Barrel Strength Bourbon. Carla Harris Carlton
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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.
One popular legend holds that the man who 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