Authors: Reid Mitenbuler
Jefferson was a wine guy. While serving in France during the 1780s, he even took a vacation, while recuperating from a failed romance, to tour the wine regions of northern Italy and France. He shipped cases of wine home and to his colleagues, including George Washington, and advised other presidents on what wines to serve at state dinners. He also experimented with growing grapes at his home, and invited European winemakers to the United States to promote a domestic winemaking industry in hopes that wine would replace spirits.
Jefferson denounced whiskey as a “poison.” He wrote, “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.” Jefferson was merely expressing the attitudes of his social class toward whiskey. He was a friend of the workingman, but didn’t care much for the workingman’s unrefined drink, although he did occasionally allow his slaves to drink it.
So it’s ironic that Jefferson was the one to drastically improve things for whiskey distillers. Two years after winning the presidency and moving into the White House, where he personally curated the wine selection, he eliminated the whiskey tax. Now small distillers no longer had to hide or worry about evading tax collectors—they could take their time, experiment, and refine their craft. Aging would finally get a chance to become a common practice.
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Jefferson’s vision of America’s economic destiny prevailed in the whiskey industry for the next half century. There was consolidation, for sure, but the picture was largely one of yeoman farmers operating thousands of tiny stills puffing away across the countryside. During the next two centuries, however, that picture would transform into Hamilton’s vision. By the year 2000, almost every single drop of whiskey made in America was produced by one of thirteen distilleries owned by just eight companies. Even though there were over one hundred brands on liquor store shelves—different recipes, aged for different amounts of
time, bottled at different proofs—almost all of them came from one of those thirteen plants. And even after the craft whiskey boom of the twenty-first century created more than five hundred new distilleries by 2015, tilting the scales back in Jefferson’s direction, those thirteen plants were still producing over 95 percent of the nation’s whiskey.
By the twenty-first century, whiskey producers had figured out that Jefferson’s vision sells: all those small, distinct labels project the romantic image of the independent out on his own. But producers had also figured out something else: Hamilton’s vision was a good way to get that whiskey into bottles efficiently and at an affordable cost. Jefferson’s vision is on the outside of bottles, but Hamilton’s vision often defines the whiskey within. Many brands seem small and distinct, and therefore more personal, which is important for marketing, but much of this is an illusion. The label for Knob Creek bourbon might state “Distilled and Bottled by Knob Creek Distillery, Clermont, Kentucky,” making it seem like a freestanding outfit, but it is made at the same plant as many other brands made by Jim Beam. “Knob Creek Distillery” is simply what’s called an assumed business name, otherwise known as a DBA, which is the legal shorthand for “doing business as,” and is a method that can be used to make one company seem like many. But drinkers who sleuth out the origins of most brands will find their whiskey traced back to one of just a few places.
Almost all of America’s dozen or so biggest distilleries also sell whiskey to outsider buyers who market it as something that’s entirely independent. One of these distilleries, Midwest Grain Products Ingredients (MGPI), a distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, that used to be owned by Seagram, makes whiskey for outside brands that include labels like Templeton, Bulleit Rye, and some of the High West brands. MGPI’s Web site has a drop-down menu featuring the whiskey styles it will make and age for customers wanting to market them as their own. This common industry arrangement is usually called “sourcing” or “contract distilling” and those companies on the receiving end are typically called NDPs, short for “non-distiller producers” (you can tell them apart on
the liquor store shelf by tiny print reading “produced by,” or some similar variation, rather than “distilled by,” since they’re not technically distillers and government regulations prevent them from saying otherwise). For many upstart distilleries, sourcing is simply a way to become established while they wait for their own whiskey stocks to age, although most, understandably, don’t advertise that fact.
As one might expect, whiskey geeks often scoff at sourced brands. The image of a small, independent producer is hard to resist, and they complain that their notions of authenticity are disrupted when that appearance turns out to be a façade. It’s easy to see why, but at the same time it must be pointed out that the practice of sourcing has a long history going back to the nineteenth century, and most of the main suppliers carry reputations for making good whiskey. MGPI is often mocked, but it is actually one of the oldest distilleries in the country, giving it the kind of real heritage that many brands covet. If MGPI had a less severe name and sold whiskey under its own labels, the brands would probably be revered as classics.
Hamilton is the eternal whipping boy of whiskey drinkers. He was an elite power broker, an early embodiment of Wall Street, and a champion of the kind of consolidated industry we rarely associate with personal independence or individuality. Modern Americans probably wouldn’t be inclined to share a drink with him. In contrast, the whiskey world fawns over Jefferson. He might have hated whiskey, but his policies helped support its rise and development, all while championing the kind of independent smallholders that remain popular icons even as they become less of a reality. Jefferson’s system might have lost out to Hamilton’s—something the whiskey world is loath to admit—but Jefferson continues to be revered.
