Authors: Reid Mitenbuler
In this way, bourbon is comfort food. As the world becomes more complex, bourbon remains simple—its foundation is little more than a
balanced combination of grains, mostly composed of corn, that is fermented and distilled into alcohol. It also remains gloriously inefficient as the ruthless efficiency of new industries unsettles the modern economy—the better part of a decade is required to make it well, as it sits quietly in charred oak barrels absorbing flavor from the wood and waiting patiently to be ready. And as the workplace scrambles around on increasingly shorter deadlines, bourbon refuses to be rushed—drinking it is an exercise in slow sipping, just letting the concentrated bursts of honey, spice, and vanilla flavors unwind on your tongue. The heat of its alcoholic power rewards those who patiently savor it, and punishes those who drink it too fast.
But even though bourbon connects us to the bedrock values of our past, the stories used to establish our ideas of heritage and authenticity are not always what they seem, as the story behind the 1964 resolution demonstrates. Take, too, Bulleit, a brand that is owned by Diageo, today the world’s largest spirits company and the outfit that would eventually acquire a good portion of Schenley’s portfolio following Rosenstiel’s retirement and a few other rounds of corporate takeovers. In advertisements, Bulleit bills itself as “frontier whiskey” and “The Last of the Great Bourbons.” It has one of the most eye-catching bottles on the liquor-store shelf: shaped like a tombstone, with a font reminiscent of “Wanted: Dead or Alive” posters, it was even used as a prop in HBO’s Old West period drama
Deadwood.
But the truth behind the brand is a little different: Bulleit didn’t first hit store shelves until the 1990s, its backstory as a frontier original the result of clever marketing. The giant British corporation that owns Bulleit (Diageo) as of 2014 contracted production of the bourbon out to a competing company (Four Roses in Kentucky), which itself is owned by a foreign conglomerate based out of Japan (Kirin Brewing Company).
Nothing here really screams “frontier” or conjures up notions of what most people would probably define as “authentic.” But this isn’t meant to pick on Bulleit—not only do most brands stretch the truth to create a sense of heritage, but many go much further. Michter’s suggests that its lineage traces back to 1753 and that George Washington
served whiskey made by the company to his troops during the Revolution. It’s a powerful story, but the modern version of the brand actually only dates to the 1990s. The company behind it originally didn’t even make its own whiskey—it simply purchased spirits from outside suppliers (which were typically very good) and sold them under its own label. The name Michter’s came from the resurrection of a lapsed trademark created in the mid-twentieth century by an advertising executive named Lou Forman who had combined the names of his two sons, Michael and Peter. For Michter’s, the decidedly unromantic story of its true beginnings needed a little glamour, which the George Washington tale provided.
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To some, these details about popular labels like Bulleit and Michter’s rob the brands of their integrity. Perhaps, but integrity aside, the facts behind these brands don’t necessarily deprive them of their authenticity; they simply indicate what bourbon and the industry surrounding it have been for a long time. Even in the nineteenth century, at the dawn of modern liquor marketing, brands began creating fake backstories they used to appeal to customers’ desire for heritage and history. These fanciful tales are very much a part of bourbon’s authentic legacy, and have proved essential to many brands’ success. Almost none of the stories or dates on bourbon bottles are true, but asking, “Is the story true?” sort of misses the point. Instead, ask, “Is it good?” Even if it’s not, the bourbon inside the bottle usually is.
Besides, the honest truth is that you probably wouldn’t want to let most authentic frontier whiskey touch your lips. It was often an inconsistent nightmare of quality that could have raised a corpse from a concrete grave, made by amateurs selling it as a bulk commodity and hiding its taste with other ingredients in cocktails. Whiskey sold on the American frontier passed no government regulations and was doctored up to appear older than it was with chemicals that today are used to embalm cadavers. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but the whiskey you
most want to drink is the modern stuff made after bureaucrats, not frontiersmen, tediously passed the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.
