Authors: Reid Mitenbuler
The clear liquor emerging from the second distillation is commonly referred to as “white dog.”
*
It’s an artful term that gives a pretty good impression of how it tastes. The nose carries the husky aroma of concentrated corn, and the taste has a hot bite that can force a sputtering cough from drinkers. The distiller’s goal when producing white dog is to capture the cleanest middle portion of the distilling run, separating it from the ends, which contain chemical compounds such as congeners and aldehydes that enhance flavor when present in small quantities, but can also ruin it if there are too many. (The middle portion of the run is sometimes called “the hearts,” while the ends are referred to as “heads,” “tails,” or “feints.”) When white dog is done right, grain notes shine through and the spirit is drinkable, but that takes skilled knowledge and a lot of practice. Like most things, it’s hard to get right the very first time, and most modern drinkers would probably find Thorpe’s whiskey about as pleasant as getting stabbed in the mouth by a screwdriver used to pry the lid off a gas
can. He wasn’t making it for connoisseurship, he was making it to survive. The thinking of the day considered spirits a form of medicine, their alcoholic content a guard against unsafe drinking water. Surpluses of it could also be traded—for anything, really, but particularly for the Indians’ land, as many of Thorpe’s fellow settlers would soon learn.
A few years of aging in wood barrels greatly improves white dog, and it’s at this stage that whiskey acquires its brown color and much of its flavor. The original set of colonists at Berkeley included a cooper, who might have made barrels for storing and transporting whiskey, although we can’t know if they were ever used for that purpose. (Thorpe’s spirit was likely stored in ceramic jugs, which lose less to evaporation than porous wooden barrels.) Even if barrels had been used, they probably weren’t charred on the inside, which greatly improves flavor by caramelizing sugars in the wood that are later absorbed by the liquid (the technique wasn’t widely common for aging whiskey until the nineteenth century). Thorpe’s rough whiskey was probably made palatable by adding fruit or spices.
Thorpe didn’t live at Berkeley long enough to refine his whiskey-making techniques or write much more about his experiments. It wasn’t his main priority, and he didn’t indicate if he sold it to other settlers or traded it. He was busy with his other pursuits, and had made promising steps to improve relations with the natives. Some natives were even regularly hosted in colonial homes for dinner, although for most it was probably less an act of friendship than of cultivating a labor supply for the growing expanse of plantations.
Thorpe had also grown closer to Opechancanough, who dropped hints that he was interested in converting to Christianity. Pleased with the development, Thorpe reported optimistically back to London.
Opechancanough’s gestures, however, were a ruse—he was following the age-old practice of keeping friends close, but enemies closer, and the Indian leader was in fact inwardly seething from a decade’s worth of slights from his new neighbors. The list was long, and alcohol was involved.
Tribes in eastern North America were some of the few peoples on
earth with no traditions based around alcoholic beverages (southwestern tribes, on the other hand, had been acquainted with fermented corn drinks long before Spanish explorers introduced brandy). For these eastern Indians, such as Opechancanough, their first sips of the intoxicating liquid must have been as startling as watching the first masts of European ships puncture the horizon. Many tribes invented new words to describe alcohol’s effect, but unfortunately those initial experiences were rarely positive. One of the first came in 1607, when Jamestown settler Christopher Newport—a university would be named for him many years later—sailed upriver toward the eventual Berkeley site and shared some of his liquor with a local chieftain. The chieftain fell into a stupor and thought he had been poisoned. Seizing the opportunity, Newport pretended to mumble some magic words over the Indian leader and told him he’d be better by morning. After the chief sobered up, Newport was billed as a miracle worker. Similar forms of trickery eventually evolved into a ritual of drunken trade negotiations that often ended with Native Americans giving away huge tracts of land for little in return. Years later, one settler put it bluntly: “When the object is to murder Indians, strong liquor is the main article required, for when you have them dead drunk, you may do to them as you please, without running the risk of losing your life.”
