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THAT FIRE OF BIRTH AND BLOOD is the most essential ingredient of many things that come from this part of the world—especially bourbon. It is more important than corn or wheat or water. The key to bourbon is time. Julian likes to talk about whether or not the whiskey put into the barrel to age “makes the trip.” That is, will it emerge from that barrel as a fine bourbon or will something happen to it along the way? His whiskey hibernates for a long time, as long as twenty-five years, and once the barrel is stored in the warehouses, there’s nothing Julian or anyone can do to guarantee that the magical living process is playing out as it should. Bottling doesn’t promise survival, either. Just as time is the greatest ingredient in bourbon, it is also its greatest enemy. Time and air can destroy whiskey.
Once Julian and I went to a tasting together where some people had purchased these old bottles of his grandfather’s whiskey, Old Fitzgerald, made with the original Stitzel-Weller juice. They wanted him to talk about his family and to taste this booze. He took a sip and I could tell he didn’t like it. Something had happened to the whiskey in that bottle. It hadn’t made the trip. The romantic in him, in all of us, wanted some of his grandfather—some of a world now vanished—to exist inside that bottle. The critic in him knew it did not. But . . . sometimes it does. That’s the magic. Sometimes the seal holds, and when you pour a glass and sip it—Julian likes his bourbon on the rocks with a twist—you have now traveled back a quarter century into the past, or further, depending on the age of the bottle.
The key difference between Old Fitzgerald and Pappy Van Winkle (and Weller and Maker’s Mark and a few other high-end bourbons) is that the dominant secondary grain is wheat. Let’s have a brief lesson about modern whiskey. There are strict guardrails for the grain, designed and pushed by powerful lobbyists who want to help their bosses maintain and protect market share. Bourbon, among its many codified restrictions, must be at least 51 percent corn. After that, though, the bourbon distiller has some discretion in picking the mix of secondary grains. Most use rye and barley. A few, like the Van Winkle brands, use wheat. That was made popular by Julian’s grandfather. His biggest contribution to modern bourbon is that he was the first to make and sell a mass market fine whiskey with wheat as its dominant secondary grain.
The core ethos of the industry has long been to make something for a little and sell it for a lot.
One of the reasons the old-timers respect Pappy is that his motto, Always Fine Bourbon, wasn’t just marketing. Stitzel-Weller put its white dog (the industry name for moonshine) in barrels at a lower proof than the maximum allowed by law, which cost the distillery money in taxes but made for better whiskey. Almost nobody does that today, because accountants and CFOs usually have more power than anyone who actually works a still or rolls around a barrel, and any issues with taste are just problems for the marketing team to fix.
Here’s how it works.
There is a federal law that says bourbon cannot be put into a barrel at any proof higher than 125 (in the 1960s, the law said 110 proof, which is one of the reasons people rave about these older bourbons. . . . Turns out, your grandfather’s whiskey really was better). The higher the proof of the booze going into the barrel, the more liquor there will be to sell once the aging process is finished. Same goes for the proof of the white dog off the still. Bourbon must come off the still at no higher than 160 proof, and the lower that number, the less complexity has been stripped out.
A few companies still put their liquor in the barrel at less than the maximum allowed proof, like Michter’s at 103 and Maker’s Mark at 110. That’s rare, since most distilleries are run by accountants. When Pappy ran Stitzel-Weller, he got to overrule the accountants. Master distillers all know how to make a better product but often aren’t allowed to do so. Pappy always staked his reputation on his independent company not cutting corners. It’s why dusty bottles of Old Fitzgerald still command absurd prices on the secondary market.
But don’t make Julian’s granddad into some kind of saint; he was first and foremost a salesman.
