TRUE OR FALSE: Bourbon can be made only in Kentucky.
If you answered “true,” you’re not alone. You’re also wrong. But don’t feel bad; I’ve encountered plenty of people who firmly hold that conviction—including bartenders in Kentucky who should know better. The truth is, you can make bourbon in any state, as long as it’s one of the United States of America. The confusion is easy to understand, however, as Kentucky produces all but about 5% of the bourbon in the world.
Now let’s further test your knowledge of bourbon with a short multiple-choice quiz. Yes, you in the back with your hand up: how can I help you? The introduction said there wouldn’t be any tests? Well, no one really reads the introduction, do they? If you did, I’m sorry. I lied. Ahem.
The correct answer to all three: d. Don’t be offended, by the way—I don’t mean that you don’t know the answers to these questions; I mean that I don’t.
The truth is, despite what you may have read or heard elsewhere, nobody knows for sure who “invented” bourbon, or when or how it got its name. People were too busy just trying to survive back then to write much down. What we do know is that people have been making bourbon in Kentucky since before there even was a Kentucky, when the land that is now the Bluegrass State was part of Virginia.
What follows are some other things we know—or our best guesses. Much of this information was gleaned from bourbon historian Michael Veach’s excellent book, Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage; The Kentucky Encyclopedia, edited by John Kleber; the Kentucky Bourbon Timeline, commissioned by the Kentucky Distillers’ Association; and interviews with Brown-Forman Master Distiller Chris Morris, who conducts a Bourbon Academy several times per year at the Woodford Reserve Distillery.
The Birth of Bourbon
The earliest settlers brought stills with them to the land that would eventually become Kentucky when they migrated west in the 1770s. Fort Harrod, the first permanent settlement in this new territory, soon became known as Harrodsburg, and when the Virginia legislature established Kentucky County in 1776, Harrodsburg became the county seat.
Colonists had been distilling spirits since their arrival in New England. One notable early distiller was George Washington. Like most of the colonists, he initially distilled rum. At Mount Vernon, his plantation manager, a Scot, is said to have persuaded him to plant rye and start making whiskey. An influx of Scots-Irish and German immigrants, in fact, helped to lay the foundations for the whiskey industry. One of them was Jacob Beam, who was attracted to the Nelson County area by its plentiful limestone-rich streams. Nelson County’s seat, Bardstown, which was established in 1780 and is Kentucky’s second oldest city, would eventually become known as the Bourbon Capital of the World.
In those early years, though, just about every farmer would have been distilling his excess grain harvest into whiskey, which became a form of currency. Transporting grain to market was difficult, but one packhorse could carry the equivalent of a quarter-ton of grain once it had been transformed into two 20-gallon kegs of juice.
Corn was especially plentiful in this new world. It grew so successfully on Dunmore’s Island, a small island in the Ohio River settled by George Rogers Clark in 1778, that residents renamed it Corn Island. Five years later, in 1783, those settlers moved ashore and founded the city of Louisville, named for King Louis XVI of France, whose government had aided the colonists against England in the Revolutionary War. Farther east, another area of what was still Virginia had been given a French name in gratitude to and honor of Louis XVI’s royal house: Bourbon County. In 1792, it became part of the new state—or, if you want to be technical, the new commonwealth—of Kentucky.
Around about this time, a man whose name you’ll recognize from a bourbon bottle, Evan Williams, built a distillery on the banks of the Ohio in Louisville. Williams is often referred to as Kentucky’s first distiller, but this claim cannot be proved. “The fact is,” Veach writes, “that we may never know the identity of Kentucky’s first distiller.” Because distilled spirits weren’t taxed, there are no government records from these early days.
That changed in 1790, when Congress voted to take on any states’ debts remaining from the Revolutionary War—and to pay them by levying a tax on alcohol. (This began a practice that persists today: with the exception of the Spanish-American War, debts from every American war have been paid with alcohol-tax revenue.)
We may not be able to pinpoint the year when Evan Williams started distilling, but we do know that in 1797 he was elected to Louisville’s Board of Trustees, and, more important, he was appointed harbormaster, one of the most influential positions in the city. The same limestone rock shelves that made Kentucky’s streams so good for bourbon making had also made Louisville a mandatory stop for southbound river traffic: the Ohio River had carved out a series of rapids here that, over 2 miles, dropped the water level 26 feet.
Boats were unloaded at a harbor above the Falls of the Ohio, and they and their freight were portaged below the falls to continue their journey. The harbor was small and heavily used; as a result, boats had to be unloaded and moved within 48 hours. The harbormaster was in charge of making sure this happened. Louisville was already a major shipping center, and it was about to become even more important.
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson decided to buy Louisiana, a purchase that opened up trade routes all the way to New Orleans. (That same year, Meriwether Lewis and Louisvillian William Clark departed from Louisville on a four-year tour of this new territory that would take them all the way to the Pacific. Among their supplies: 120 gallons of whiskey.)
At this point, whiskey, and anything else someone wanted to sell or trade, was transported by flatboat. These simple vessels—which, as their name implies, were essentially flat-bottomed rectangles—could easily be built by farmers to take their harvest downriver. With nothing to power them but the current, however, flatboats were a one-way ticket.
{ Just A SIP }
Once a farmer arrived in New Orleans, he would sell his boat as well as its contents. The buyers didn’t need boats, however; they needed the lumber. (Many of the oldest shotgun-style houses in New Orleans are said to have been built with Kentucky wood that arrived in the form of a flatboat.)
To get back home, sellers faced a long and often dangerous trek; if someone was hiking north from New Orleans, chances were good that he was carrying a sack of money. To increase their odds of arriving alive, many Kentuckians bought horses—the fastest ones they could find—to make the trip. Some say this was the beginning of the Thoroughbred industry in Kentucky.
Fortunately, a man named Robert Fulton was busy working on a boat that would be able to make the round-trip. He developed the first commercial steamboat in 1807, and in 1815, a steamboat made the first excursion upriver from New Orleans to Louisville. (The city of Louisville owns the only authentic steamer from the great American steamboat era that is still in operation—the Belle of Louisville. She turned 100 in 2014 and still plies the Ohio River at the dazzling top speed of 11 miles per hour.) Steam would also be harnessed to distill alcohol as distilleries adopted new technologies during the 19th century.
The French had long been aging brandy and cognac in oak barrels charred on the inside to give them flavor and color. At some point in these early 1800s, Kentucky distillers began using this same method to make whiskey, which added caramel, vanilla, and oak flavors to the spirit and gave it a distinctive amber color.
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