But even though reality is often less romantic, it’s usually more interesting. Beneath the slick surfaces of America’s greatest tales dwell contradictions and surprising truths that make the stories real. The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” but is signed by men who owned slaves. Daniel Boone made the coonskin cap a symbol of rough-hewn frontier independence, but he refused to wear one himself because he thought them “uncouth” and that top hats made of beaver fur were more dignified. Thomas Jefferson is beloved by bourbon drinkers because he established policies that helped whiskey production thrive in the decades after his presidency, but he called the drink a social “poison” and tried to persuade Americans to switch to wine instead.
Bourbon is likewise brought to life by its contradictions. It has one foot in the agricultural realm, made from grains harvested from fields, but another foot in the industrial realm, distilled in places that have always resembled the factories of their eras. Take as another example today’s craft distilling movement: it is full of people reclaiming whiskey’s individuality from corporate conglomerates, but many of those giant corporations started as craft outfits themselves, growing big because they made a good product, which isn’t something that can always be said of whiskey’s counterparts in the beer or meatpacking industries. In fact, big companies often make the most coveted bourbon brands, and our conversations about whiskey within the confines of the craft movement demand a different type of discussion than we have about other foods.
The most beguiling aspect of bourbon, however, is found in the stories of the people who really built the industry, rather than the ones with their names on the bottles. Lewis Rosenstiel sold millions of gallons of whiskey in his lifetime but never got a brand named after him or his picture on a bottle. Admittedly, the label might have looked funny: Rosenstiel wore the kind of amber-tinted glasses most people associate with the fashion sense of bookies working in Atlantic City during the
1970s. Plus, his stare was crooked, the result of his getting kicked in the face as a teenager. It was this injury that actually got Rosenstiel into the liquor business in the first place—he figured it ruined his chances of becoming a professional football player, so he dropped out of high school and went to work at his uncle’s distillery in Kentucky.
Even if Rosenstiel had attempted to name a brand after himself, one of the four Madison Avenue advertising agencies on his payroll probably would have advised against it. Nobody wants to drink something honoring the guy at the top of the food chain. The ad men no doubt would have reminded Rosenstiel that bourbon is one of those rare objects into which America invests its own image. This, they would have said, should always be a picture of ideals and aspirations—how we want to be seen—rather than a picture of shrewd operators such as himself. Not only that, but the prejudice of Rosenstiel’s times might have sniffed at his Jewish name. This sort of obstacle had already been dodged by a long history of other notable Jews who had responded to bigotry by building their fantastic success on the names of long-dead WASPs such as Elijah Craig and Evan Williams, men who had nothing to do with the liquor in the bottle but at least conformed to stereotypes. Of course, Rosenstiel had other image considerations as well: he was indicted, although never convicted, on bootlegging charges during Prohibition. And there were stories of his legendary sexual adventures—with men and women alike; he did nothing on a limited scale—at epic parties he threw at his home that were attended both by politicians and underground crime figures.
In terms of how Rosenstiel changed whiskey as a product, his legacy on that front is also a little controversial. He presided over vicious consolidation rounds that put many distillers out of business and caused many unique bourbon styles to go extinct. But with this said, Rosenstiel is also part of the reason why many bourbons today taste as good as they do. On the lobbying front, he was a driving force to change industry regulations over taxation—dictating how long distillers could age bourbon and still make a profit—that are directly responsible for the existence of some of today’s most noteworthy brands.
But here’s the greatest irony: even though Rosenstiel didn’t make it onto a bottle, he would have fit in well with the frontiersmen who did. Like them, he was an ambitious bootstrapper and a gambler who won more than he lost. He was a
shtarker,
the Yiddish term that’s used, half in admiration and half in fear, to describe somebody who will always get the job done and never apologize about how it was accomplished. Rosenstiel might have been accused of lining the pockets of a few politicians, including Lyndon Johnson, but he also gave $100 million to philanthropic causes; and while fierce to his enemies, he was loyal to his friends. Rosenstiel was full of contradictions, but that’s just another way of saying that he was an American, and just one in the kaleidoscopic cast of Americans who have made bourbon what it is. Of course, just to be fair, it
was
Rosenstiel who was most responsible for convincing Congress to designate bourbon “a distinctive product of the United States.”
Our native spirit, indeed.
