Standing in a whiskey section can be pretty confusing.
You'll see labels from around the world - Scotch whisky, Irish whiskey, Japanese whisky, and then you'll start looking at American whiskey.
The labels are endless. Small batch. Handcrafted. Old family recipe. Prohibition-era. Aged in oak. A founder's signature. A story about a barn fire in 1789. There's more written on whiskey bottles than what you'll find in many newsstands!
We trust labels to tell us the truth, but when it comes to whiskey, and in particular, the American whiskey of choice, bourbon, there are a lot of claims on those labels that may or may not be backed by concrete, indisputable facts.
When I started researching this episode, I came across the work of Michael Veach. He is a historian at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville; he's in the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame, and he wrote what amounts to the standard history of bourbon. He put it about as plainly as it can be put: "the biggest problem is that so much of the history of bourbon has come out of the marketing department."
Now, Michael does make it clear that he isn't claiming most of it is untrue. He just takes anything he hears from a distiller or a marketer with a grain of salt.
That's the spirit (ha! Spirit - get it?) of this week's Dispatch. It isn't a takedown. I love this stuff. But bourbon whiskey might be the most successfully marketed product in American beverage history, and once you see the pattern of marketing making the product, you see it everywhere, all the way back to the beginning.
So what is bourbon, actually?
Let's get the true part out of the way first, because it's short.
- Bourbon is a distilled spirit made in the United States.
- The mash has to be at least 51% corn.
- It has to age in brand-new charred oak containers, not used ones.
- It can be distilled to no more than 160 proof, it goes into the barrel at no more than 125, and it comes out of the bottle at no less than 80.
- No added coloring, no added flavoring, nothing in there but whiskey and the water used to bring the proof down.
That comes to us from the Code of Federal Regulations.
That's it. That's the whole legally enforceable definition. Miss any one of those and what you've got is American whiskey, which is a perfectly good thing to have, but it isn't bourbon.
But those rules only came into being starting in 1935. For the first 150 years of American whiskey, there were no legal definitions about what exactly bourbon was!
Nobody was checking your corn percentage. Nobody cared what your barrel was made of. The rules came toward the end of the story, not the beginning, which means that for most of bourbon's life the only thing standing between you and whatever was in the bottle was somebody's word.
Why whiskey beat rum
Back in the Rum Dispatch, we talked about why rum faded in the American drinking lineup. The Revolution wrecked the molasses trade; we had just gone to war with the people who sold us the molasses, and grain was growing right here.
It's all true, but there is one more thing that I left for this week's Dispatch:
Rum had a story problem.
Rum came from sugarcane, which meant it came from somewhere else, often British plantations, on British ships. Whiskey came from grain, grown here, by an American farmer, on American ground. At the exact moment this country was finding its identity, one of those was an embarrassment, and one was a source of pride...
"Are you a patriot, or are you somebody drinking that British stuff?"
Nobody had to make that argument up. It was true. But somebody still had to make it, over and over, and that's what finished rum off (the first time). Whiskey became the American drink. Rum got left behind.
Whiskey's first great marketing campaign was calling itself American. It never stopped.
The tax that almost broke the country
March 1791. Hamilton (the guy who won't throw away his shot) puts an excise on distilled spirits to pay down the war debt. It's the first internal tax the federal government ever levied on its own citizens, and to say it went poorly is an understatement.
I learned about the Whiskey Rebellion in school, and I knew it was concentrated in Western Pennsylvania, but I didn't understand why those farmers were so upset. Turns out, they had a good reason to feel the government treated them unfairly.
You see, there were two ways to pay the tax. You could pay a flat fee on your still, or a rate per gallon. The big distillers were on the East Coast and ran year-round, so the flat fee worked out cheap for them, somewhere around six cents a gallon.
Small farmers out in western Pennsylvania and western Virginia and into Kentucky distilled seasonally and couldn't run at capacity, so they got pushed onto the per-gallon rate at around nine. The federal tax bureau's own website says it flat out today: smaller distillers often paid more than twice per gallon what the larger producers paid.
And out west, whiskey wasn't a luxury. It was infrastructure. You couldn't get a wagonload of rye over the Alleghenies, but you could get the rye over in a jug, so farmers distilled their surplus to make it portable. Whiskey also functioned as currency out there, in an economy with almost no cash. The tax had to be paid in cash.
