of the masses. This prompted Mark Twain to compare ice to jewelry previously available only to the rich, but now worn by everybody.
Ice had become commonplace, and by the twenty-first century it had declined in quality. The thick, dense ice cut from Tudor’s giant blocks—able to cool a drink without overly diluting it—was replaced by those crescent-shaped shards from ice machines that are foamy and white and full of air. This kind of fast-melting ice instantly converts a cocktail into an insipid puddle.
But with the revival of cocktail culture that has accompanied this century’s whiskey renaissance, ice’s glory has been restored. High-end bars like the Aviary in Chicago hire full-time icemakers who use Clinebell machines to produce three-hundred-pound blocks of clear, dense ice like those Tudor cut from Massachusetts ponds. Bartenders at these kinds of places often resemble an expedition sent up the side of Mount Everest: a blur of Alpine tools (imported from Japan, exquisite and expensive) whacking and chopping away. Chunks of ice are tailored to the drink—shaped into spears, cones, or globes—so they melt at an ideal rate. The Aviary even offers one cocktail called “In the Rocks” that features a drink held inside an ice shell that explodes when struck by a slingshot, releasing the liquid and evoking the same sense of wonder enjoyed by Tudor’s tropical customers when they first tried their cocktails cold. Bars with fancy ice programs usually charge accordingly, borrowing another page from Tudor’s playbook by translating luxury into profits.
The juleps made by Woodford Reserve take ice one step further. For the 2013 Kentucky Derby the distillery imported blocks of ice made from water that had permeated geologic formations in Nova Scotia containing gold veins (every year the Derby juleps have a different theme, and in 2013 the theme was “gold”). Past themes for Woodford’s Derby juleps have required ice chopped from Arctic glaciers, mint imported from Morocco, and sugar grown in the South Pacific.
On the day I witnessed the construction of one of the Woodford juleps, Morris set himself to the task of shaving the giant block of ice. It took him nearly ten minutes to finish. Afterward, he resembled someone who has just shoveled his driveway after a snowstorm. He then assembled the julep in a traditional silver cup that was gilded in
gold and included a gold-plated sipping straw. The bourbon used in the drink was Woodford Distiller’s Select, a bottling that “has won a gold medal in every major spirits competition,” Morris bragged. Ready for his finale, he sprinkled the julep with a bit of gold dust, his fingers quivering over the drink as if he were conducting a tiny orchestra.
Morris called this last step the “Midas
touch.”
T
he whiskey-soaked bones of dead Civil War soldiers fill the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland. They no longer smell like the booze that surgeons used as a preservative, but most still contain shell fragments. They also carry pebbled scars, like those on the nose of a heavy drinker, from where the bone tried to fight off infection. Other body parts that were originally preserved in whiskey are displayed throughout the museum. A brain resting in one case resembles a little moon and features a crater in the left lobe, as if a tiny asteroid had crashed into it. A sign beneath it reads, “Gunshot wound.”
The museum was founded during the war by army surgeon Major John Brinton, and the amount of whiskey he needed to preserve the war’s carnage was astounding. All of the liquor that was confiscated in Washington during the war was funneled to him, and a giant still built on the museum’s original grounds clattered nonstop. Make no mistake, the liquor used on the bones was rarely the refined bourbon of producers like James Crow or the other fledgling name brands with a growing reputation. When nectar like that came into the museum’s possession, Brinton usually traded it for favors that made his job easier, like procuring good horses for trips out to the battlefield. The bones resting here were instead drenched in the venomous dreck of a war that later reshaped the whiskey industry the same way that it reshaped the nation.
In the days leading up to the war, John Brinton wasn’t sure if he should fight. He was thirty years old, a respected doctor and only son from a prominent Philadelphia family, and worried about what his mother would think of his joining the army. But after shots were fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and Abraham Lincoln issued a call to arms, he and his friends realized they were all going to war.
Many would join as officers and were required to supply their own uniforms, but tailors in the city were swamped with orders. Brinton soon took a commission as a brigade surgeon, and as he waited for his uniform to be tailored he joined a swarm of men buying pistols for the fighting. Firearms were scarce, but Brinton finally got his hands on a “discreditable looking affair,” he wrote in his memoirs. He later traded it for a more reliable Colt revolver, but it wouldn’t matter—except for target practice, he never shot it.
Exactly one year after joining the army, Brinton was ordered by Surgeon General William Hammond to establish an Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C. There, he and a group of doctors would collect and study battlefield specimens in order to improve military medicine. The specimens arrived in casks of whiskey diluted to an appropriate strength, and Brinton was authorized to buy as much whiskey as he needed, despite strict rationing measures on spirits. The army had discontinued daily whiskey rations in 1830 to limit the rowdy behavior of drunken soldiers, although commanders could still issue it to troops at their own discretion. Officers were authorized to purchase their own liquor, but the biggest bartenders in most army camps were the doctors, who were permitted to prescribe whiskey for ailments including rheumatism, measles, and sexually transmitted diseases.