He was the seller of romantic ideas, not the buyer of them. Turns out, wheat survives extended aging better than bourbons with rye as a secondary grain. Of course, that meant it was better at a younger age, too, which is likely what Pappy wanted. With Prohibition repealed the day before he started construction on the new Stitzel-Weller plant, there weren’t huge supplies of aging whiskey sitting around, and Pappy needed to get whiskey out the door of his new distillery and into customer’s hands as quickly as possible. He knew how to tell a story about himself and his whiskey. The reason Pappy’s office was built to look like Monticello, with the leafy grounds of the Stitzel-Weller plant made to feel like an oasis from modern life, was because he knew that bourbon drinkers were often motivated by nostalgia—by this desire to stop the march of time and the cold hand of reality. It’s a drink made for contemplating, and what is usually being contemplated is the easy and often false memory of better days. The bottle itself takes us there; it’s why Mississippi Delta farmers still drink Old Charter, even though it’s not nearly as good as it used to be, or why a Heaven Hill or Kentucky Tavern label reminds a lot of Southern boys of high school, or how the red wax on a Maker’s Mark bottle evokes your father’s liquor cabinet.
Opening a bottle of Pappy is a way for some people to signal they don’t need to care about money, while for others it is a way to show a guest how much they are valued. When my friend, the great writer Charles P. Pierce, first came to my house to visit, I opened a bottle of Pappy 23. That was my way of saying: I am humbled and grateful for you to be in my home. A bottle of bourbon is a coded way for so many unspoken ideas to be transmitted and understood. In many ways, the most important ingredient in bourbon is added by the drinker once the bottle is purchased, which is why whiskey companies know to tell a story and stick to it.
Here’s the story they don’t want to tell: eight companies make 95 percent of the whiskey in America. When you walk into a liquor store and see all those labels, that’s marketing. Templeton Rye and Bulleit Rye, for instance, have both been made by the Orwellian-sounding MGP, which is in Indiana, not Kentucky. Whiskey is better when it’s mass produced by an expert and a team of chemists, not done in small artisanal batches by a guy who talks about craft. And all those different brand names are just that. Brands. Perhaps no word sums up the death of truth in America better than the word brand.
The term brand name comes from the whiskey business, according to Reid Mitenbuler, author of the excellent book Bourbon Empire. Nearly all pre-Prohibition whiskey was sold in barrels that were rolled into bars and tapped; the makers used a hot metal brand to sear their name into the top of the barrel so they could be identified. Mitenbuler’s book explores many different threads, from how bourbon came to be associated with Kentucky to how it burrowed its way into our national consciousness. Mostly what he does, point by point, is strip away all the layers of myth and spin and bullshit. That Kentucky has become home to this industry is perfect, because it is a “colorful state with mythic origins, where history collides with mystery.”
A lot of the famous brands, like Elijah Craig and Evan Williams, were created by Jewish distillers who presumed that their customers didn’t want to open a bottle of Rosenstein Straight Bourbon Whiskey. The characters the distillers invented, the alleged fathers of bourbon, were ginned up mostly out of thin air, taking tiny threads of true biography and weaving a compelling fiction. The fine print on the back of bottles remains full of little lies. Look for words like “produced by” instead of “distilled by,” and don’t bother to fact-check the histories told in gauzy, romantic language. But the opposite is true, too. They are selling you a lie you desperately want to be told. Mitenbuler writes: “Don’t believe 90 percent of the tales you read on whiskey bottles but don’t forget to enjoy them either.”
So let’s talk about what was on the Old Fitzgerald label and, more importantly, what was actually
in the bottle. Stitzel-Weller bourbon was made from 72 percent corn, 20 percent wheat, and 8 percent barley. That’s called a mash bill—the list of grains that get combined to create the mash that is the foundation for whiskey. The word recipe gets thrown around a lot and when the marketing people start talking about it, you need to get real suspicious real fast. Bourbon doesn’t have a recipe. It has a mash bill.
Some people know Stitzel-Weller’s mash bill and many others try to guess. A friend bought a copper still on the internet and hosted a party behind a big Mississippi mansion where he took those grains, in those percentages, and made it into white dog (aka moonshine) that everybody sat around firepits and drank. And while the idea of a recipe is intoxicating and fits into our view of bourbon as a rigorous craft, something akin to fine cooking or a birchbark canoe, that’s misleading and a modern spin on a process that never really worked like that in practice. Precise and proprietary mash bills are a modern invention, something that happened to whiskey once marketers and salesmen and lobbyists got involved in what had been primarily a farmer’s business.