T
he earliest days of bourbon whiskey likely date to a Virginia swamp where roughly a quarter of America’s colonial population was massacred in 1622 during the Powhatan Uprising. Almost four hundred years later, a visit to the swamp is much more pleasant. The Berkeley Plantation, about twenty miles upriver from Jamestown, sits in the middle of it, and was briefly the home of Captain George Thorpe, one of the first Americans believed to have distilled liquor from corn. The finer details of his efforts are vague, which can sometimes give Thorpe’s story the feel of a legend, but what is certain is that he was eagerly exploring the New World’s potential riches when the native grain caught his eye. In America, corn grew better than the barley that Europeans used to create beer and spirits, and Thorpe wondered if it could be used instead. Berkeley today is a working museum, and historians speculate that the carpet of grass where I’m standing on the day I visit is where Thorpe had his original still, and also where attackers during the uprising bludgeoned him to death and dismembered his corpse.
Before his unfortunate demise, Thorpe was a living paradox. Here was a New World fortune seeker who condemned his fellow colonists’ bigoted attitude toward American Indians. A humanitarian as well as an inquisitive explorer, Thorpe was enthusiastic about his new home and its native people. Where his countrymen were skeptical of
America’s native corn, Thorpe wrote back to London championing the grain, hoping it could be used for a drink that would raise morale and reduce the death rate caused in part by unsafe drinking water. He owned a still but he wasn’t a professional distiller looking to create an industry—America for the next century would consist mainly of cottage industries supporting the larger economies of Old World empires busily carving up the continent. Rather, Thorpe was a curious amateur feeling out his new home, trying to re-create the comforts of his past life in England by experimenting with an unfamiliar grain. His early efforts likely tasted more like paint thinner than what we’d today recognize as bourbon. Regardless, the act of distilling a distinctive New World grain was a break from Old World tradition and the first step toward a uniquely American whiskey. A forerunner of the more refined corn-based whiskey that would evolve centuries later, here was bourbon’s “Big Bang.”
• • •
The Berkeley Plantation where Thorpe lived began in 1619 as a kind of suburb to the original Jamestown settlement, which was established a decade earlier when the very coast itself was considered the frontier. Thorpe and other settlers moving to Virginia in those first decades were taking a risky and dangerous gamble into a “howling wilderness” ravaged by famine, disease, and even rare cases of cannibalism. Travel agents, had they existed at the time, likely would have steered clients elsewhere.
Thorpe’s name isn’t attached to any modern whiskey brand—his grisly death doesn’t make for sparkling ad copy—and nobody has bothered to spend the budget to put his name in lights. This is partly because his achievements came too early—whiskey wouldn’t become popular in America until almost two centuries after his death. Until then, it was a bit player in an ensemble dominated by ale, cider, and other spirits such as rum. When whiskey finally emerged from the shadows in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, other distilling icons—people from the Ohio River Valley states where the
frontier had migrated—found the spotlight instead. By the middle of the twentieth century the whiskey industry would consolidate largely within Kentucky and Tennessee, and distillers in these places naturally chose to tell the stories of hometown favorites instead of people like Thorpe. This has diminished his legacy; most of today’s books about whiskey only put Thorpe’s name in the footnotes, if they mention it at all.
But Thorpe’s Berkeley home is likely where the idea of producing spirits from a grain unique to America first appeared. In the centuries after his experiment, the rules and standards for making bourbon, the most iconic of American whiskies, were slowly developed and codified. For a spirit to be called bourbon today, federal regulations dictate that it has to be made within the borders of the United States (not just Kentucky); it must be at least 51 percent corn, and it has to be aged in charred new oak barrels. The remainder of the grain mixture used is up to the distiller, but typically includes a small amount of malted barley and a bit of rye, which provides a spicy kick to balance the corn’s sweetness (wheat is sometimes used in place of rye for a softer effect). The proofs at which it is distilled, barreled, and bottled are also carefully regulated.
It’s a lot of rules, but this is what makes Berkeley so special. It’s where George Thorpe started everything before any of the rules were even written.
