Tasting Whiskey

by Lew Bryson

  Scotland: Back in the Glens

  For the most part (excepting the Lowlands of the south), Scotland’s geography encompasses a series of barriers: ridges, steep ravines, rivers, long estuaries, and the ocean-moated islands. It almost seems designed to keep people from trading.

  It’s also cool, and the soil is often rocky. Barley grew well here, and still does; it was often made into whisky here, and still is. Barley is a grain that a farmer can use in a number of ways: it is a good animal feed and remains so even after it has been used to make beer and whisky; fermentation takes the sugars, leaving cellulose and proteins behind, and cattle make good use of them. Although it is not a particularly useful grain for baking because it has a low gluten content, it makes a sustaining and satisfying meal as porridge or soup.

  Most of the barley used in Scotch whisky is grown right in Scotland.

  But it is uniquely suited to brewing. It is easily malted, much more so than some grains, like corn. That low gluten content makes for a much less sticky mashing when the malt is heated to convert the starches to sugars, and it doesn’t foam like rye does (and rye does, so much so that it’s actually a problem in brewing). Barley grows inside a husk that acts as a natural filter after brewing, giving a relatively clear beer, which makes distilling much easier.

  Barley was a Scottish farmer’s friend, even after the English tried to squash home distilling beginning in the 1780s. The English government was looking for revenue (a hunt that would eventually lead to the Boston Tea Party and the Revolutionary War in America), and one of the places it looked was in drinking. Malt was taxed, stills were taxed, sales were taxed. Until 1781, home and farm distilling was legal so long as the product wasn’t sold. When the commercial product was sold, with the taxes figured in, you can guess that there was a price difference. Farm distillers were quick to realize that the differential was in their favor, if they were willing to risk smuggling small kegs of whisky over the hills on ponies or their own backs.

  The Blair Athol Distillery in Pitlochry, Scotland, founded in 1798

  The benefit was enough — often the difference between survival and calamity for a tenant family working a small holding, known as a “croft” — that the substantial risk was taken by literally thousands of crofters. The topography that hindered trade was a boon for illicit distilling, with abundant small streams for cooling and water supply, high hilltops for observation of approaching strangers, plentiful peat to fire the still, and bogs and glens to hide the activity.

  There was also a preference for the home-distilled spirit, illegal or no, that spread all the way to London. The way the taxes were imposed often led the Lowland commercial distillers to make spirit in ways that were more concerned with price than quality. A tax on the size of stills, for instance, rather than on their output, led to broad, shallow stills that ran faster, hotter, and harder to focus on quick output. The Lowlanders would also immediately take to Aeneas Coffey’s continuous still, the column still used today for grain whisky. The farm distillers ran on the “sma’ still,” the small pot still that was easier to heat and manage, more adapted to the small scale of farm distilling, and easier to conceal when the government excise men came looking for illicit distillers.

  The spirit that came out of those small farm stills was not what we think of as Scotch whisky today. It was unaged, though it may have spent a month or so in wood during the storing and transport. It was often spiced or flavored with fruits. But it was spirit, distilled from malt, often with a smoky “reek” from the malt having been dried over a peat fire, and when it was aged, it was aged in barrels that had been used before, with the oaky tannins largely leached out of the wood. Scotch whisky had developed its basic DNA.

  Two major steps in the evolution of Scotch whisky took place after the Excise Act of 1823 brought Scottish distilling into the light. First, the act made it much more attractive for farm distillers to “go legal,” sometimes on the same spots where they had illegally distilled before. Duty was lowered, the regulations and tax structures were changed to make the Highland style of all-malt, slower distilling more profitable for legal distillers, and, importantly, enforcement was significantly increased.

  As the Highland-style whisky became more widely available, merchants bought it and offered it for sale. Through another evolutionary process guided by changing government policy, customer preference, and canny business sense, this straight distillery spirit became aged spirit, then a blend of malts. After the invention of the continuous still and a change in government policy that allowed the previously illegal blending of malt and grain whisky, the blended Scotch whisky we are familiar with today emerged. Blended whisky was consistent, and it was less assertive than straight malt whisky, and thus more attractive to a larger number of consumers, who willingly took to it in the millions, in the UK and around the world.

  In earlier centuries, the green and gloomy glens of Scotland sheltered legions of illicit “sma’ still” distilling operations, progenitors of the eventually legal Scotch we know and love today.

  The other innovation was simple economics that turned out to have wonderfully synergistic effects. Great Britain had long been one of the major markets for sherry, the Spanish fortified wine (and still is, even though consumption has dropped off significantly). In the nineteenth century it was still the custom to ship sherry in barrels, and Scottish distillers saw these used sherry barrels as a cheap source of cooperage.

  The flavor of the whisky was changed by interaction with the leftover wine and the Spanish oak; happily, it was a delicious change, and sherry wood aging became part of some distillers’ regular program. The same thing would happen when America’s bourbon industry expanded to the point at which its cast-off barrels — allowed to be used only once for bourbon — would become plentiful enough to age Scotch whisky; they now account for about 90 percent of the barrels in Scotch warehouses.

