Bourbon Whiskey

by Bernie Lubbers

  Unlike Washington, these whiskey men were not rich and had no cooperage on site. They bought their barrels from dry good stores or from anyone who had barrels to sell. Barrels were handy to use because one person could roll one down the dock and onto the Kentucky boats (simple Tom Sawyer-style rafts, but much larger and able to transport up to 50 tons) or onto steamboats which also sit low in the river.

  Frequently, the second-hand barrels had been used to ship pickles, meats, fish and other perishables, and many of the barrels had used salts, vinegars and pickling agents so the contents would not spoil. When the whiskey makers bought these barrels, they didn’t just put their liquor in them right away. They would sterilize the barrels by scraping and then setting the inside of them on fire so that their whiskey would not be flavored with what was shipped in the barrels beforehand.

  When you snap a branch off a tree, that tree sends sap to that area to heal itself. When the inside of the barrel is fired and charred, the natural sugars in the oak used to make the barrels rush to the damaged area, and a caramelized layer of natural sugars sets where the char ends and the wood begins. This is known as the “red line.”

  During the day, the sun would beat down on the barrels traveling down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. When a barrel heated up, the liquor expanded and went into the wood, passing through the red line to pick up some of that amber color and, more importantly, absorb flavors from the wood. At night when it got cooler, the whiskey would be forced out of the wood and back into the barrel, again passing through the red line, picking up flavor, and rounding out that rough spirit.

  In the six months it took the whiskey to travel downstream, it was drastically changed in sight and taste. Remember, it had started differently than traditional whiskey and was sweeter because the predominant grain was corn instead of rye. But the interaction with the charred barrels made it something entirely new. As we like to say in the whiskey business, the barrels rounded off the rough edges and softened up that white dog. When people tasted it, they fell in love with it and asked what it was. The barrel heads were printed with the name of the port the liquor was shipped from, the county in Kentucky named after the French royal family—the Bourbons—just like Bourbon Street: OLD BOURBON KENTUCKY WHISKEY. And so the drink we all know and love came to be. Fans would say, “I sure like that bourbon whiskey from Kentucky.”

  Did the whiskey makers know what was going to happen to their liquor on that journey? Or was it just an accident that people liked?

  My friends Larry and Rob down at Heaven Hill Distillery tell another story. According to them, Elijah Craig was the first distiller to char a barrel before storing whiskey in it, and I personally hope their version is true.

  Elijah Craig was a Baptist preacher and a distiller (talk about an oxymoron) and had some empty barrels stored in his barn. There was a fire in the barn, and being a thrifty God-fearing Christian man who felt that wasting anything was sinful, he went ahead and used those barrels to store his whiskey. When he did this, the barrels did their work, and bourbon was discovered because someone was too cheap to replace his materials after a fire. It’s a great story and like I said, I really want it to be true, and perhaps it is indeed how his barrels became charred.

  By the way, Elijah Craig is a damn fine bourbon, and the 12-year expression is my favorite one to toast Brother Elijah with. There is also a single-barrel 18-year-old expression that is quite tasty. And for the price, you can’t beat these whiskies, especially for their age.

  Of course with these stories, you’ve got to keep in mind that in France they were storing cognac and brandy in toasted barrels, and barrels were being used to add some color/flavor to other liquor. The French tripped upon extra aging when they were at war with Spain, because Spain was their big export market for cognac. Most of the cognac sat in the toasted barrels for more than 12 years before peace made its export possible again. The VSOP, XO and extra-aged cognacs can trace their origins to this time. So maybe some of the folks in the New World had heard about the benefits of aging liquor in oak barrels. Was it this information that made the folks in Kentucky, North Carolina and other states char their barrels deeper to add more color and flavor? Was it a barn fire? Was it an accident? Perhaps we’ll never know, but it sure is fun reading old books and records and seeing the evolution of bourbon aged in charred barrels. I know for sure that George Washington wasn’t charring barrels, and David Beam and David M. Beam were charring barrels in Kentucky in the 1800s, so something happened somewhere in there.