So the first tax the United States ever levied on its own people was built in a way that landed hardest on the people with the least. It was not appreciated.
In 1794, the farmers of western Pennsylvania rose up, and George Washington rode out at the head of a militia army against American citizens. It's the only time a sitting president has personally led troops in the field. The armed intervention worked, and it settled the question of whether federal law was enforceable, which was what the country was really asking itself.
From this "rebellion" comes one of the first myths and marketing stories of Bourbon. The folks in Kentucky will sometimes claim that distilling in Kentucky began because the Rebellion drove distillers into Kentucky.
Veach lists that one as a myth. There were already people distilling in Kentucky, the migration had already happened, and there's documentation of Kentucky distillers paying the tax right along with everybody else. It's a great story. The government came for our stills so we kept moving west. It just isn't true.
Who invented bourbon? Start in Virginia, in 1620.
George Thorpe was an English member of Parliament who came to the New World in 1620 and ended up at Berkeley Hundred, a plantation up the James River from Jamestown. He sat on the Virginia Governor's Council, led the project to build a college in the colony, and became something of an advocate for the Powhatan, criticizing his fellow colonists for how they treated them.
He also got interested in corn.
In a letter dated December 19, 1620, he mentions a mash of corn he'd distilled, describing it as a good drink of Indian corn that was at times better than strong English beer. Some historians think that's the first whiskey made in Virginia, and maybe in America. Others read it as a fortified beer rather than a true distilled spirit. Nobody's certain, but what we do know is that he was distilling something, because when they inventoried his estate the list included an old copper still, valued at three pounds of tobacco.
They inventoried his estate because he was killed on March 22, 1622, in the coordinated Powhatan attack led by Opechancanough. He'd been warned it was coming and he refused to leave, because he believed they were his friends and wouldn't harm him.
That's the first American whiskey story, and it's got no marketing in it at all. Which is probably why almost nobody tells it.
The preacher who didn't invent bourbon
People kept distilling. And now we get to the one you've heard of.
Elijah Craig invented bourbon in 1789. Baptist minister, Kentucky, charred oak barrel. It's on the bottle. Heaven Hill still calls him the Father of Bourbon.
Craig was a real person, and he really was a big deal. Born in 1738, he eventually settled in Kentucky and became a full-blown frontier business magnate. Schools, a paper mill, a lumber mill, a fulling mill, a ropewalk. If you could mill it, he milled it. Around 1789, he opened a distillery.
Everything after that is...well, shall we say, sometimes more a story than historical fact.
Elijah Craig, the person, was almost certainly making the same thing as everyone else, which was rye-forward whiskey in the Pennsylvania Monongahela style. There's no evidence he was charring barrels. And he wasn't even in Bourbon County.
So where does the claim come from? The 1874 edition of Collins's "History of Kentucky", which says the first bourbon whiskey was made in 1789 at Georgetown, at the fulling mill at the Royal Spring. Craig had a fulling mill at Royal Spring. Collins never names him. It's one line, buried on a page of short items under a heading of Kentucky firsts, with no attempt to back it up.
Craig never claimed any of it in his lifetime. Not in his own papers, not in the papers of people who knew him well, including a judge who had Craig in his courtroom as a defendant over the whiskey tax.
Two things happened in the 1870s to get him the credit.
The small one is family. His nephew, Newton Craig, was a Kentucky state legislator who spent years pushing the idea that Elijah invented the drink, championing the research of local historian Ann Bevins.
The big one is temperance. In the 1870s, when the whiskey industry was fighting the temperance movement, they decided to proclaim a Baptist preacher the father of bourbon. Let's make a Baptist preacher the father of bourbon, they figured, and let the temperance people argue that it's immoral. Makes it a much harder argument if a man of God is the inventor, right?
That's a modern public relations move, executed in 1874, and it worked so well his name is on a bottle you can buy tonight.
Nobody knows who charred the first barrel
You make a barrel, you light the inside of it on fire, and the char is what gives bourbon most of what it tastes like. The vanilla, the caramel, the sweetness. When it comes to bourbon being bourbon, people argue about whether the grain or the wood matters more, and the honest answer is probably the wood.