During the next decade, Opechancanough watched as whites pushed 140 miles up the James River, the edges of their plantations creeping like high tide. He bided his time through 1621 and into the early months of 1622, but the writing was on the wall. Letting the new neighbors stay would be cultural suicide. Despite his best intentions, Thorpe was Opechancanough’s enemy. The school he was planning was a declaration that native tradition and religion were in the crosshairs. “Integration” really meant subjugation and extinction.
On March 22, 1622, the day started as normal. Native men brought game and fur onto the plantations to trade. Some joined the colonists for breakfast. Others mingled in the fields and workshops. It was business as usual, although some of the colonists had received word from rival tribes that Opechancanough was planning an attack. Thorpe, for
his part, was at home when a servant, suspicious of the natives’ behavior, urged him to get away. Thorpe casually dismissed the advice, as he often did at what he considered other colonists’ poor understanding of native customs.
It was advice he should have taken. Shortly thereafter, the natives struck, grabbing whatever tools or weapons lay at hand, and began slaughtering colonists in a coordinated attack throughout the countryside, killing at least 347 out of the colony’s total population of roughly 1,240. Thorpe was afforded special treatment, his body mutilated after he was bludgeoned to death. The note back to his family in London was carefully circumspect about the finer details, although some historians speculate he was dismembered. Some old history texts claim the natives were drunk on Thorpe’s whiskey when they attacked, a baseless claim completely rejected by Berkeley’s staff.
The colony took revenge, and their policies toward the natives hardened, spinning into a cycle of violence. Opechancanough was captured more than two decades later when he was nearing one hundred years of age and had just orchestrated another uprising. While he was imprisoned in Jamestown, his guard shot him in the back. Today the primary reminders that his culture ever even existed are found mainly in the names of the rivers, national parks, and military bases—Rappahannock, Shenandoah, Quantico—that you pass as you drive down the I-95 expressway that hugs the eastern coastline.
• • •
The beginning of whiskey in America wasn’t spectacular, and as Thorpe’s fate and the probable quality of spirits made from his corn drink can attest, there was still a long way to go. Thorpe would probably be gobsmacked at modern bourbon, the sweetly oaked stuff of today a vast departure from the harsh first drippings that dribbled from his still. Improvisational attempts at distilling other fermented grains into spirits had occurred long before Thorpe’s time, and remained improvisational well over a century after his death. These ancient spirits carried an assortment of names, many of them variations of the Gaelic
usquebaugh
that would later morph into “whiskey”:
uisce betha
(1405),
uskebaeghe
(1581),
uscough baugh
(1600),
usquebagh
(1682),
usquebae
(1715)
.
One manual from 1731 gives a recipe for
usquebaugh
that resembles a kind of primordial gin, consisting of malted barley steeped with sugar, cloves, coriander, and cinnamon.
These spirits were made on both sides of the Atlantic but were minimally if at all aged, aside from any flavor they picked up from barrels used for transport. Other distilling manuals from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show that Americans regularly channeled the innovative practicality that Thorpe had exhibited with corn. They experimented by fermenting and distilling whatever surplus crops lay at hand: carrots, turnips, whortleberries, maple syrup. In most cases, the rough edges of the unaged results were masked with herbs and flavorings
.
In the decades before the American Revolution, however, all of these other spirits were vastly overshadowed by rum, made from sugarcane and molasses shipped from British-controlled parts of the Caribbean to distilleries in the rapidly industrializing coastal cities of the colonies. The sugarcane by-products would have gone to waste otherwise, thus making rum an essential and practical tool used by the Crown to knit together the various economies of its scattered empire. But as war between the colonies and England threatened the rum trade, whiskeys more closely resembling those we are familiar with today—made from the native grains of a nation verging on independence—shifted into position.
I
n 2007, Washington, D.C., buzzed with talk about the resurrection of George Washington’s lost whiskey recipe. His distillery at Mount Vernon, only a few miles from the capital, had just been rebuilt and was holding its grand opening. The first bottle of whiskey coming off the stills was going to be auctioned to the highest bidder, and many came to watch the competition.