Brinton’s medical colleagues used whiskey as a cure-all. Medical understanding of the day still considered it a stimulant rather than a depressant, probably for the simple reason that it often made people belligerent and rowdy. Unfortunately, it also created more problems than it cured. For instance, because whiskey was considered a stimulant, it was used to treat patients suffering from the cold. But alcohol only makes people
feel
warmer, while actually causing their body temperatures
to drop. Alcohol causes blood vessels to dilate, moving warm blood closer to the skin where heat escapes the body, exacerbating the problem.
But that’s just the beginning of a carnival of errors.
The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion,
which kept a running account of how soldiers were treated, is full of prescriptions like “quinine, opium, and whiskey.” Another popular cure was “whiskey and morphine,” which sounds better suited for the title of a heavy metal album than a medical prescription. Many patients were prescribed a pint a day; others were given “as much whiskey as [they] could take,” according to the
History.
When not drinking it, soldiers were washed in it. One man had an inflammation on his leg bathed daily with a mixture of “turpentine, with carbonate of ammonia, and whiskey.” But because bacterial infections were poorly understood, whiskey wasn’t often used as a disinfectant, where it might have been more beneficial. Doctors used it instead as a wash for its so-called mystical “stimulating” properties.
Surprisingly, the stereotype that soldiers often drank a manly slug of whiskey before going under the knife for surgery isn’t true. During the Civil War, opinion on the use of anesthetics varied, and a few surgeons used whiskey instead of ether or chloroform, but the majority knew better. With the copious amount of blood lost during amputations, abandoning proper anesthesia for whiskey, which thins the blood, would only have wreaked havoc.
The museum’s most famous specimen is the whiskey-preserved leg of Union general Daniel Sickles. It was shattered into a dozen pieces by a cannonball, and the museum staff has carefully reconstructed the bone shards, a fitting symbol of the man who used the loss of his leg to reconstruct his failing political career.
Before the war, Sickles was a Tammany Hall politician and U.S. congressman. In 1859, he killed the exceedingly handsome Philip Barton Key, son of national anthem scribe Francis Scott Key and the district attorney of Washington, D.C., when he learned that Key was having an affair with his wife. The shooting happened across the street
from the White House, and Sickles was acquitted with the nation’s first successful plea of “temporary insanity.” Unsurprisingly, the murder dampened Sickles’s political prospects and sent him looking for other career options. When the Civil War began, he joined the army as a colonel and soon found himself promoted to general.
At Gettysburg, a twelve-pound cannonball tore through Sickles’s lower leg after he defied the orders of his boss, Major General George G. Meade, in a stupid tactical move of his own devising. As he was carried to the field hospital in a stretcher to have his leg amputated, Sickles calmly lit a cigar and told his men to stand firm. Under most circumstances he would have been court-martialed, but his political connections and the fact that he was effectively removed from fighting by the cannonball spared him.
Sickles was aware of orders from the surgeon general that his leg should be sent to Brinton at the medical museum. He had it wrapped in whiskey-soaked cloth and placed in a coffin-shaped box, which he sent with a note reading, “With the compliments of Major General D.E.S.” For years afterward, on the anniversary of the amputation Sickles would visit his leg at the museum to remind everyone of his heroic sacrifice, using it to revive a political career that lasted until he died at the age of ninety-four. Though he learned to use an artificial leg, he relied on a crutch during political events. In 1897, he convinced the War Department to issue him a Medal of Honor even though military historians consider his battlefield tactics appalling. Meeting Sickles in later years, the writer Mark Twain concluded that he “valued the leg he lost more than the one he’s got.”
Sickles had made it easy for Brinton by gift-wrapping his own leg. When the museum first opened, however, Brinton often found himself toting his own whiskey to battlefields to show field surgeons how specimens should be collected. After hearing about unusual injuries that warranted study, he would head to the field and slosh into swampy pits of human meat and fluid. He later wrote, “Many and many a putrid heap have I had dug out of trenches where they had been buried in the
supposition of an everlasting rest, and ghoul-like work have I done, amid surrounding gatherings of wondering surgeons.”
After Brinton educated his colleagues about how specimens should be collected, the museum began shipping the preservative whiskey to battlefield surgeons by rail, where railroad workers often drank it and caused shortages in the field. To prevent the theft, Brinton chose particularly good barrels of whiskey and added tartar emetic to induce vomiting. Problem solved.
The museum itself became a kind of whiskey depot after the secretary of war ordered that confiscated liquor go directly to Brinton. A side lot next to the museum soon swelled with “kegs, bottles, demijohns and cases, to say nothing of an infinite variety of tins, made so as to fit unperceived on the body, and thus permit the wearer to smuggle liquor,” Brinton later wrote. The contents ran from “champagne to the commonest rum,” and wines or other lower-proof alcohol were dumped together into the still, which ran nonstop, to increase the proof. The still occasionally blew up, but “never caused any active harm,” Brinton wrote. When not engaged in making liquor, it was used to redistill sulfuric ether for cleaning bones.
