Authors: Reid Mitenbuler
Then there are purists who claim that whiskey should only be had neat or with just a few drops of water to “open it up,” but their advice is tiresome and dull. Whiskey is a drink of independent adaptability and does whatever it wants, even if that means pairing itself in cocktails or with soda, plain water, or ice (or food, if you like). Whatever suits the season and the time, whiskey doesn’t care about being judged. It is a drink of Americans who once used it to defy the arbitrary social protocols of those who deemed it unsophisticated and rough.
But even though wine and whiskey are separate and distinct, wine has nevertheless created the rules of connoisseurship by which whiskey is often evaluated. In its role as a tastemaker, wine is responsible for the sensory approach—describing drinks based on their phenolic compounds—typically used to evaluate whiskey and other spirits today (comparisons like “hibiscus,” “sandalwood,” “nougat,” or “saddle leather”). Whiskey, like wine, shares specific phenolic compounds with seemingly unrelated items, which people can train their palates to detect, heightening their ability to enjoy the subtleties both kinds of drinks can offer.
Appreciating and detecting these things can sometimes seem like a high art, the province only of sommeliers
and other members of some kind of culinary priesthood. But this isn’t the case at all. In fact, having ordinary senses is perhaps better than having exceptional ones. “Supertasters”—people who are genetically more sensitive to smells and flavors—oftentimes aren’t particularly adventurous eaters, shying away from spicy or bitter flavors because of their acute sensitivity, according to some studies. And just as having sensitive hearing doesn’t make somebody a better music critic, an acute sense of smell or taste doesn’t automatically make somebody better at judging wine and spirits. “Tasters are created, not born,” Hildegarde Heymann, a professor and enologist at the University of California at Davis, told me. She and other sensory scientists stress that learning to taste just takes a little practice and attention to detail. They recommend that tasters simply keep notebooks and write down flavors and aromas they detect. Compare the notes to others reviewing the same whiskey but don’t worry if they don’t perfectly match up—tasting notes almost never do. For this reason,
Whisky Magazine
has two separate critics review the same whiskey, usually with notable differences. Most experienced tasters will readily admit that their ability was developed through simple practice, not because they have mastered some kind of occult knowledge.
*
We evaluate with our minds as much as the nose or the tongue. In nineteenth-century America, wine gained its snobbish reputation because of whom it was associated with and because the economics of trade gave it a relatively higher price. Outside associations like price and status continue to dictate our appreciation, and are tools that marketers have mastered. When tastings are blind, expectations are always confounded. In blind wine tastings, cheap castoffs are often named as favorites and cherished vintages from prestigious vineyards are disregarded. At the Judgment of Paris, held in 1976, wines from California’s burgeoning wine industry were chosen by French critics over their French counterparts.
Francophiles were horrified and embarrassed; if the tasters had known, national pride almost certainly would have prevented them from choosing the American upstarts.
Price also warps perceptions of quality, even if it has nothing to do with the liquid in the bottle. In the 1930s the wine baron Ernest Gallo made a sales call on a New York customer and offered him two glasses of wine—one from a five-cent bottle and one from a ten-cent bottle. The wines were identical, but “they always buy the ten-cent wine,” Gallo said. Customers were preoccupied with not looking like cheapskates rather than just trusting their gut about which wine was better.
As the rules of connoisseurship have developed over time, appreciation, a thing that was originally considered an art, has become an industry. As you might expect, wine blazed the path that whiskey now follows. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the style of wine-tasting notes was literary rather than sensory. In 1932, the wine critic and classical scholar H. Warner Allen described the Latour 1869 this way: “The palate recognized a heroic wine, such a drink as might refresh the warring archangels, and the perfection of its beauty called up the noble phrase ‘terrible as an army with banners.’”
As the wine industry developed in America, and as more people began making a living by offering advice, either as sommeliers
or in magazines like
Wine Enthusiast,
the need arose for a system that seemed more legitimate and less fanciful than writing about flavors and aromas as if they were “warring archangels.” The idea of tasting notes gained in popularity during the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1990, Ann Noble, a chemist at the University of California at Davis, invented the “Wine Aroma Wheel,” which attempted to standardize tasting conventions. Pineapple was an example of “tropical fruit,” while fig and raisin represented “dried fruits,” all of which were categorized under a “fruity” family of aromas. “Sulfur flavors” such as burnt match described another family of aromas. The wheel described almost a hundred different scents. While far from being a perfect science, the approach nevertheless gave professional tasting a sense of legitimacy.
The studied approach to tasting inevitably led to an increased emphasis
on scoring, which helps humans fulfill our almost compulsive desire to rank things. After experimenting with a few different approaches during the twentieth century, the wine industry eventually settled on the hundred-point rating system devised by the wine critic Robert Parker Jr. in the 1980s. This system—or a ten-point scale extended out to one decimal place, which is essentially the same thing—was later adopted by many spirits publications.