• • •
A native of Gloucestershire, England, George Thorpe was a well-connected lawyer who had served in Parliament before partnering with three other men to form a private colony in Virginia then known as the Berkeley Hundred. He sailed from Bristol for America in 1619, leaving in England his wife, an eight-year-old daughter, and three young sons, all of whom he planned to send for once he was established across the Atlantic. After nearly three months at sea, he arrived in Virginia aboard the
Margaret.
There was plenty of booze aboard the
Margaret
: “5½ tuns of beer,
6 tuns of cider, 11 gallons of sack, 15 gallons of aqua vitae, etc,” according to ship records. “Aqua vitae”
referred to distilled spirits, a term that is often dated to the fourteenth century and credited to a physician and alchemist at the University of Paris named Arnaud de Ville-Neuve. Ville-Neuve was obsessed with unlocking the secrets—including health benefits and the possibility of achieving immortality—presented by the distillation of alcohol. He suspected that alcoholic spirits were the concentrated essence of sunlight, funneled into fruits and grains that were later fermented and distilled. He wrote that aqua vitae
was “a water of immortality. . . . It prolongs life, clears away ill humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth.” The term
meant “living water” and translated to
akvavit
in Swedish,
eau de vie
in French, and
usquebaugh
in Gaelic. The Gaelic version became
uisge-betha,
was eventually shortened to
uisge,
and finally became
whiskey,
referring to the spirit that people in the British Isles distilled from a coarse beer made out of fermented grains, predominantly malted barley.
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It’s unclear if the aqua vitae aboard the
Margaret
was actually whiskey (distilled from grain) or if it was gin (also typically distilled from grain but flavored with juniper and other aromatics), brandy (distilled from fruit), or rum (distilled from sugarcane by-products like molasses). Old historical documents have a confusing tendency to use spirit names interchangeably.
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In any case, more important than the specific nature of the spirits on board the
Margaret
is the fact that they were a part of the first Thanksgiving, which the Berkeley Plantation staff today emphasizes happened here more than a year before the Pilgrims’ better-known celebration at Plymouth, Massachusetts. On December 4, 1619, the group’s
leader, Captain John Woodlief, led everyone to a grassy clearing to give thanks and enjoy the stale remainders of the ship’s provisions, including the aqua vitae.
This significant historic event is commemorated today with a humble brick gazebo festooned with plaques, reminding visitors that Virginia’s Thanksgiving came first, specifically “One year and seventeen days before the Pilgrims,” which can also be read to mean, “Take that, Massachusetts.”
The tale paints a far different picture of the first Thanksgiving that most Americans learn in elementary school. In the Berkeley version, the settlers make do with scraps. Every year since 1958, Berkeley has reenacted this more truthful version of Thanksgiving, although guests today have the option of swapping out the scraps for catered fare. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy even issued an official proclamation acknowledging that Virginia, and not just Massachusetts, laid claim to the nation’s earliest Thanksgiving heritage, but nobody really noticed—the story was already written.
About eighty yards beyond the first Thanksgiving site sits a large cornfield. When Thorpe first arrived in Virginia, the importance of corn quickly became evident. It grows well here, and American Indians in the area cultivated three principal varieties of the grain as an important foundation of their diet. The term
maize
translates to “that which sustains us,” and the crop had helped save many of America’s earliest white settlers from starving to death. Even so, many English back in London remained prejudiced against the grain. One European even wrote that maize was “fit only for beasts.”
But Thorpe embraced the corn. Part of his mission to America was to experiment with new crops, such as tobacco and silk, and corn represented a potential cash source. He learned to grow it from the natives, a group who had captured his sympathy when he still lived in London and had hired a manservant who as a youth had traveled across the Atlantic as part of the Indian princess Pocahontas’s entourage. Thorpe was impressed by the boy, and upon his arrival in America began
organizing a university for natives, to convert them to Christianity and teach them about English life. Students at the school supported themselves by farming corn.