I got to know the late moonshine runner and stock car legend Junior Johnson pretty well, and once I asked him for a mash bill and he sent it to me in old-fashioned and inexact measurements like pecks and bushels. I’ll never forget the language he used, a new kind of postmodern grease poetry, when we sat in his shop and he talked about cars:
The 1944s had the same motors as they got now. Like a Cadillac, overhead valve, supercharged, bored out, stroked, cammed, and hell fire . . . you could run it. They said you can’t get a Cadillac motor in a ’44 Chevy. They just dropped right in there. Dropped it in a dad-blame frame and called Vic Edelbrock. Talked to him. Built me a manifold, three or four carburetors. Then they had that lawn mower people, made the McCulloch, they made a supercharger. Shit, I got me one of them things and adapted it. Had to build brackets and stuff. You hook that thing to that fan belt and it started whining, and when it started whining, you had some damn power. Sitting there with three carburetors and that’s all I needed. You could put camshafters on that and hydraulic lifters on it and that thing would run so fast you couldn’t even see the road. And that ain’t no shit.
In the same way that Colonel Sanders wasn’t a real colonel, the bluegrass bourbon business is an intentional creation, designed by salesmen who wanted to give the public a reason to buy their product and not someone else’s. Kentucky, Mitenbuler writes, didn’t have the monopoly on bourbon that it does today until after Prohibition, and that dominance was established by well-paid agents working on Capitol Hill and Madison Avenue.
American whiskey actually came into being when the first stirrings of manifest destiny took hold of the American imagination and people began to move west, first to Pennsylvania and then filtering out from there. New York and Pennsylvania rye farmers birthed this national tradition. They were farmers who wanted to stay on their land. The history of American whiskey is tied to that quest, all the way back to the first drop that rolled off the first still in the New World. It was a product, a crop, no different than cattle driven to slaughter or grain shipped to the coast. The earliest how-to books about making booze make it clear that the grains should always be whatever the farmer had easy access to, and that it’s fine if the ratios, or even entire categories of grain, change from year to year. Whiskey is designed to be constantly evolving, to reflect the land from which it’s made, and virtually all the current rules applied to its manufacture were designed by advertising wizards and businessmen eager to protect their share of the market.
For farmers, whiskey was the only way to get full value from their crops. Not everyone had access to markets and distribution methods, so to feed their family and keep their land, a man sought to do something with the surplus of a harvested crop. The dominant crop at the time was rye. They were spending time and money carefully planting and growing rye, and saw no point in watching that money rot before their eyes.
So they turned rye into whiskey.
What happened next would send ripples into the American future that we’re still dealing with today: it began with a man who’d become the subject of a huge Broadway musical and ended with Jefferson’s Republican Party replacing Washington’s Federalist Party. The American Revolution earned the country its freedom but cost incredible amounts of money, most of it paid for by state-financed debt. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume that debt and impose a sizable whiskey tax to help pay for it. He saw it as a sin tax, ignoring the economic realities of rural life that led to whiskey’s distillation in the first place. It wasn’t the first time a city dweller didn’t understand life in a world different from his or her own.
George Washington, who made whiskey at Mount Vernon, knew different.
He opposed the tax at first, but a listening tour through Virginia and Pennsylvania in 1791 persuaded him. Congress passed the bill. And then, to use academic historian language, the farmers and distillers of Western Pennsylvania, the frontier at the time, went batshit crazy. This was the first bubbling of the Tea Party Movement, the anti-government strain that continues to exert great control over American politics. The new sin-tax law punished farmers who needed to make whiskey to maintain value, which meant that the farther away from the seats of power a man lived, the more likely he was to be hit by this tax. And the large distillers used their influence to keep the bill from crushing their businesses; they paid six cents per gallon and accrued substantial tax breaks. Small distillers paid nine cents per gallon.