Washington notables roamed the event grounds alongside about fifty reporters and photographers. Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, was present to cut the ribbon and promote Scottish-U.S. ties with a tribute to James Anderson, the Scottish farm manager who originally convinced George Washington to build the distillery after he returned home from the Revolutionary War. The first president was persuaded, and for a brief period his operation was America’s biggest whiskey distillery. The winning bidder for the first bottle from the rebuilt still would own a piece of history, one connecting whiskey to the most famous founding father and the nation’s earliest heritage.
Marvin Shanken, impresario publisher of
Wine Spectator
and
Cigar Aficionado,
was there for the auction. Shanken had electrified international headlines two decades earlier when he entered a bidding war with the billionaire Malcolm Forbes for a bottle of French wine that had supposedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Shanken was a bushy
but charming pleasure seeker, a man given to dropping serious coin in pursuit of the good life. Once, after his wife forbade him from smoking cigars in their Manhattan apartment, he bought the adjacent unit and turned it into a smoking lounge. At the auction, there was no doubt he’d go to similar great lengths to get the first bottle of Washington’s whiskey. After the bidding started, Shanken didn’t disappoint, securing the bottle for a cool $100,000. It was by far the highest price anyone had ever paid for an American whiskey.
At the time of Shanken’s winning bid, most Americans were blithely unaware that the first president had been involved in the whiskey industry at all, let alone that he was the nation’s biggest distiller. Washington’s distillery burned down a decade after his death in 1799, and a blanket of weeds soon covered the rubble. After that, it was effectively wiped from the nation’s collective memory. A few anti-Prohibition advocates tried to resurrect the memory of Washington’s distillery a century later, but were shouted down by a powerful temperance movement claiming the first president’s ties to whiskey would tarnish his reputation, although it was probably more worried that the connection would undermine its own cause.
Thus the distillery sat dormant until archaeologists stumbled upon the old site in 1995. By then, Prohibition was a faded memory and whiskey was starting to enjoy renewed popularity. Its cultural cachet restored, Americans no longer had qualms about linking whiskey to the most famous founding father, who personally helped engineer the nation’s transformation from a country of rum drinkers into whiskey drinkers. The whiskey industry’s chief lobbying group, no doubt sensing the powerful appeal of reestablishing a deep connection to George Washington, quickly made plans to rebuild the distillery as a working museum and tourist attraction.
The rebuilt distillery at Mount Vernon sits a couple of miles away from Washington’s main home so its gristmill can utilize the passing currents of a nearby stream. The entire operation was originally part of an eight-thousand-acre working plantation that made the first president one of the wealthiest men in Virginia. Construction of the main
house began in 1757, shortly after Washington suffered his second major defeat for election to the Virginia House of Burgesses. Sizing up his losses and pondering his next steps, he blamed the defeat on his failure to effectively accomplish what many called “swilling the planters with bumbo.”
What this meant was that he had failed to ply voters with alcohol, a common if illegal practice that politicians from the era referred to as “treating.” The colonies inherited the habit from England, and it became an essential part of the American political process well into the nineteenth century. James Madison, who lost an election in 1777 to a candidate who gave out more free alcohol to voters, would later write that voters traveling long distances to polling stations expected their trips to be rewarded with more than just democracy. Washington was savvier when he ran again in 1758. He swilled the planters with enough booze to win Frederick County with 310 votes to his opponent’s 45.
“Bumbo” wasn’t a nickname for whiskey or even a generalized term for alcohol. It was a rum-based drink made with sugar and spices such as nutmeg or cinnamon. Rum dominated the colonial drinkscape before it was usurped by whiskey following the Revolution, and tavern records from the time regularly show it outselling all other drinks combined. It was both the colonists’ favorite drink and a perfect symbol of colonial economics and politics. Made from sugarcane and molasses shipped from British-controlled parts of the Caribbean to commercial distilleries popping up in rapidly industrializing parts of New England, rum provided a mechanism for the Crown to integrate its empire by pairing the distinct talents of its far-flung points—New England had the customer base and distilleries, the Caribbean had an abundance of cheap molasses. By 1763, Boston brimmed with more than thirty rum distilleries, and nearly a thousand ships each year brought the drink in and out of its harbor. Rum and molasses composed 20 percent of the city’s imports, making it the region’s leading industry.