Thorpe took his role with the school seriously and, missionary zeal notwithstanding, was relatively liberal for his time. He condemned the rampant prejudice of his colonial counterparts, arguing that kindness was needed to gain the natives’ trust. Backed by the colonial government, Thorpe curried favor with the Indians in ways that bothered some of his fellow colonists. He sternly punished subordinates who offended the natives and modified the rules so Indians could roam the colony freely. When Indians complained about two rowdy English mastiffs, Thorpe had the dogs hanged in public. To attract needed support from the powerful Powhatan Confederacy tribal leader Opechancanough, a large and commanding man whose name in Algonquin means “He whose soul is white,” Thorpe replaced his traditional hut with an English-style house. The home included keyed locks that the Indian leader reportedly amused himself with for hours, locking and unlocking the unfamiliar devices hundreds of times over. Studying these gadgets designed to prevent theft and invasion, Opechancanough only could have taken them as an omen.
By this point, Thorpe had fully adopted corn as part of his new life, despite the occasional scorn of his countrymen back home. Running short of traditional ingredients to make his precious English beer, he realized that nature had gotten the last word, and decided to swap America’s abundant corn for scarce malt. As the cargo manifest of the
Margaret
indicates, beer was more popular with the first colonists than spirits, even though it was more difficult to ship, took up greater space, and spoiled much faster. A reminder of home, beer was worth the bother, even if recipes had to be padded with things like corn, pumpkins, parsnips, and pinecones. Thorpe wrote in a letter to friends back in London that he actually preferred his “drink of Indian corn” to proper English beer, which they no doubt considered a hick thing to say. He was becoming an American.
But the colony was a restless place, better suited for a more efficient
drink that lasted longer and weighed less. Records from a year after Berkeley’s founding show beer imports falling and aqua vitae imports more than quadrupling. Medical thinking of the day held that distilled spirits were a good way to battle North American climates that were vulnerable to drastic swings in temperature. People believed that when a person sweated in warm weather, heat was drawn from internal organs and needed replacement, which hot liquor provided. In cold weather, the liquor provided warmth. Writing to his friend John Smyth back in London, Thorpe lamented the high mortality rate, the questionable water, and other colonists’ complaints about the lack of a “good drink.” This he hoped to change.
Between the first Thanksgiving site and the cornfield lies a grassy plot near a spring where Berkeley’s staff speculates Thorpe kept his still. Marking it today is a whiskey barrel converted into a drinking fountain, alongside a sign that reads, “First Whiskey Distillery 1621.” Other than this, the distillery is a ghost—records indicate that Thorpe had a copper still and make vague references to distilling, but are spare with finer details.
Similar distilling operations from the era, however, give us a pretty good idea of how Thorpe might have made whiskey, which follows a similar process today. He would have begun by drying his corn and then grinding it into a flour resembling cornmeal. Then it was time for cooking, the flour mixed with hot water to become a thin porridge that distillers call a “mash.” The mash sat until wild bits of yeast landing in it turned the liquid into a bubbling broth called a “sweet mash.” This process of fermentation can last for a few days, and when it peaks, the surface of the mixture is alive and warm as yeast spores furiously devour sugars and convert them into alcohol. During this stage, thousands of small bubbles explode on the surface. They release fumes that, from a distance, smell like fresh bread. Move in closer, and the smell gets more tangy, like sourdough starter. Stand directly over the frothy mix, and the little exploding bubbles release fumes so barely alcoholic they’ll gently sting your eyes.
Of course, this is what happens when the process goes well. Sometimes
it doesn’t. In Thorpe’s time, the primitive nature of equipment and methods sometimes prevented the magic from happening. Temperature was often an issue, and to keep the fermentation warm in cold weather, steaming manure might have been packed around the vats. If a batch resisted fermentation, it wasn’t out of the question to add the carcass of a dead animal to kick-start the process.
But for now let’s just assume that everything went well for Thorpe. Once the bubbling was finished, the fermented mash—resembling a thin-tasting beer absent of the lightly bitter flavor of hops—was ready for distillation. It went into a pot still sealed at the top with a thin piece of copper tubing called a
worm
that extended out and passed through a barrel of cool water. A low, even fire was built underneath the contraption, vaporizing the alcohol and pushing it through the worm, where it cooled and condensed back into a liquid. This clear liquid was likely distilled again through the same still to increase the alcoholic concentration, although more sophisticated stills today usually have a second distilling piece called a “doubler”
to do this.