Strictly speaking, bourbon was defined by federal law in 1935: It must contain at least 51 percent corn, must come off the still at no more than 160 proof (higher alcohol content means less flavor), must go into the barrel at no more than 125 proof (distilled water is generally added both before barreling and before bottling), be bottled at at least 80 proof, and be aged for at least two years in brand-new oak casks that have been charred on the inside. Bourbon right off the still remains clear and almost flavorless today its two or more years in a barrel give it its color and almost all its taste. The defining qualities of bourbon emerged over the following decades and the early nineteenth century, and their beginnings are strangely impossible to document. The whiskey these pioneers made was hardly bourbon it was a clear, unaged, almost flavorless corn vodka closer to moonshine. His renown, however, rested not on priority but on the fact that he was a Baptist preacher, making him the ideal forefather for distillers fighting the forces of Prohibition a hundred years ago. None of them has a clear claim to the title the father of bourbon for most of the nineteenth century the honors were given to one Elijah Craig, who started up in 1789. Robert Samuels, great-great-great-great-grandfather of Bill Samuels, Jr., head of Maker’s Mark, came in 1780 Basil Hayden, the actual Old Grand-Dad, in 1785. In 1788 Jacob Beam, great-grandfather of Jim Beam and great-great-great-grandfather of Booker Noe, master distiller emeritus at Jim Beam today, entered the region and soon was distilling. Before lone, men whose names survive to this day were setting up homemade stills around the bluegrass countryside. When, in 1776, Virginia named its western frontier Kentucky County (much of which became Bourbon County after the Revolution, in honor of France’s help in the war, giving the whiskey its name), the state decreed that it would give four hundred acres to any settler who built a cabin and planted corn there. To the Germans in Pennsylvania and Maryland that meant rye in Kentucky, to which a largely Scotch-Irish population began to move after Daniel Boone cut a path through the Cumberland Gap in 1767, it meant corn, which would become the main ingredient in bourbon. Non-Puritan immigrants from the British Isles and Northern Europe tended to head west and south of New England, and they took with them their homegrown traditions of whiskey making, adapting them to the grains that could grow in the regions where they settled. The American liquor industry, centered in New England, was based on slave power. In Rhode Island in the 1750s there were at least thirty legitimate distilleries making rum. This was because of the triangular trade: Molasses was shipped from the West Indies to New England, there to be made into rum to be sent to Africa to trade for slaves for the West Indies. The early English settlers in North America made and drank beer, but by the early eighteenth century the dominant distilled spirit in the colonies was rum. Whiskey is essentially brandy made from beer instead of wine it developed in Northern European countries where grapes wouldn’t grow. Though it may sound hyperbolic to say so, we think it’s all right there in a single shot of Tennessee sour mash, straight rye whiskey or bourbon.” Congress was not being fatuous when in 1964 it proclaimed bourbon America’s “native spirit,” and the bourbon distiller Bill Samuels, Jr., does not exaggerate when he says, “Whiskey was the funnel through which the West leapt, the lubricant and the currency, and since then bourbon has gotten a lot better.” The authors of the 1995 definitive history and guide The Book of Bourbon and Other Pine American Whiskeys open their volume by stating, “Deep in the soul of American whiskey lies the rich pioneer spirit that founded this nation, the steadfast determination that conquered the Great Plains and the Wild West. Yet bourbon endures, as uniquely and utterly American as jazz or baseball-and as curious in its history and as rich and subtle in its enjoyment. And in this century bourbon was beset by outright banning, followed by another suspension of business during World War II and then the rise of martini culture in the 1950s, vodka as the soirit of choice after that, single malts becoming America’s favored sipping whiskey, and through it all a broad decline in liquor consumption. The nineteenth century saw the scandal of the Grantadministration Whiskey Ring, the rise of a monopolistic Whiskey Trust, and the proliferation of unscrupulous distillers who sold God-knew-what as straight whiskey. At the very dawn of bourbon, in the 1790s, a federal excise tax nearly killed the young industry (and threatened the young Republic as well).
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