With this in mind, it is greatly ironic that the popular brand named after Jefferson today is sourced. An image of him is literally engraved on the bottle, even though the whiskey within comes from the kind of industry he fought against. The brand was formed in 1997 as an NDP and is headquartered out of New York City, Hamilton’s old turf. When I once asked brand proprietor Trey Zoeller why he named his whiskey
after the former president, he simply laughed and said, “I had no marketing budget. I simply wanted a recognizable face associated with history and tradition.”
But Zoeller is far from using a mere façade—most people buying the small brand probably think they’re supporting a modern-day personification of one of Jefferson’s smallholders, and in some ways they are, but not in the way they probably expect. Zoeller is a small businessman utilizing the knowledge and efficiency of larger distilleries by co-opting their whiskey. He doesn’t actually make his bourbon from scratch, but he does blend bourbons he finds elsewhere to create a unique flavor profile for his own brands. Taken alone, Zoeller explains, none of the separate bourbons he buys is as good as the sum of the parts mixed together, and the strengths and inadequacies of each compensate for each other. For instance, he might purchase stocks of twenty-year-old bourbon that most would find undrinkable after having absorbed too many wood tannins from aging so long. But blended with younger bourbons the older spirit lends the kind of dryness wood tannins offer, helping balance the young bourbon’s heavier grain notes. Zoeller doesn’t distill, but he does have a refined palate, a quality that shines through in the layered complexity of the whiskies he creates.
Big versus small. That’s sometimes how the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson is described. There are benefits and drawbacks to both, and it’s a battle cry constantly sounded throughout America’s economic history. The respective sides of Jefferson and Hamilton’s ideas are still argued among politicians today, and Americans are reminded of it every time they open their wallets and find images of both men emblazoned on U.S. currency. Only Jefferson, however, has his image on a bottle of
bourbon.
M
odern distillery visitor centers rumble and shake like revival tents. Stories boil out of them, shouting the creation myths of their brands. In Kentucky, you hear the names of many different early settlers—Elijah Craig, Jacob Boehm, Evan Williams, Basil Hayden—but their tales all follow a similar pattern: once these people arrived at the frontier, they dedicated themselves to the simple principles of making whiskey, establishing the legacy behind whatever bourbon you’re drinking today. Every account is a classic American success story, rooted in a fabled past. And even though the tales are often embellished, exchanging mundane reality for serendipity and style, we tend to look past any inconsistencies. This is because the story matters just as much as the facts—it’s what we buy into, literally and figuratively.
The stories are also designed to make you believe specifically in Kentucky. The state holds a special connection to bourbon, even though many other places possess the exact same qualities that make Kentucky’s whiskey so good: water filtered by limestone, the ability to grow grain, and climates defined by hot summers and cool winters. So what accounts for Kentucky’s primacy today? Much of the answer would come after Prohibition, explained by the state’s business and lobbying savvy, but that falls later in the tale. Much earlier than that, Kentucky would begin to give its whiskey special prominence with its ability to
weave a good story. The frontier didn’t keep careful records, and detailed specifics of bourbon’s early days—involving questions of why distillers started aging the spirit in charred barrels or how bourbon even got its name—were poorly documented. Kentucky, a colorful state with mythic origins, where history collides with mystery, would soon find creative ways to fill in the gaps. The whiskey industry would later call its marketing efforts “history,” but it’s this sort of history that the writer Julian Barnes would later describe as “that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
Today, the Heaven Hill distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, makes the Elijah Craig line of bourbon. It is named after the man who for many decades was erroneously credited with making the “first” bourbon. Before Craig moved to Kentucky and began distilling, he was a controversial preacher in Virginia who was jailed in 1768 for sermons so fiery that they enraged the colony’s official Episcopalian clergy. Undaunted from his cell, the firebrand pastor continued to preach and draw large crowds, among them a young James Madison, who would later strive to protect religious freedom in the Constitution. Shortly after the American Revolution, Craig decided to start a new life in a freer place. Joining his brother Lewis, he led an exodus of six hundred people to what is present-day Kentucky. The group called itself “the Travelling Church.”
The Kentucky they arrived in was a place of transition, new and unknown. To many, even the state’s name was a mystery. The Cherokee said it meant “dark and bloody ground,” but the Iroquois’s interpretation of
Kanta-ke
translated to “meadow-land.” The Wyandote interpreted it as “the land of tomorrow,” while the Shawnee claimed it meant “at the head of the river.” Others said it was simply a name invented by white people.
