came up with the idea of charring the insides of barrels to enhance the flavor of bourbon was the Reverend Elijah Craig. Now, the Reverend Craig was a real person, a man of the cloth who fled from Virginia to Kentucky because of religious persecution and built a distillery in 1789. But there is no proof that he intentionally charred barrels to improve his whiskey’s flavor, and even the legends surrounding him don’t make a lot of sense. One story says that after a barn fire charred some staves, Craig was too cheap to throw them out and serendipitously discovered that barrels constructed from these staves made his whiskey better. But why, Chris Morris asks, would staves burn only on one side? Another story says the frugal Craig often reused barrels and charred the insides to eliminate the flavors of whatever they had originally held, whether that was fish or pickles. But barrels were made specifically for certain uses, Morris says, and no one would ever use a fish barrel to hold whiskey.
According to Veach, the earliest known mention of charring a barrel is found in an 1826 letter to a distiller from a Lexington grocer ordering more barrels of whiskey and adding, “if the barrels should be burnt upon the inside, say only a 16th of an inch, that it will much improve it.” Veach thinks it’s more likely that a grocer or wholesale whiskey merchant, not a distiller, came up with the idea of aging American whiskey in charred barrels after noticing that the large French population of New Orleans favored imported brandy and cognac, both barreled-aged spirits, over local unaged corn whiskey.
One whiskey pioneer who did write things down was Dr. James Crow, who immigrated to Kentucky from Scotland in the 1820s to work at the Old Oscar Pepper Distillery in Woodford County (now Woodford Reserve Distillery). He wanted to learn as much as possible about all of the variables that affect whiskey production so that he could improve the product, and he took copious notes so that his methods could be replicated. Although the Oscar Pepper Distillery’s output was small, Dr. Crow’s whiskey, Old Crow, became nationally known for its high quality.
Again, nobody knows for sure, but the oldest legend is that the spirit was named for Bourbon County, Kentucky. Supposedly merchants in New Orleans found that whiskey invoiced in Limestone, in Bourbon County, Kentucky, was the tastiest, and “Bourbon County” whiskey eventually became known simply as “bourbon whiskey” or “bourbon.” Bourbon historian Michael Veach, however, notes that Limestone was part of Bourbon County for only a short time while Kentucky was still part of Virginia, and because the round-trip to New Orleans took a year or more, there would not have been enough shipments invoiced to Limestone to allow that connection to be made. Limestone (now Maysville) had been part of Mason County, Kentucky, for more than 30 years when the Maysville firm of Stout and Adams advertised “Bourbon Whiskey by the barrel or keg” in a newspaper in 1821—the earliest documented use of the term.
Another theory says that people drinking the aged spirit in New Orleans started asking for “Bourbon Street whiskey,” which got shortened to “bourbon.” In any case, bourbon came to mean excellent whiskey from Kentucky.
“Wall Street for Whiskey”
To accommodate the growing number of steamboats, the city of Louisville built a canal that allowed the boats to bypass the Falls of the Ohio. River traffic grew exponentially with the opening of the Portland Canal in 1830, as did Louisville’s population. By 1850, Louisville was one of the 12 largest cities in America, bigger even than Chicago. The arrival of railroads made Louisville even more important as a transportation hub, with lines connecting the city to points north and west.
If you operated a distillery anywhere in the region, you shipped it from Louisville. Whiskey interests from all over opened offices and warehouses along a 12-block stretch of Main Street near the Ohio River that became known as Whiskey Row.
George Garvin Brown, cofounder of Brown-Forman distillery (Photo courtesy of Brown-Forman)
Whiskey Row was also the home of rectifiers, who created new products either by blending several whiskeys together or by blending whiskey with neutral grain spirits. While some of these products were legitimate, it was easy to tamper with them since bourbon was sold directly from a barrel. There was no way of knowing exactly what you were going to get, even from reputable distillers, because one batch could differ from the previous one.
In 1870, a young Louisville distiller named George Garvin Brown landed on a solution to the problems of consistency and potential tampering. His Old Forrester Bourbon, named for a Union Army hero, Dr. William Forrester, was the first bourbon to be sold exclusively in bottles. (Incidentally, Dr. Forrester was not old; he was probably in his early 30s. “Old” denoted that the bourbon was aged, which implied quality.) At some point in history, Old Forester lost one of its Rs, but it is still the flagship brand of the Brown-Forman distillery. Bottled bourbon did not become common until after 1904, when Michael J. Owens patented a machine that could make four uniform bottles per second.
Several other measures enacted in the late 1800s and early 1900s were designed to protect consumers and ensure authenticity in bourbon production. The Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 developed “Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits,” among them that spirits had to be produced by one distiller in one distilling season at one US distillery, which was to be identified on the label; had to be aged in a federally bonded warehouse for at least four years; and had to be bottled at 100 proof. The “federally bonded” part made the government responsible for guaranteeing that the standards were met. Bonded warehouses were padlocked, and only US Treasury agents had a key.
In 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act required that all products, including whiskey, carry a label that listed their contents. But what was “pure whiskey”? The chief chemist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided it was a spirit distilled from grain that was aged in oak barrels and had nothing added but pure water; anything else would have to be labeled as “imitation whiskey.” This upset the rectifiers, who were putting neutral grain spirits, flavoring, coloring, and who-knows-what-all into their whiskeys. President William Howard Taft finally settled the question “What is whiskey?” with the Taft Decision of 1909.
{ Just A SIP }
According to the Taft Decision, “straight whiskey” was to be made only from grain (not fruit or molasses) and water, and whiskey flavored with other spirits would be defined as “blended.” Taft allowed the terms bourbon and rye for identifying the dominant grain; the language was later expanded to account for grains such as wheat. And now you know something that President Taft did besides commission an oversize bathtub in the White House to accommodate his 340-pound girth.
By the turn of the 20th century, there were nearly 100 whiskey-related concerns operating on and near Whiskey Row in Louisville, according to the Louisville City Directory, and not just from Kentucky; they also hailed from places like Cincinnati, Chicago, and New York. “This was the greatest accumulation of whiskey companies in the world in one place at one time,” Chris Morris says. “It was like Wall Street for whiskey.”
Unfortunately for both Wall Streets, big crashes were coming.
From Famine to Feast to Famine
The growth of distilling—and of cities, for that matter—in the early 1900s was not welcomed by everyone. A new temperance movement that blamed alcohol consumption for society’s ills was gaining momentum. Women played a large role in this movement. Somewhat ironically, one