The story attached to Craig is that he was thrifty, reused barrels that had held salted fish, burned them out to kill the smell, and found it improved the whiskey.
Nobody can source it. The earliest written mention of charring in production that anyone has found is an 1826 letter from a whiskey wholesaler in Lexington, explaining the process to a distiller over in Bourbon County and telling him it gives a distinct flavor.
Which is Veach's whole objection, and it's a good one. If Craig created bourbon in the 1790s, why did it take thirty years before a single person wrote down how to char a barrel?
We're going to circle back to barrel charring in a bit, but remember, Elijah Craig almost certainly wasn't the guy.
Why is it called bourbon? Pick a story.
There are two explanations. They can't both be right, and I'm not going to pretend I know which is.
The one everybody tells:
Bourbon County, Kentucky, formed in 1785 and named for the House of Bourbon, a thank-you to Louis XVI for helping us out of the Great Britain situation. (Also good marketing, incidentally.)
The distillers there started making a corn-forward whiskey that was noticeably sweeter than what the neighbors were doing. It went down the Ohio in barrels marked Bourbon, and people started asking for it by the county name. Not a regulated term, just a descriptor for a style.
The one Veach likes better.
His alternative goes like this. Around 1807, two brothers named John and Louis Tarascon, from near Cognac in France, set up a warehouse and mill at the falls of the Ohio in Louisville and ran trade down to New Orleans. And the records of the time show that New Orleans didn't want whiskey. New Orleans wanted cognac.
So the Tarascons bought Kentucky whiskey and put it in charred barrels, instead of the plain barrels whiskey normally aged in, because charred barrels are how cognac is aged, and it would make cheap American grain liquor taste closer to expensive French brandy.
Then they sold it into the New Orleans entertainment district, and people started asking for that whiskey they sell on Bourbon Street. Which shortened to bourbon whiskey.
If that's what happened, then the two things that most define bourbon, the char in the barrel and the name on the bottle, both came out of a deliberate plan to make an American product pass for a fancier European one. Not a preacher being thrifty. Two guys with a warehouse and an angle, in 1807.
I love this story and I want to believe it, because how funny would it be if America's great spirit is based on two slightly devious brothers using marketing to start it off?
The Tarascons are documented in historical fact, but most sources still lead with the county being the source of the name. Veach says himself that we may never know who invented bourbon or who Kentucky's first distiller was. It doesn't really matter, but it's fun to try and figure out where the name got started, and the Tarascon story is a lot more fun!
The year the government became a brand
In the 19th century, whiskey generally shipped in barrels, because glass doesn't survive a rattling wagon. It went to saloons, general stores, and pharmacies, and whoever owned the place bottled it and sold it.
In between sat the rectifiers, buying bulk spirit and blending it. The good ones were genuinely skilled and saved people money. The bad ones stretched their supply with coloring and flavoring, and accounts from the period describe additives ranging from caramel color to tobacco spit, which made it look properly brown, to turpentine and iodine, which made it taste aged.
You had no way to know what was in the bottle. People got swindled, and some of them got hurt. It became a public health problem.
So on March 3, 1897, President Grover Cleveland signed the Bottled-in-Bond Act. It's widely considered the first federal consumer protection law in American history, and it beat the Pure Food and Drug Act by nearly a decade.
The rules are wonderfully specific:
- One distillery, one distiller, one distilling season, so no blending across sources or years, and somebody's name is on it.
- At least four years in a federally bonded warehouse under government supervision, which means you can't even get into the building without a federal agent.
- Bottled at exactly 100 proof.
- Nothing added but water to bring the proof down.
Hit all of that, and you got a green strip stamp across the bottle, and that stamp meant the United States government was vouching for what was inside.
While the consumer trust angle was important, there are a few more cynical sides to this story:
First, people like Colonel E.H. Taylor and the straight-whiskey distillers pushed the bill. They were established players in the whiskey game who lobbied hard and walked away with a federal trust mark to beat competitors who blended over the head on quality and trust claims.
Then you had the tax part, which mattered as much as the consumer-trust part. Ordinarily, you owed the excise when the whiskey went into the barrel, and you might not sell that barrel for a decade. Bonding let you defer until you pulled it for bottling, which is what made it financially survivable to sit on a barrel for four years.