Brinton’s problems finding whiskey were minor compared to those faced by the troops. Demand was still strong for liquor that could numb the pain of war, but grain was needed for food, farmers were off fighting, and supply lines from whiskey-producing regions were often severed. Shortages were particularly bad in the South, where most of the war’s fighting occurred and where the government had confiscated copper stills and melted them down to produce war materiel. Southern states ordered strict prohibition for civilians in order to preserve grain. In 1860, whiskey in the South cost twenty-five cents per gallon, but by 1863, as the fighting raged, shortages caused it to spike to thirty-five dollars.
Brinton’s medical colleagues on the Confederate side were often accused of stealing quality liquor and foods donated by civilians to recovering troops. One southern newspaper even claimed that medical staff
regularly ordered troops to raid private cellars in search of the best spirits. The doctors were also accused of killing patients while operating drunk. One surgeon defended his malpractice by claiming he was so overworked that he needed the so-called stimulants.
Before Brinton established the museum he occasionally met his Confederate medical counterparts in neutral territories where both were treating patients. He even befriended a few of them, noting in his memoirs that they were more confident in their fighting abilities, but also more poorly outfitted, largely due to the agrarian nature of the southern economy versus the manufacturing-focused north. “The uniforms of the Confederate officers were generally of a shabby dirty gray, with a good deal of tinsel and cheap gold ornamentation,” and “their arms were poor,” he wrote.
The quality of whiskey that Confederates drank followed suit. The rebels famously made do with substitutes like cleaning solvent, and their whiskey was given nicknames like “coffin varnish,” “chain-lightning,” and “tangleleg.” They got it from back-alley bootleggers who used other soldiers as middlemen. Containers were sometimes so scarce that a soldier from a Tennessee regiment was once seen drinking whiskey straight from the barrel of his gun. One newspaper claimed that a single drop of Confederate whiskey “falling on the cobblestones would sound like a peal of thunder as it rent asunder the earth’s surface for a quarter of a mile around.”
Within the Confederacy during the war, distilling whiskey became a matter of states’ rights—it was like a mini civil war within the larger Civil War. Most southern state legislatures tightened restrictions and invoked their sovereignty whenever the Confederate government attempted to seize whiskey. Virginia imposed stiff penalties on distillers who fulfilled contracts with the Confederate government. Even as Union general William Tecumseh Sherman galloped through Atlanta at the war’s close, Georgia’s legislature was bickering about its prohibition laws.
Union soldiers drank better than their southern counterparts. The North had more money, troops were regularly stationed near cities, commanders were more likely to issue alcohol as a part of rations, and
the Federal government had better supply lines. Moreover, distilling strongholds in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and Illinois—all Union states—didn’t suffer as much fighting as the South.
Some distillers even found fortune in the war. Kentucky was neutral during the beginning of the conflict and sold whiskey to both sides. The Bluegrass State eventually sided with the North, but many Kentuckians continued to fight for and sympathize with the South. Jim Beam, born in 1864, was given the middle name Beauregard in honor of the Confederate general who captured Fort Sumter. The Samuels family, which would go on to found Maker’s Mark, operated a distillery where Quantrill’s Raiders, a rogue guerrilla unit fighting for the South, became the last Confederate militia to surrender.
Union general Ulysses S. Grant finally took control of most of Kentucky in 1862. The move helped ensure supplies of that state’s whiskey for the Union, and apparently of Old Crow for Grant personally. Grant had been known as a heavy drinker since his days as a junior officer at frontier outposts in California, but officers close to him claimed it never hampered his performance. This included Brinton, who became close with the general while serving on his staff. The doctor’s memoirs are carefully circumspect about Grant’s drinking, probably to protect the general’s reputation amidst all the rumors, and claim that Brinton was the only staff officer authorized to carry liquor for medicinal purposes, per Grant’s order.
Regardless, after Grant suffered heavy losses at the battle of Shiloh in 1862, even though he technically won the battle, his critics blamed the carnage on his drinking. When Missouri congressman Henry Blow complained directly to Lincoln, the president famously replied, “I wish I knew what brand of whiskey he drinks. I would send a barrel to all my other generals.”
There was a lot of speculation about Grant’s preferred brand. Twenty years after the war ended, Union colonel Isaac Stewart claimed it was Old Crow. According to Stewart, he was with the general on a steamboat several months before the Union took Vicksburg in 1863. Grant proposed a nightcap among the officer staff, claiming, “Stewart has got
some prime Old Crow whiskey around here somewhere.” Grant allegedly downed a brimming goblet of the bourbon in one gulp.