The very precision of these systems casts doubt on their validity—how can there really be a meaningful distinction between a 92 and a 93? Thoughtful industry watchers often argue that these numbers, which appear meticulously deduced, give ratings an aura of authority because they
seem
scientifically evaluated, but are really just ways to capitalize financially on something that is in fact highly subjective (by making it seem more specialized or precious than it really is). Many of the organizations that provide the ratings, such as the official-sounding Beverage Testing Institute, are likewise named so they seem more credible and unassailable.
Among the sharpest critics of modern ratings systems is Charles Cowdery, the author of numerous guides to appreciating whiskey and a regular contributor to magazines like
Whisky Advocate.
In his book
Bourbon, Straight,
Cowdery points out that very few whiskies ever score below 80 on what is admittedly a lopsided scale. This is because wine and whiskey publications are pushed by advertisers to do ratings because “they know lazy consumers buy from them,” he writes. Like field day at an elementary school, everybody is made to look like a winner. The lopsided scales are designed as much to avoid offending liquor companies—which advertise in the magazines and sponsor tasting events—as they are to give drinkers accurate evaluations. The San Francisco World Spirits Competition, for instance, uses a rating scale of double gold, gold, silver, and bronze. Even if a brand scores in the bottom half of entries, it still gets a medal that looks good to the average customer. But because almost
all
the ratings look good at first glance due to the way the scales are inflated, it’s hard not to conclude that their primary purpose is simply to sell more booze. The business of ranking spirits is essentially an industry within a wider industry, and it understandably wants to protect what can be a pretty sweet gig by not
offending the hand that feeds it. Spirits critics have a fun time—and some even make a good living—by offering advice to people who are unsure of their palates. That advice is sometimes worth seeking out, but never without a grain of salt.
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Ultimately, the best advice for evaluating and appreciating whiskey can be linked back to what impressed wine-drinking Europeans about their American hosts two centuries ago. The Europeans were sometimes critical, but their praise usually far outweighed their complaints. Almost all of them extolled the whiskey-drenched republic’s independence, self-sufficiency, and aversion to arbitrary rules.
S
ave for quarrels about how to make proper barbecue or martinis, no American culinary tradition is more debated than the julep, the most famous of the bourbon cocktails. Juleps have only four ingredients—bourbon, mint, sugar, ice—but the combination of those ingredients is dictated by a million rules. The debate—about proportions, technique, presentation—started in the nineteenth century and is still awaiting its day in front of the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, there is one undeniable truth of a proper mint julep: it is the most luxurious of all cocktails. Served in a silver cup, it requires a glacier’s worth of ice and a good five ounces of liquor, more than double the size of the average cocktail. Shaving the ice demands an eternity of time, as does drinking something so boozy and large.
The julep’s difficulty and the commitment it requires are part of its appeal. One cool gulp of the minty sweet liquid on a hot day makes up for everything the drink demands. Anticipation is part of the julep’s genius—like Miles Davis playing trumpet on “All Blues,” coming into the song when he’s good and ready, knowing that waiting is just as important to the music as the next phrase. Juleps epitomize the concept of patience.
But the julep is also defined by its contradictions. The unhurried leisure of the southern lifestyle defined by the julep was made possible
only by slavery; the drink is a simple pleasure but requires a lot of work; and it’s the most famous of the bourbon cocktails, but is rarely ever consumed—people today mainly drink juleps as a nostalgic nod to the past while watching the Kentucky Derby. But the julep’s most important contradiction is that, despite all its overtones of ritual and custom, the drink actually embodies change. The same industry and invention leading to its creation during the nineteenth century revolutionized how bourbon was made and consumed. Today the bourbon industry constantly trumpets tradition, but before it could get to this point it would require innovation. Two men, Frederic “the Ice King” Tudor and James Crow, otherwise known as “the father of modern bourbon,” were the ones to provide it.
• • •
The julep’s rise in America followed a similar path to many other cocktails. It has old roots—“julep” is a French word derived from the Arabic
julab,
meaning rosewater, and ancient juleps were nonalcoholic concoctions containing crushed rose petals to help medicine taste better. The rose petals were replaced by mint once the drink migrated to the Mediterranean, and once it drifted across the Atlantic, Americans added booze. The first American versions of it poked up around 1800 in Virginia and were spiked with brandy or rum but still no ice, which was a scarce luxury.
As the julep migrated west across the United States, whiskey came into play. In the South, political candidates in antebellum elections plied voters with rudimentary versions of juleps (which were still iceless). Battered tin cups hung from the sides of barrels of free whiskey sitting outside polling centers. Candidates’ names were stenciled on the side of the barrels and a bouquet of mint and a few pounds of sugar were tossed inside. It was primitive but effective.