No matter the reason, we now had the first government-backed consumer protection law, and that standard still exists today!
When you look at bottles on the shelf, and you see that green government stamp, you know exactly what you're getting, and that's great marketing.
Whiskey by prescription
Prohibition arrives, and one of the few ways you could get a legal drink was by taking advantage of the medicinal loophole. Your doctor gets a Treasury permit, writes you a prescription, and you pick up a pint every ten days.
I knew that loophole existed, but I didn't know the details, and I found them fairly interesting:
Medicinal whiskey had to be bottled-in-bond. One hundred proof, government stamped, pint bottle, prescription attached. For thirteen years, the only legal whiskey in America was whiskey carrying the 1897 stamp. The law written to certify the good stuff became the law that defined the exception.
The government made ten permits available, and only six companies bothered to apply, because nobody believed there was a business in it. So all six got one. They couldn't distill anything new for most of a decade, but by 1929 the stocks were running down, and the government let them make more. The A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery was one of the holders of the medicinal permits and at that time was under the control of a man named Pappy Van Winkle.
As soon as the government allowed distilling again, Pappy got moving, and when Prohibition ended four years later, those six companies walked out of it with aged inventory ready to sell and a head start nobody else in America had. Whiskey takes time to be worth drinking, and they were the only ones who'd had the time.
You can look up what a bottle of Pappy costs now. Safe to say the folks at the Stitzel Distillery and their successor companies took advantage of their persistence through Prohibition!
Congress passes a marketing campaign
A definition of Bourbon finally showed up in 1935, when the Federal Alcohol Administration Act created the Standards of Identity, and the government said, for the first time, this is what bourbon must be.
We said it at the start of this Dispatch, but let's make them clear again:
- Bourbon is a distilled spirit made in the United States.
- The mash has to be at least 51% corn.
- It has to age in brand-new charred oak containers, not used ones.
- It can be distilled to no more than 160 proof, it goes into the barrel at no more than 125, and it comes out of the bottle at no less than 80.
- No added coloring, no added flavoring, nothing in there but whiskey and the water used to bring the proof down.
Production stopped for the Second World War, when the distilleries were turned over to industrial alcohol. After the war, bourbon returned and became a serious export.
In 1958 the industry founded the Bourbon Institute, whose job was to sell bourbon to the world and get trade restrictions knocked down, because for a long time Scotch was simply what whiskey meant.
Its driving force was Lewis Rosenstiel of Schenley, who had a bourbon surplus and needed somewhere to put it. The Institute's first win was the 1958 Forand Act, which pushed the tax due date on whiskey out from eight years to twenty and bought Rosenstiel time.
Then, on May 4, 1964, Congress agreed to a resolution declaring bourbon a distinctive product of the United States, and asking the appropriate agencies to take appropriate action to prohibit importing whiskey labeled as bourbon.
A concurrent resolution isn't a law. It expresses the sense of Congress, and we all know how much Congress has a sense of. The actual protection came afterward, through regulation and trade agreements, and it worked. Our trade representatives went around the world getting everyone to agree that bourbon comes from America.
In 2007, a Senate Resolution creating National Bourbon Heritage Month chose to enshrine Bourbon as "America's Native Spirit," which is, in my opinion, a real upgrade over the language used in the 1964 resolution.
That phrase has become an integral part of bourbon's marketing around the world for those who want to enjoy a taste of America. And just like post-Revolutionary Americans chose whiskey to show their Americanness, proud Americans today can reach for America's Native Spirit.
Great marketing never really goes away, it just comes back in new forms, right?
The woman who designed what bourbon looks like
We've pointed out marketing's propensity to seize on small bits of truth and make a big deal about it, but let's now talk about one person who did a fantastic job with hard work and genius ideas to build an iconic brand: Margie Mattingly Samuels.
Margie was born in Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1916. She and her husband Bill founded Maker's Mark in 1953. Bill handled what went in the bottle. Margie did everything else, and everything else turns out to be most of what you picture when you picture bourbon.
The name "Maker's Mark" is her idea, and it comes from her habit of collecting English pewter, where a maker's mark was the stamp of handmade quality.
The bottle shape is hers. So is the label with the torn edges and the lettering, now one of the most recognizable type styles in American business. The logo too: star for Star Hill, S for Samuels, IV because Bill was a fourth-generation distiller.