  Maker’s Mark barrels being charred. (Maker’s Mark is a registered trademark of Maker’s Mark Distillery, Inc. and is used with permission.)

  Regardless of how the barrels came to be charred, until the Bottled in Bond Act of 1897, most bourbons were shipped to a tavern in a barrel right from the distillery. Bourbon makers didn’t supply bottles, or ship the liquors in bottles, with the exception of Old Forrester. Old Forrester was bottled in 1870, but that was distributed as a prescription from doctors at the time. So previous to that time, if you owned a tavern, you’d bring your own bottles from home—wine bottles, apothecary bottles—and use them to sell whiskey to your patrons. If you could put liquid in it, you could sell bourbon in it. As an aside, a lot of single-barrel or small-batch bourbon makers, such as Basil Hayden’s Woodford Reserve, Knob Creek or Booker’s, remember their history by packaging their bourbons in similar bottles today.

  Because the bourbon was sent to the tavern in a barrel, some unscrupulous shopkeepers would water down the whiskey to make more money. If you suspected this, you might take a bullet out of your gun belt, take it apart and dump the gun powder on the bar in a little pile. You’d then wet the gun powder with the whiskey. Alcohol will burn at just over 50% alcohol content (57.06 to be exact), so if you lit a match and put it to the gun powder and it burned yellow and fizzled out, the whiskey had been watered down. But if it burned blue and made that gun powder flash, it was proof of how good the whiskey was. And that’s where we get the term 100 proof or 86 proof. It’s also one reason Bottled in Bond bourbon was 100 proof. It was considered the good stuff!

  So how did bourbon go from being stored in used charred barrels to being stored in brand new charred-oak barrels each and every time? After Prohibition, the Standards of Identity were written and enforced. The coopers’ union lobbied their congressmen and senators, who had a vested interest in the cooper industry in their districts, and to insure the coopers had work forever, these legislators made it a law that bourbon had to be stored in a brand new charred-oak container.

  Would bourbon distillers still use a brand new charred barrel if they didn’t have to? We’ll never know. But when you reuse a barrel, it’s like reusing a tea bag. You get less and less out of it with each use. You do get more wood notes and characteristics out of a brand new charred barrel than from a used one and in a shorter period of time. But as of now, if you do reuse a barrel even after following all the other laws of bourbon, all you are left with is whiskey, not bourbon whiskey. Examples of this are Michter’s American Whiskey and Early Times Kentucky Whiskey. This doesn’t mean they are not as good in quality; their wood notes just won’t be as pronounced. Some of these can be as enjoyable as bourbon; they are just not bourbon by definition, is all.

  My friend Bill from over at St. Raphael’s Men’s Club has been retired a little while, and he’s known a couple former federal agents who actually lived in the distilleries back in the day. (Agents lived on the distillery up until the 1970s).There were millions of dollars in tax money involved here. They would inspect the “bonded warehouses” and make sure the appropriate taxes were being paid on the right amounts of bourbon. On each warehouse there would be two padlocks on every door. The master distiller would have one key, and the government agent would have the other key. Neither one could get in with out the other.

  So anyway, a government agent told my friend that several years back, Jim Beam was experimenting with aging bourbon in caves, like wine. Two years later when
they came back to taste the barrels that were locked away in the caves, they opened up the doors … and all the whiskey was gone! So much for national–or alcohol– security.

  AGING TODAY

  As you travel the bourbon trail in Kentucky and visit the different distilleries, you’ll notice the rack houses where the bourbon is warehoused dotting the landscape. Most are tin-wrapped wooden structures facing north to south so that they get as much exposure to the sun as possible.