The brisk trade, however, was plagued by imbalances, and colonists relied on British imports more than the reverse. The colonists paid for their imports with gold and silver, then suffered currency shortages
when England didn’t buy anything in return. Credit was one answer, but English financiers hesitated to invest in remote projects, forcing many colonial merchants to barter using rum when cash was short. The spirit was easy to make, relatively simple to ship, and maintained a value that fluctuated less than paper money.
As colonists increasingly used rum as a barter tool for international trade, the British soon introduced tariffs to ensure they got a fair share of the growing profits. The Molasses Act was passed in 1733, prompted by British sugar planters who pulled strings in Parliament to establish duties making colonial imports of French and Spanish molasses more expensive than British molasses from the West Indies. Unfazed, colonists shrugged off the duties and spent the next three decades simply smuggling the cheaper molasses. Corrupt British customs officials usually doctored the paperwork.
In 1764, England became more serious when it passed the Sugar Act. The measure increased the price that New England rum distilleries paid for molasses by further curtailing foreign imports, and was once again a maneuver by Parliament to help its cronies in the Caribbean. But whereas the colonists had considered the Molasses Act a mere nuisance, the Sugar Act touched a nerve. It landed amid an economic depression, closing many distilleries and forcing the rest to muddle along, enduring higher costs. Colonists began carving time out of their busy smuggling schedules to protest and begin writing pamphlets. One title breathlessly said it all:
Reasons Against the Renewal of the Sugar Act as It Will Be Prejudicial to the Trade Not Only of the Northern Colonies But to Those of Great Britain Also.
The colonists’ outcry convinced England to roll back parts of the act, but that did little to settle the matter. They were now talking, organizing, and warming up the presses. England, working to prevent the colonists from becoming emboldened by their victory, quickly imposed other taxes. The Sugar Act was replaced by the Stamp Act, which was an even more burdensome tax on all varieties of printed papers, including newspapers, playing cards, contracts, and pamphlets with ridiculously long titles.
Colonists responded with a shorter message: “No taxation without representation.”
On the brink of war, just two months before the battles at Lexington and Concord, a group of British soldiers marched toward Salem, Massachusetts, and were confronted by an angry mob blocking the only bridge into town. A colonist named Joseph Whicher stepped forward from the crowd and dared the soldiers to fight, pulling back the sides of his shirt to reveal his bare chest. A British soldier glanced him with his bayonet—it was just a little warning telling the colonist to back off, but enough to spill a thin line of blood down the front of Whicher’s shirt. The Revolutionary War’s first blood was drawn, and from a man who happened to be the foreman of a local rum distillery, a spirit that was about to be ousted in favor of whiskey.
• • •
George Washington was a moderate drinker, usually preferring the expensive Madeira or brandy favored by many in his high social class. But most Americans enjoyed the ubiquitous rum, including the regular troops serving under Washington in the war, who were given a daily four-ounce ration of the spirit for morale and health. Shortly after the war started, however, British blockades of molasses shipments from the Caribbean created shortages of the drink. When American major general Horatio Gates prepared to fight the British in South Carolina during the summer of 1780, as British troops swept up the coast from the south in a series of successful offensives, he found his rum supplies bare. He did, however, have plenty of molasses. Figuring the raw material of rum was better than nothing, Gates distributed the sweet goo among his men without realizing it was a laxative. He ultimately lost to the British.
Rum soon became a political target. In the middle of the war Congess moved to levy import duties on molasses, but the measure, which required unanimous consent, was blocked by a Rhode Island delegation protecting rum distilleries in the state. That was rum’s last political victory, however. Once the federal government was established at the
war’s end, Congress, which didn’t need unanimous consent anymore, put the rum and molasses duties in place.