And the red wax was hers as well, developed after much experimentation at home. She was quite serious about it, so serious in fact, that one day her son came home from high school to find all his things sitting out on the lawn, because his mother had thrown out his photo lab to set up a wax test kitchen in the basement!
The first bottle with the finished look went out in 1958. They still dip them by hand, and if you take the tour, you can dip your own.
In 2014, Margie was inducted into the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame as the first woman directly involved with a distillery to receive that honor. She's also credited with inventing bourbon tourism, which means the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and every distillery visitor center in the country trace back to her.
The line they use at the distillery says it best: Margie is the reason people buy their first bottle, and Bill is the reason they buy the second.
There are lots of stories in this Dispatch, but Margie did it herself. No crazy stories. I think that's pretty neat and wanted to make sure her story was in here.
Bonded or bunk: what the words actually mean
Alright. Practical section. If you take one thing out of this piece, take this.
Almost anything can go on a whiskey label. That surprised me, because in the meat industry, we need to be really careful with words. Federal standards govern what you can and can't put on a package, and what each word means.
Not so for bourbon (and whiskey in general). Here are a few phrases you may find on a bottle and if it's "bonded" - a term backed by real law - or "bunked" something that has no clear legal definition.
Bottled-in-Bond.
Bonded (as the name suggests!), and the most rigorously defined term in American whiskey. Everything in the 1897 section, still enforced.
Straight.
Bonded, with an asterisk. Most people assume it means unblended or unmessed-with. Straight is actually just an aging statement, and it only guarantees two years.
Kentucky Straight Bourbon.
Bonded. A state name on a straight whiskey means it was distilled and aged in that state, so you can't buy your whiskey somewhere else and label it as Kentucky. That's a federal rule, not a Kentucky one, though Kentucky is certainly happy about it.
Small batch.
Bunk. No federal definition at all. Could be twelve barrels, could be three hundred. It's on almost every premium bottle on the shelf.
Handcrafted, artisanal, craft, micro.
Bunk. There are no federal rules governing any of them in distilling.
Sour mash.
Bunk. While sour mash is a real process, it's not federally monitored on the label. A sour mash distillation is like a sourdough starter, where you carry some of the previous batch forward to your next batch. Nearly everyone does it and nobody checks whether you did.
Aged in oak.
Technically true and completely empty. Bourbon has to be aged in oak. Advertising it is like me advertising that my ground beef is made from cows.
Single barrel.
Bunk. While it's a real practice, it's not a legal term. Every barrel is a single barrel until somebody mixes it. What got invented in 1984 was selling the contents of only one barrel by itself as a single barrel, to premiumize a category that was dying. It worked.
"Produced by" or "bottled by."
True, but maybe misleading. These words don't mean that the listed company distilled it. Under federal regulation an outfit that buys and blends spirit can use "produced by," "made by," "blended by," or "manufactured by" in place of "bottled by."
"Distilled by."
Bonded. When you see this phrase, it tells you who actually made the whiskey.
That last pair is a bit sneaky, and distilling to sell for others to buy and then resell is no small industry. There are big manufacturers that produce an enormous volume of bourbon, rye, and single malt, and a long list of brands buy it, put their own label on it, and sell it as theirs.
A lot of these products are high quality, but many aren't, and it raises questions about authenticity and craft. It's not necessarily a bad practice, but just know what you're getting into when you buy!
Bourbon: a triumph of American marketing
Bourbon. America's Native Spirit.
How fitting that, in a land of sales, marketing, and storytelling, our Native Spirit has an origin story cloaked in uncertainty but surrounded by fantastic tales we want to believe are true.
Marketing at its heart is storytelling, and telling a good one isn't a problem. It's up to you what you want to believe and where you want to put your money.
So whether you believe the Elijah Craig story, the Tarascon Brothers story, or that Bourbon County, Kentucky, is a real place, it's okay.
Bourbon is a beverage meant to be enjoyed and savored. Appreciate the craft, but understand what the marketing means.
Next time you're in the mood, share a pour and a story of your favorite bourbon with a friend. I'm sure you'll have fun, and that's what it's all about.
Cheers!
Nick
Resources
Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage by Michael Veach
Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey by Reid Mitenbuler
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