  A traditional rack house has from five to nine stories, with three barrels on each floor. It takes a crew of five people to put barrels up in these houses. The newly barreled bourbon is placed in the house from top to bottom, and left to right. The barrels stay in the same place the whole time, and after aging is complete, they are pulled out in the same order. The alternative to this placement is to rotate barrels between storage facilities every two or three years. As you can imagine, rotating the barrels is very labor intensive. However, the distilleries who rotate believe that’s the best way to make quality bourbon, and the distilleries that don’t feel it’s unnecessary. There really is no “better” way, but if you ask them, they will tell you their way is the better way every time! You gotta love distillers! Ha!

  Heaven Hill rickhouses (Photo courtesy of Heaven Hill Distilleries, Inc.)

  Another type of storage facility for bourbon is an escalator house. The escalator house uses a conveyor system to help get the barrels up, so it only takes three people to fill the building. Yet another type of rack house is the palletized warehouse, which is only a couple stories tall, so it only takes one person on a forklift to put the barrels in. They are stacked on top of each other on pallets.

  Anyway, as you can see, all these barrels in these different houses age differently. It takes a distiller experience and know-how to get a consistent flavor profile for their best small-batch or single-barrel bourbons. Should they rotate the barrels over the years? Should they take a cross section from top to bottom, and left to right? There’s no single answer for any of these questions. For example, Four Roses is the only distillery in Kentucky exclusively using single floor warehouses so that extreme temperatures never affect the bourbon. Other distilleries want those extreme temperatures and marry barrels from top to bottom. Maker’s Mark rotates their barrels. Buffalo Trace has two different types of brick houses and two different types of block houses. A new distiller just has to work with the different methods, taste the results, and then make some choices. That’s one of the reasons it is so hard to get into the bourbon business from scratch. There is a big learning curve here.

  Of course, the fun stories you get told over a drink by a new friend are part of what makes bourbon so special. I wish you all could hear my buddy from Tennessee, Nick Lambert, tell this story. He is an exceptional storyteller. I’ll give it my best, though.

  One May I was doing a bourbon tasting in Memphis at the famous Bar-B-Q festival. Our team there is the wonderful “Peg Leg Porkers.” Pit master Carey Bringle has an artificial leg, a great sense of humor and a great way with BBQ.

  I gave my talk to the Peg Leg Porkers and their friends, and it went just great. We laughed, we tasted, we learned about our native spirit, and then we all took the bourbon pledge. One of the guests there was already half in the bag and was heckling me a little during my presentation. It seems my presentation broke into his beer drinking time since he was not a bourbon drinker or fan. So after the tasting, he staggered up to me—I was up close to the beer cooler—and said that he enjoyed my presentation, but he thought I went about 10 minutes too long.

  My comedy background turned on like a switch, and I treated him like a heckler. “So just what would you have done in my place?” After toying with him a while and having as much fun as I could at his expense, I thanked him for his honest yet uninvited input. We all moved on to eating BBQ, drinking bourbon, and sharing stories the rest of the night.

  When we walked back to the hotel, I noticed the same guy who had been critical of me staggering around with his wife, looking for their car. His wife was totally sober and not at all happy with her intoxicated, boisterous, butting-in husband. After a few minutes, the man started cussing because he realized they had parked in an illegal spot and their car had been towed. He came up to me in our team’s car and said, “Can you believe the damn city towed my f@%&ing car?”

  I replied, “Well buddy, I guess you parked there about 10 minutes too long.”

  The bottom line is, if you want to get into the bourbon business, you’ll find that the most expensive things you’ll incur are wood, time and mistakes from lack of experience. A barrel costs around $125 a piece, and the average rack house holds 20,000 barrels. Experience is priceless. You’ll have to cross your fingers and pray over all those years of aging, and hope you distilled and aged it right. What a blow that would be if after eight years in the barrel, the bourbon you made just didn’t taste very good.

  Even so, there have been hundreds of applications approved for micro distilling in the United States. It will be quite a journey for those new distillers, who will no doubt be calling up the old timers and bourbon experts and bending their ears for advice. Most will be happy to give it. The rising tide raises all ships, so these micro distillers will bring a lot of excitement and pride in regional distilling, just like micro breweries did with craft beers. But whether it’s a giant industrial distillery like Jim Beam that makes 1,200 barrels a day, or one that can only turn out a couple of barrels a day, they all have to follow the same strict laws. That’s one of the beautiful things about bourbon, there are no short cuts. The word “bourbon” is a quality stamp, like cognac, 100% pure agave or champagne.