The frontiersmen who had lived in Kentucky before the arrival of Craig and the Travelling Church were equally confounding. Most were fringe-dwelling loners like the Scotch-Irish distillers who had protected Washington’s flank during the war—hunters more than gatherers. They
wore buckskin and during their odd visits back east spoke of killing Indians. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a New Yorker who originally hailed from France, described them as “no better than carnivorous animals” that “exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.” It would still be decades before a club of writers known as the Knickerbocker Group—including James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving—would reimagine these backwoodsmen as a cast of heroic American originals.
The arrival of Craig and the Travelling Church, however, was the result of an earlier phase of Kentucky’s image makeover. Crèvecoeur and others had claimed that the frontier needed proper farmers to introduce social bonds and civilization. The idea of Manifest Destiny was in its infancy, and Jefferson’s objective to create a rural democracy was just taking root. In 1779, when the future president was governor of Virginia, of which Kentucky was a part until its statehood in 1792, he enticed people like Craig to move by giving away free land if it was used to grow corn.
People started to trickle in, but many were still fearful. What the frontier really needed to attract settlers was the right spokesperson. Enter Daniel Boone, who had moved to the frontier when he was scrappy and poor, then fought Indians there during the Revolution. Later he would win public office and become a Freemason, making Boone the ultimate bootstrapper, embodying the frontier’s potential. Then, when he was fifty years old, he became a living legend when the historian John Filson published
The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke
in 1784
.
Filson colorfully chronicled Boone’s adventures, glossing over certain details—part of the reason Boone chose to live in the frontier was to avoid debt collectors (which he later repaid)—and often taking spectacular liberties with other parts of Boone’s epic and inspiring story.
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It was mythmaking at its best. Other writers with purple pens happily joined Filson’s effort to glamorize the frontier and attract quasi-nomadic dreamers like Craig, Elijah Pepper, Henry Wathen, Jacob
Boehm (later changed to Beam), and others whose names would, many decades later, eventually lend inspiration to bourbon brands. These writers gushed that Kentucky was a place where a settler only needed to work “scarcely two hours a day to support himself and his family.” One writer even called heaven “a Kentucky sort of place.” The historian Daniel Blake later wrote that Boone’s Kentucky was “first and perhaps foremost, an idea. It was an idea born of need and hope.”
Once Craig and his Travelling Church arrived in Kentucky, they founded a town called Lebanon, borrowing the name for what the Old Testament called the “land of milk and honey” (in 1790, the name was changed to Georgetown, to honor the first U.S. president). The group soon learned that the region was also a perfect kitchen for making whiskey. Each hill on the Kentucky horizon was a paler blue echo of the one before, the rolling topography resisting erosion and creating bottomlands with soil so rich that one settler compared it to black butter. From the very beginning, the bottomlands were legendary for growing corn. Hierosme Lalemant, a Jesuit missionary living in Wisconsin a century before whites first started moving into Kentucky, was told by Indians that Kentucky’s cornstalks were bigger than trees, the ears were two feet long, and the kernels were bigger than grapes.
That, of course, was just the kind of exaggerated storytelling that seems to be part of Kentucky’s DNA. Nevertheless, the corn did grow well there, and was a practical choice for planting in the state’s newly settled rough acreage because it didn’t need as much plowing as smaller grains and could grow faster than the weeds. It exploded out of Kentucky’s legendary soil like fireworks. Whereas Maryland farmland typically produced ten bushels of corn per acre, Kentucky land yielded forty. This was more corn than any single family could consume, leaving surpluses to be distilled into whiskey that wouldn’t spoil and could be used for barter or the inevitable drinking. It must have seemed impossible that the land could ever be exhausted.
The layer of limestone underneath Kentucky’s rich topsoil was also important to the whiskey. Water bubbled through it to springs, which native Shawnees believed were entrances to the underworld. Shawnee
warriors sprinkled tobacco around the springs and asked the spirits for a safe return from hunting missions. Farmer-distillers like Craig found the water a valuable medium to a different variety of spirits. The limestone filtered iron salts from the water and added calcium, which helped yeast thrive during fermentation.
The land and its economics dictated a whiskey that increasingly resembled modern bourbon: primarily corn, with some rye and a little malted barley. The grain combination was perfect from both a technical standpoint and a flavor perspective. Corn was inexpensive and yielded a relatively high amount of alcohol per bushel, an asset that also made it smart from a business perspective. Rye added flavor and presented a way to use a grain that sometimes struggled to find another purpose (wheat is better for making bread and barley is better for beer). Potential grains outside this trio presented other difficulties. Wheat was relatively expensive, buckwheat becomes gummy and easily scorches, and oats are difficult to work with due to their high bran content—if not fermented fully before beginning distillation, they can boil up into the worm and blow up the still.
Recipes from the era are rare, but the ones that do exist often indicate mash bills reflecting bourbon.
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One distillation manual from the early nineteenth century explained that “if the proportion of one fourth part of rye can be obtained, it is enough.”
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The account also indicates that distillers used whatever was at hand and that proportions were rarely standardized, meaning that any modern claims by companies that they are adhering to a strict and ancient “family recipe” from the era are highly questionable. Whiskey still was sold primarily as a bulk commodity and brand names didn’t exist, meaning that consistent flavor as part of a brand’s identity wasn’t an issue. In 1819, Anthony Boucherie published a distilling manual confirming that recipes were
basically free-for-alls, writing that “whiskey is made either with rye, barley, or Indian corn. One, or all those kinds of grains is used, as they are more or less abundant in the country.”
Regardless of the recipe, quality probably varied. The clear, unaged spirit emerging from most stills was quickly nicknamed “paleface.” It served its practical purpose, but likely didn’t serve the taste buds or the soul. Flavor was improved with fruit, herbs, or oils from clove, anise, or juniper, just as it was with Washington’s rye whiskey. Cherry bounce was one popular recipe made by adding syrup and cherries or bark from the root of a cherry tree steeped in hot water.
A more sophisticated way to improve the taste involved filtering the spirits through charcoal. This removed the unpleasant flavor of excessive fusel oils and helped give the spirit sweetness by neutralizing acids found in the raw alcohol. The process usually involved a tub with a false bottom punctured with holes: flannel was placed over the bottom and covered with a pile of charcoal made from green wood such as sugar maple or hickory, and raw spirits were poured through.
But charcoal filtering was only a quick fix for smoothing out the liquor’s rough edges. Kentucky still hadn’t earned its legendary reputation for producing particularly tasty whiskey.
And this is where today’s marketing comes in, fantastically but erroneously crediting Craig with the idea of aging bourbon in charred oak barrels. As the story goes, once Craig was settled in Kentucky he continued preaching but devoted an increasing amount of time to distilling (other Baptists started criticizing his entrepreneurship, claiming it was impossible to serve God and Mammon both). The legend as it’s told by Heaven Hill today is that a barn fire was responsible for accidentally charring the insides of barrels Craig had intended to use to store and ship his whiskey. The frugal frontiersman addressed this problem by using the barrels anyway, serendipitously discovering the unique flavor their charred interiors gave his whiskey.
And, so the legend goes, bourbon was born.
But it’s not true. The Elijah Craig brand has existed since 1986, and Heaven Hill was first established in 1934. Naming the brand after a
firebrand historical figure gives it an instant heritage anchored in a romanticized past.
The Craig myth first appeared in 1874, when the historian Richard Collins claimed that Craig made the “first” bourbon. He didn’t use Craig’s name, but he wrote under a list of “Kentucky Firsts” in his sixteen-hundred-page
History of Kentucky—
which for decades was standard in Kentucky classrooms—that “the first Bourbon Whiskey was made in 1789, at Georgetown, at the fulling mill at Royal Spring,” which identified Craig by the location of his distillery. Collins, of course, provided no evidence that Craig’s whiskey was different from any of the other whiskies that had already begun flowing out of Kentucky at that time. Modern historians speculate that the Craig story was a way for Collins to defend the reputation of whiskey, which was under attack by the temperance movement when he made his claim.
It is no mystery why Heaven Hill would run with the Craig tale—it’s far more exciting than a dry explanation that the rise of bourbon was an organic affair, emerging from the collective efforts of thousands of nameless farmer-distillers who, over time, adopted a succession of good practices after word spread over the countryside. The distillery understands that great tales can’t have a flock of heroes, they can only have one, and Craig won the casting call.
In bourbon marketing, stories like Craig’s are the rule rather than the exception. For many years, the companies behind the brands were the only sources explaining the history of the industry, and there is no advantage whatsoever in telling the boring version of the story. Don’t believe 90 percent of the tales you read on whiskey bottles, but don’t forget to enjoy them either. The stories are just like the whiskey itself. They start as a vapor, condense, and then sit unseen in a barrel for years. Finally they emerge, transformed into something entirely different and enchanting.
• • •
Every whiskey barrel is a sort of medieval alchemist’s laboratory, a dark and sooty place from which a clear spirit poured inside emerges years
later, golden and transformed. Barrels first started as humble shipping containers for whiskey, but over the centuries were promoted into something else: an ingredient as well as a vessel.