Rum was falling fast, and per capita consumption during the war dropped by more than half. Pushed by necessity to find alternatives, the United States began acquiring a taste for whiskey, a more patriotic alternative made from domestic grain. After patriot troops lost a well-fought battle to the British at Germantown in October 1777, Congress sent the fighters thirty casks of whiskey as a reward. The French, equally impressed by the patriots’ fighting at the battle, as well as at Saratoga, decided to assist the struggling rebellion. Americans repaid the gesture by naming an assortment of frontier areas for French towns and people. These included Bourbon County in present-day Kentucky, which in the following decades would emerge as an important whiskey-producing area.
As the fighting raged, Washington lobbied Congress for the construction of public distilleries in different states, writing in one letter that “It is necessary, there should always be a Sufficient Quantity of Spirits with the Army.” During the winter at Valley Forge, where vicious bouts of dysentery and typhoid killed around 20 percent of the twelve thousand troops, rum shortages were particularly bad, forcing Washington to constantly reallocate supplies. Eventually, he ordered the switch to whiskey. While ration orders had previously stipulated rum specifically, Washington broadened them to read, “One gill of whiskey or spirits, as or when they are available.”
America’s transition to whiskey was also sped along by backwoods settlers who became some of Washington’s favorite fighters in the war. Even as combat raged, Americans continued to migrate west, where they often protected the Continental Army’s flank by fighting Indians recruited by the British. The frontier, however, was isolated from shipments of rum or the raw materials needed to make it. In contrast, it was an ideal place for whiskey: water flowed, grain grew, and plenty of wood was available to burn under the stills. Many of the settlers were also skilled at the practice, hailing from a variety of European backgrounds—German, Scottish, Irish, Scotch-Irish—that all had strong legacies of distilling either brandy or grain spirits.
Of the entire contingent, the Scotch-Irish best embodied the characteristics that proved most useful to Washington in turning the tide of the war. Most had left Europe on bad terms and were intensely patriotic and loyal to the cause of American independence. They hated the British, questioned all authority, and had honed their fighting abilities back in Europe by resisting whiskey taxes levied by an oppressive government. Neither technically Scotch nor Irish, the Scotch-Irish were poor Protestants also known as Ulstermen,
a name given them by King James I starting in 1610 when he sent them to Ulster, a rowdy Catholic region of Ireland, to “tame” the “wild Irish” living there and help spread Protestantism. The move came shortly after the Crown had dragged the remote enclave into submission after a protracted struggle, and the Scotch-Irish became outcasts living among other outcasts as both groups struggled to survive.
The Scotch-Irish turned to whiskey for income, building their reputation as distillers. The Scotch and Irish whiskey styles for which the British Isles would later become famous, however, were still a long way from their modern forms. Today, both are made primarily, though not always entirely, from barley. Other differences depend on many factors: How is the grain malted, and with what kind of fuel? (With scotch, burning peat is often, though not always, used to dry the grains, infusing the whisky with the essence of the loamy bogs from which the peat is harvested.) What kind of still is used, and how? (Irish whiskey is typically, though not always, triple distilled.) How is the spirit aged? (Different kinds of barrels are used, many of them repurposed after aging sherry or bourbon.) These decisions are made by the producers and, like bourbon, it wouldn’t be until much later that Europe’s most famous whiskey styles would become fully defined or regulated by their own sets of rules and standards.
As the Scotch-Irish refined their whiskey craft in their new home, the Crown buried them under indignities. They had converted peaty countryside bogs into farmland, introduced the potato, built deepwater ports that turned Belfast into northern Ireland’s shipping hub, and established thriving woolen and linen industries. Their English counterparts
couldn’t keep up, and Parliament soon passed laws to limit trade and increase rents. When the Crown passed a tax on whiskey to help fund a civil war elsewhere in the country, the Scotch-Irish began celebrated careers as whiskey smugglers and moonshiners, the latter term derived from their nighttime smuggling of spirits from Holland and France onto the British coast. They didn’t hesitate to kill revenue collectors and organized into gangs to battle any larger forces sent to enforce the whiskey tax.