  3

  Distilling and Aging Bourbon

  “I have known several men who drank too much, and they were all extremely interesting.” –Katharine Hepburn

  Why the hell did folks distill grains in the first place? Was it just for catching a buzz? Back several hundred years ago, water was the liquid you least wanted to drink in most places. Unless you were located on a spring, the water in ponds or lakes was usually full of bacteria and other nasty things that would make people sick. Our forebearers found that if they fermented the water with fruits, grapes or grains and created mead, cider or beer, the water was then safe to drink and could keep longer.

  By the same token, these grapes, fruits and grains could normally only be consumed when they were in season. But fermentation meant that they could be kept around and consumed over a longer period of time. So the earliest distillers were farmers. Whether they were growing fruits or grains, there were certain to be excess crops from time to time. Instead of just throwing that food out, they would preserve it by canning them or (even better) making beer from the grains, or wine from the grapes and fruits.

  So how did this lead to distilling? Well, in Spain and France, for example, they had lots of grapes. They would take the excess grapes and make wine, which was great until they started exploring the world. They took wine with them for the voyages since it kept longer than water, but because the wines were made at low alcohol per volume, they would go bad and turn to vinegar. So they began distilling the wine. Those evolved into what we know today as brandies, cognacs and Armagnacs.

  Scotland and Ireland grew a lot of barley for their breads and cereals. They often had excess grains after a growing season, so they made beer from it. When they distilled the beer, they got what they called usquebaugh, and thus were born Irish and Scotch whiskies. Usquebaugh (pronounced Ush-ka-bay-ha) means “water of life” in Gaelic.

  Most nations had their own version of the “water of life”—water made drinkable by distillation: Aqua Vitae (Latin), Aquavit (Scandinavia), Eau-De-Vie (French), Zhizennia and Voda (Russian). Some were made from grapes, some from grains, but all were high in alcohol content.

  So when the Scottish, Irish, Spanish and French immigrants came to the New World, they brought their knowledge of distilling. If you look at where these various nationalities settled, you g
et a clear idea of how North American drinking trends were shaped even before 1600.

  The Spanish landed in Florida, and the French settled in Louisiana. As the French and Spanish were experienced in making brandy from grapes and fruits, they made brandies and apple jack from the fruit trees that are indigenous in the South. The Irish were more prevalent in the northeastern United States; the Scottish in Canada. Both nationalities were whisk[e]y drinkers, and in those areas of the new continent, rye was the most abundant grain. In Canada, the Scots followed in the tradition of Usher’s and Johnny Walker so Canadian Whisky used a neutral grain spirit along with rye, malted rye and malted barley as flavoring grains. Because of their Scottish influence, they also did not spell their whisky with an “e”. The Irish and other whiskey men who settled around Maryland and Pennsylvania used mostly rye, and some corn in their whiskey (and beer, for that matter). The Irish influence meant they spelled their whiskey with an “e.”

  In 1789, George Washington was elected as the first president of the United States. At that time, he had a big debt to repay to France and others for their help in the Revolutionary War. An estimated $54 million in debt was racked up since the 1776 declaration of war. So in 1791, the Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton suggested an excise tax on domestically distilled spirits. Because of the British embargo on rum and sugar cane, whiskey was the spirit that was being distilled domestically. The people affected most by this tax were the farmers in Western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. They had just fought a war based on taxation without representation, and this tax was levied from an Eastern-based national government. Western farmers owned small family stills and did not operate year-round, so they ended up paying a higher tax per gallon, making them less competitive. Farmers in Western Pennsylvania thought that Hamilton was deliberately trying to run them out of business and promote big businesses that could pay more taxes to the new government.