  Though it was the lack of effective, economical transportation that shaped Scotch whisky, the nineteenth-century revolution in industrial transportation and manufacturing, combined with the inexhaustible energy of the pioneers of Scotch whisky, would gain it a huge global market.

  The United States: Down in the Holler

  American whiskey was shaped by a similar set of circumstances. Two sets of circumstances, actually: American rye whiskey grew up in the ridges and valleys of Pennsylvania’s Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains, then floated down the Ohio River and decided to become bourbon. Both, again, were products of their geography and time.

  American rye (as distinguished from Canadian rye whisky) was a creation of central European immigrants who came to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moravians and Germans in particular, often fleeing religious persecution, came to the area and commenced brewing and distilling, spreading west across the colony. The whiskey from these distillers kept the soldiers of the Continental Army warmed at the Valley Forge encampment in 1776.

  Why rye? It was familiar to them; rye was the main bread grain in their homelands. It also has agricultural advantages; rye grows easily in marginal soils, with a dense root structure that holds loose soil and prevents erosion, and it will control weeds with its expansive growth. And while it can foam quite dramatically as it ferments, rye gives an excellent amount of spicy flavor to the spirit (as it does in rye bread).

  It was a good time for farm distillers in the Pennsylvania colony. They grew their rye, brewed their beer and distilled their whiskey, and hauled it over the low but imposingly steep ridges to markets where they could trade for manufactured goods, tea, sugar, and gunpowder. The unaged whiskey was flavored by allowing fruit (most often cherries), herbs, or hot peppers to steep in it.

  After the Revolutionary War was over and won, however, the newly created federal government had a problem: a huge war debt, owed largely to European banks. One of the ways they came up with to retire it was an excise tax on spirits, collected from distillers. The farm distillers in western Pennsylvania were incense
d by this tax. They felt that it unfairly targeted them, since they thought they weren’t getting much benefit from the federal government anyway. It was also hard for them to pay the tax, which had to be paid in cash, not goods. The frontier economy was largely barter based; there wasn’t much currency in circulation in “Westsylvania,” as the area centered on Pittsburgh was called.

  The farmers refused to pay the tax, and in July of 1794 they burned the home of the inspector of revenue for southwest Pennsylvania, John Neville. It was the start of the Whiskey Rebellion, the first major challenge to the new federal government. After negotiations failed, President George Washington reluctantly called out the state militias to quash the uprising. Washington inspected and briefly rode with the troops during the march west, the only time a sitting president would lead troops in the field as commander-in-chief.

  After the American Revolutionary War, when the new government taxed distillers to pay off war debt, angry citizens faced off against federal tax collectors, leading to the Whiskey Rebellion.

  The ploy worked; the rebels faded away, a small number were arrested, and two men were sentenced to hang but then pardoned by Washington. The upshot of it all was mixed. The tax was never fully collected and was repealed in 1801. Rye whiskey continued to be the dominant spirit in western Pennsylvania and Maryland well into the twentieth century. After a steep decline that left American rye whiskey at death’s door by 1990, the spirit has made a handsome comeback, in the form of such products as Wigle Whiskey, a Pittsburgh craft-distilled rye named for one of the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion.

  In the wake of the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion, many of the rebels took to the Ohio River and floated downstream to escape what they saw as the reversal of the liberties promised by the American Revolution; they mostly settled in Louisiana. But some probably stopped to farm the dark, rich soil of Kentucky, where a native North American grass was already being turned into whiskey: corn.

  Corn whiskey and its more refined cousin bourbon are the most American of spirits, made from this native grain with European distilling techniques. The question of who first turned corn into whiskey is a contentious one, with several claimants. The earliest, and least likely, is George Thorpe, at the Berkeley Plantation near Williamsburg, Virginia, all the way back in 1622! Thorpe wrote in a letter to his backers in England, “We have found a way to make so good a drink of Indian corn as I protest I have divers times refused to drink good strong English beer and chosen to drink that.” It seems almost certain that this was a corn beer; there is no other evidence of distilling at Berkeley at the time.

  The most frequently mentioned name is that of Evan Williams, namesake of the well-known Heaven Hill bourbon brand. Bourbon historian Michael R. Veach neatly disposes of this claim by noting that when Williams was supposed to be distilling the first whiskey from corn, he had not yet reached America; Veach cites “the existence of a receipt for Williams’s passage from London to Philadelphia on the ship Pigoe dated May 1, 1784” (Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, 2013).

  Veach then notes several other candidates who were probably distilling in Kentucky in 1779: Jacob Myers and the brothers Joseph and Samuel Davis. That these men were distilling or had the wherewithal to distill in 1779 is a matter of record, but as Veach points out, there were no government records at this time, which predated liquor taxation in Kentucky. It is likely that we will never know with certainty the first person to distill corn into whiskey, and why should we? We don’t know who first distilled barley into whiskey in Ireland or Scotland, either.