These lukewarm juleps were an extension of the days during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when cocktails were generally served hot. This was a holdover from British drinking culture that used warm drinks to ward off damp chills. The British had long been
making punches involving spirits mixed with citrus juice and other flavorings, but Americans, as is their nature, soon reimagined and reinvented the process. Established hierarchies between wine, spirits, and other ingredients were shattered, and anything and everything was mixed together,
e pluribus unum
.
And then everything got put on ice. Cold drinks suited the warmer American climate, prompting one English observer to write, “Ice is an American institution—the use of it an American luxury—the abuse of it an American failing.” The presence of ice marked an increase in Americans’ standard of living and the trickle-down process of converting luxuries into necessities. Like many stories of American ingenuity, it also involved a pigheaded and stubborn businessman whom early potential investors didn’t take seriously. Nevertheless, he eventually became one of the nation’s first millionaires by creating an industry around providing year-round ice that most Americans today take for granted. Along the way, he revolutionized cocktails like the julep.
During the early nineteenth century, ice was a luxury. It could be kept year round in insulated icehouses, but access to these was often limited to the wealthy, particularly in warmer southern states. This all changed, however, when Boston businessman Frederic Tudor revolutionized the ice trade. It all started in 1806 when his brother remarked that they could probably make a lot of money by selling frozen water cut from Massachusetts lakes and ponds.
Tudor wasn’t the first to notice the value of ice, of course. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Chinese all harvested and stored it during winter to chill their food and drinks in summer
.
Tudor’s ice trade stood apart because of its sheer ambition. He saw untapped markets scattered across the globe and believed that cutting ice and shipping it across the world to the tropics, where it would provide relief from the oppressive heat, would make him “inevitably and unavoidably rich,” he wrote.
Most potential investors saw nothing inevitable or unavoidable about the riches expressed in Tudor’s vision. Instead, with their flinty New England gazes, they saw what Daniel Boorstin described as Tudor’s
“flamboyant, defiant, energetic, and sometimes reckless spirit.” Yes, the market for luxurious ice was growing in the United States, but wouldn’t it just melt during a long voyage to the tropics? Their understanding of the science was accurate, and much of the ice Tudor shipped to Martinique and Cuba between 1806 and 1810 melted into large financial losses.
Besides that, potential customers in those markets didn’t really know what to do with the frozen stuff once it arrived.
Tudor solved the melting problem by packing his ice tighter and insulating it with sawdust. He solved the second problem—demand from customers—with cocktails. Tudor’s initial customers bought ice to preserve food and medicine, but he later branched out by selling ice to cafés and wealthy households so they could chill their drinks.
Tudor sold his ice utilizing the same business strategy as a shrewd drug dealer: give the first hit away for free and then charge once customers are hooked. Customers were enticed, compliments of the house, with slushy cocktails that offered relief from the sun’s glaring heat. Then the bill came when they asked for a second round. After people tried their drinks cold, they could “never be presented with them warm again,” Tudor wrote. He then anchored himself in his various markets by bribing local officials to let him build a monopoly of icehouses.
Tudor made his first profits by 1810, only to be swindled by a business partner and land in debtor’s prison. After he was released, he secured a loan enabling him to continue with his obsession, but significant profits were still another fifteen years away.
Those profits eventually came, however, and Tudor’s increased success led to the hiring of a new foreman named Nathaniel Wyeth to help meet growing demand. At that point, ice was laboriously cut by hand with saws. Wyeth developed a horse-drawn ice plow and a system in which frozen bodies of water could be divided into chessboard patterns and cut into ice blocks about two feet square. This mass-produced ice was easier to transport and store, reducing Tudor’s costs by two-thirds and enabling him to sell more.
Tudor’s most ambitious plan came in 1833, when he set out to
deliver ice to Calcutta, a voyage of fourteen thousand miles that involved crossing the equator twice. Tudor and his investors wondered if the ice would even sell, but their concerns were put to rest by his extraordinary profits. In an editorial, the
India Gazette
thanked him for making “this luxury accessible, by its abundance and cheapness.”
By that point, Tudor’s success had drawn competition to the ice trade, and Americans across the country were becoming accustomed to the luxury. Henry David Thoreau chronicled the growing industry near his Walden outpost, describing one stack of ice as “an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds.” The ice symbolized an increasingly complicated world breaking from its preindustrial past, and a luxurious counterpoint to Thoreau’s experiment in simplicity. Besides, Thoreau didn’t appreciate having his peace disrupted. He couldn’t help but marvel, however, that “the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”
By that time, Thoreau’s fellow Americans were developing a taste for slushy cocktails such as the julep, as well as ice cream and other frozen delicacies. Ice was becoming integral to daily life, and newspapers followed the trade closely. Unseasonably warm winters prompted newspapers to issue warnings about “ice famines,” and ice harvesters would sail to the Arctic and make up the shortfall by chopping up icebergs. The benefits of ice spread well beyond cocktails. Fishermen stayed at sea longer with their catches packed in ice, and its ability to preserve fresh vegetables also meant that food could be sold in the distant markets of growing cities.
Alongside transportation improvements, ice helped push more fresh fruits and vegetables into America’s turgid diet of salt pork and corn mush, helping decrease the whiskey binge that had so alarmed foreign visitors. During the late eighteenth century, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush had called for Americans to substitute vegetables for salt pork in their diets as a way to reduce the intake of spirits, which he noted were drunk at an alarming rate. His idea gathered momentum as reformers like Sylvester Graham promoted diets that rejected whiskey, coffee, meat, and other items they claimed “stimulated” the emotions
and exacerbated domestic abuse and other forms of violence caused by insobriety. In 1829, Graham, a vegetarian and temperance advocate, created the graham cracker as a wholesome way to promote the more healthful mind-set, and he advised Americans to wash it down with water, not whiskey. Spirits consumption peaked around 1830 but then started to slowly decline, although it was still considerable.
Technology and innovation were changing how Americans drank whiskey, transforming ice from a luxury into a necessity, and enabling other social changes. Soon they would also revolutionize the whiskey itself.
• • •
Just as Frederic Tudor’s ice business was becoming a profitable success, the Kentuckian James Crow began bringing bourbon into the modern age, implementing scientific production standards and creating the kind of whiskey modern drinkers would recognize. The modern brand named after him, Old Crow, is only a husk of the legend it once was—the same in name only—but the legacy of its creator is found in every other bottle of bourbon for sale today. Crow was the Steve Jobs of bourbon: he didn’t invent anything but took methods and practices others had discovered and perfected them. The whiskey landscape of the 1830s was a random patchwork of clunky old ways and promising new technologies and methodologies begging for integration. Bourbon needed a coherent force to collect and streamline all the stray bits of knowledge.
A Scottish native educated in chemistry and medicine, Crow moved to Kentucky via Philadelphia in the 1820s. As a physician, he mainly practiced for free, spending the remainder of his time working for a handful of distilleries in Woodford County before eventually landing at a distillery owned by Oscar Pepper by the side of Glenns Creek on land where the Woodford Reserve Distillery sits today. Distilling first began on the spot around 1812 when Elijah and Sarah Pepper, Oscar’s parents, built a grain mill next to the water. Elijah died in 1825 and Oscar took over, building many of the stone buildings—still in use at the distillery today—between 1838 and 1840. At this time, he hired Crow.
In the decades before Crow started at the Pepper distillery, distilling equipment improved technologically. In 1810, Phares Bernard of New York patented a still using steam that allowed him to cut his labor by a third and his fuel by half. Other innovations followed—the nation’s most popular magazines regularly published articles about distilling technology, and between 1802 and 1815 more than a hundred patents were issued for distilling equipment, a number amounting to more than 5 percent of all patents granted in the United States.
Of all the innovations, the landmark achievement was the invention in the 1820s of the continuous still, also called a column still, which allowed production of higher-proof liquor. In 1831, Irish inventor Aeneas Coffey patented an even more efficient version of the column still. The stills themselves were large—up to five feet wide and a few stories tall—and allowed the liquid to be pumped through in a continuous flow, meaning distillers no longer needed to empty or clean pot stills after single batches. The beer was poured in at the top, then trickled down through a series of plates perforated by holes. Steam was pumped into the still from the bottom and rose up to meet the beer as it trickled down. The steam stripped the alcohol from the beer and carried it away as vapor. It condensed back into a liquid in the coiled piece of tubing known as the worm. Column stills devoured beer when they ran at full capacity, producing volumes unimaginable to small distillers using traditional pot stills.
Distilleries using these new technologies required far less labor, leading to the first wave of industry consolidation and a tilt away from the Jeffersonian vision of a cottage industry toward the Hamiltonian vision. Although the number of distilleries in America had increased from fourteen thousand to twenty thousand between 1810 and 1830, that number fell by half between 1830 and 1840.
Even though consolidation today is often viewed as a steamroller of brutal efficiency, leaving a vicious wake of lost jobs and sacrificed freedom, during the 1830s it allowed for changes that many farmer-distillers surely welcomed. Industrialization in growing urban centers in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys absorbed excess labor from the agrarian sector,
allowing previously nomadic families to establish roots in their communities and create social institutions that helped limit excessive drinking. An expanding system of canals, steamboats, and transportation infrastructure helped create a national grain market that made farmer-distillers less dependent on whiskey sales. For those continuing to make whiskey, the shipping revolution helped create new markets and expand old ones. Price differences between commodities became less drastic and many western farmers discovered they had more economic opportunities aside from just whiskey production.