The revolt that simmered and ultimately forced Washington to send in troops is now known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Until it was quelled, real fear existed that it could turn into a second revolution. Washington himself rode at the front of his army. Mitenbuler describes the Founding Father as tired and weary, with his steel dentures cutting into his gums. You can just see a haggard old man who wants to return to his farm, put down his guns, and age and rest and die in peace.
President Washington won the rebellion and strengthened the power of the federal government, but in the process the major debate in American public life was cemented, baked in, really. Nearly every political and cultural flashpoint we’ve experienced since is descended from this divide. Hamilton favored concrete and tall buildings and Wall Street, where he’s buried, while Jefferson favored Main Street and the dirt of the rural America in which he’s buried. Violence and discord over Hamilton versus Jefferson remain the greatest threats to the health of our experiment in democracy.
At the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Ohio River Valley produced the vast majority of America’s whiskey, nearly all of it rye. Today, Kentucky produces the bulk of America’s whiskey, nearly all of it bourbon. This switch seems random and complicated and yet it is actually quite simple. The farmers and distillers ran from the tax man and the long arm of the feds, looking for a piece of land where they might make their stand.
Hamilton’s tax law passed in 1791.
Kentucky became a state in 1792.
In Kentucky, the land was perfect for corn—four times the yield per acre than Maryland, according to Bourbon Empire—and so the farmers naturally grew corn. The same laws of supply and demand that created whiskey followed the farmer-distillers from Pennsylvania to Kentucky. They faced the same existential challenges. Without modern supply chains, and because they were living on the edge of civilization, the farmers still couldn’t monetize all of their crop before it rotted. So just as their forefathers did in Pennsylvania, they needed a way for their corn—and for their pigs—to hold value. Cured hams came from this need. And so did bourbon. Soon whiskey was traded as a currency, avoiding government notes and any taxes associated with them, which is why the IRS has long been obsessed with chasing down moonshiners and bootleggers. To Kentuckians, that is a federal war on working rural families, no matter what it’s called in Washington. The spirit of modern Kentucky remains defined by its farmers. It might be calle
d the Bluegrass State, but just as easily might be the Corn and Wheat State. Many farmers have been growing grains here for eight or nine generations. A family farm in Loretto, now in its thirteenth generation, grows all the soft red winter wheat used in Maker’s Mark. Distillers buy a lot of local grain. Each barrel of bourbon contains sixteen bushels of corn, and two thirds of the corn used for Kentucky bourbon is grown in Kentucky itself.
Here’s what you won’t see growing along a winding Kentucky road: rye, the traditional dominant grain in American whiskey and long the most popular secondary grain in bourbon. There’s almost no rye grown in Kentucky. The amount is so small the US Department of Agriculture doesn’t even track how much—less than 1 percent of total farmed acres. Rye is primarily a Northern crop and its inclusion in the mash bills of so many bourbons isn’t because of geography but because of tradition and habit. But if whiskey is supposed to be a reflection of the land around the place where it’s made, if it is going to carry with it some metaphysical power greater than the assemblage of molecules by PhDs in a lab, then it seems to me that it needs to carry its home with it out into the world. In Kentucky—and you can tell this by just going on a weekend drive—that means fields of corn and wheat, stretching out toward distant tree lines, not rye.
I’d always thought that wheated bourbon tastes smoother because wheat is softer than rye, and the chemistry is different, but now I wonder if the magic comes from a deeper place. The wheat makes the whiskey distinctively Kentuckian—a drink born after the rebellion and the diaspora south and produced from the grains that sway in the wind all around the distilleries. Bourbon made with rye is a holdover from Pennsylvania, from a tradition that traveled south. Instead of using the local grains, distillers have rye shipped in from Minnesota and the Dakotas and other states where it grows in abundance. On that Derby Day in 1935, Pappy Van Winkle stepped away from his competitors and released a different kind of bourbon into the market, one of this place—of his place. Fields of grain surrounded the distillery when Julian was a boy and Pappy was still alive. Corn, of course, and millet planted for the doves. On the weekends in September, the Van Winkles would go out in those fields and shoot doves. Even now, a half century later, Julian tells me, “I can still hear the shotgun blasts reverberating off the corrugated metal sides of the warehouses.”
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