  What we do know is that corn grew well in Kentucky, and still does; today there are fields of corn all through the bourbon heartland, which stretches from Louisville south to Loretto and east to near Lexington. Corn is easily stored, and the stalks make excellent cattle feed. It is the basis of cheap and filling food for people: mush, cornbread, fritters, the simple hoecake, and the ubiquitous Southern breakfast staple, grits. It is hard to malt but is abundant in convertible starch; add some barley malt to the cooked corn mash, and the chemistry will bring the corn right along.

  Again, the farmer-distillers who made the spirit, sometimes on very primitive equipment indeed, used what was locally plentiful, mixing it with barley malt for the chemistry and a bit of rye or wheat for flavor. They bartered spirit for goods (keeping some for themselves), and they began trading their whiskey farther from home. The success of that trading and the way the reputation of Kentucky whiskey grew leads to another pair of mysteries about bourbon: who first aged it in charred oak barrels (and why), and why do we call it “bourbon”? Again, theories abound.

  The most common one you’ll hear on why barrels were charred is that it was done so they could be reused; the charring, the explanation goes, would take the smell of the previous contents out of the wood. Fish is often given as the example of “previous contents” (though you have to wonder if even charring would get the smell of smoked or salted fish out of a barrel).

  As to why the whiskey was aged, you will likely be told that as the whiskey was floated downriver to New Orleans on flatboats it aged in the barrels, and the boatmen noticed that it was much better for it. The downriver trip only took about a month, though, so it’s unlikely that much significant aging would take place.

  Veach’s research again has turned up evidence that the barrels were deliberately charred to affect the flavor of the whiskey. He quotes an 1826 letter from a merchant in Lexington, Kentucky, to the Bourbon County distiller John Corlis about barrels of whiskey to be purchased, suggesting that if Corlis could burn the barrels on the inside to the depth of “say only a 16th of an inch, that it will much improve it.”

  This burning, Veach points out, emulated the aging process used for French brandy and cognac, which were popular imports in New Orleans. He speculates that this popularity may well have led merchants to try this charred barrel aging with Kentucky whiskey. That would be when folks started calling it one of my favorite nicknames for bourbon: “red liquor,” for that hint of ruby in the brown that notes a good bottling.

  Finally, why “bourbon”? Was it from an association with Bourbon County in Kentucky? That seems a bit of a stretch, as bourbon was made in several other places. Or was it that the “good stuff,” the aged whiskey, was available on Bourbon Street in New Orleans? Or was it, as Veach suggests, a marketing idea to make it appeal to the French expatriates in New Orleans? The best answer is the simple one: we don’t know. There is no solid proof for a definitive answer to any of these questions. We’ll simply have to be satisfied with drinking the whiskey.

  Bourbon would change again, going from a largely pot-stilled spirit to one that is almost exclusively made using column stills (though a pot still–like “doubler” is often used for the second distillation). It was more efficient, and — unlike Scotch — very little of bourbon’s flavor and character comes from the size and shape of the still. It’s the corn and the charred oak that do it.

  The other major change in bourbon’s character was in the late 1800s, when there was a reaction to the sharp and sometimes less than ethical economic practices that had led to the rise of the “rectifiers.” Like the meatpackers in Upton Sinclair’s muckraking classic, The Jungle, many whiskey sellers were running a business in which what was represented on the label sometimes bore little resemblance to what was actually in the bottle. These blenders would mix neutral spirit with flavorings and colorings — caramel, creosote, wintergreen, and glycerin were popular — to create “whiskey,” which infuriated the straight distillers; genuine aged bourbon cost a lot more to make than flavored spirit, which was often only days old at the time of bottling.

  The distillers took their fury to Washington, where it resulted in two pieces of legislation. The first was the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897. The “bond” referred to government oversight and regulation, particularly the bonded warehouses established in the wake of the Whiskey Ring scandal of 1875 (a conspiracy of government officials and distillers to evade excise taxes on wh
iskey).

  To comply with the act and be labeled “bottled in bond,” whiskey had to be at least 4 years old, bottled at 100 proof, have no additives other than pure water, and be the product of only one distillery. Clearly this meant that almost all rectifiers’ whiskeys were not going to make the cut, and distillers moved to make sure that drinkers knew that bottled-in-bond whiskey was “the good stuff.” The rectifiers were unimpressed and continued to sell their product simply as “whiskey” or even “Old Bourbon,” with no legal restraint. What’s more, bottlers of good-quality whiskeys blended from authentic bourbons felt that they were harmed by the law.

  Another form of regulation would be needed to straighten out the mess, and it came with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which was prompted in part by public disgust generated by the portrayal of the meatpacking industry in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Back in these pre-Prohibition days, bourbon was still held in high regard by the nation in general, and along with meat, and milk, and medicine, whiskey was something the public wanted to be wholesome.

  It wasn’t easy — it took 3 years of additional wrangling to settle the whiskey issue, and eventually President Taft had to provide the final opinion — but in 1909 whiskey got the protection it deserved. The definitions that had been so long fought over boiled down to something fairly simple: