by Mark Meyer
THE WHISKEY REBELLION
AND THE
REBIRTH OF RYE
A Pittsburgh Story
Mark Meyer and Meredith Grelli
Copyright © 2017 Mark Meyer and Meredith Grelli
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may
not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First edition 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9989041-6-0
Belt Publishing
1667 E. 40th Street #1G1
Cleveland, Ohio 44120
www.beltmag.com
Book design by Meredith Pangrace
Cover and interior process illustrations
by John Tarasi and Jessica Pierson Turner
CONTENTS
Foreword by Leslie Przybylek
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Whiskey Rebellion
Chapter 2: A Love Story
Chapter 3: The State of the Industry
Chapter 4: The Rebirth of Craft
The Process
Cocktail Recipes
Strawberry Shrub
War of Conquests
Sherry Darlin’
Wigle Rye Manhattan
Summerset
Whiskey Daisy
Maple Whiskey Sour
Milk Punch
Whiskey Buck
Whiskey Bramble
Don Draper’s Duvet
Whiskey Sour
Ward 8
Gin and Juice
Southside
Gin Fizz
Improved Holland Gin Cocktail
Dutch Negroni
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
FOREWORD
LESLIE PRZYBYLEK
SENIOR CURATOR, SENATOR JOHN HEINZ HISTORY CENTER
“W ho on earth is crazy enough to open a craft distillery in the Strip District?”
That was my first thought when I ran across stories announcing Wigle Whiskey’s plans for a building across from the old Otto Milk warehouse in Pittsburgh in 2012. I didn’t even live here at the time. Like so many other Rust Belt children, I grew up in the region and enjoyed untold summer misadventures in Pittsburgh’s South Hills during years when the city hit its lowest ebb. (Not that I recognized that as a kid. There were too many other things to do.) Then I left western Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s, building a career as a history curator elsewhere. Sixteen years later, I was contemplating a return.
In the intervening years, Pittsburgh had changed. For me, the stories about Wigle Whiskey symbolized the transformation of a blue-collar “beer and burger” town into something not quite finished, but definitely new, a more adventurous urban community. A place still trying to negotiate its relationship between what had been and what could be. In that context, a group of dreamers setting out to resurrect the heritage of Monongahela rye whiskey in one of my favorite parts of the city didn’t seem like such a wacky idea. Hey, why not try it? Pittsburgh has always been a place where people tested crazy ideas. Try and run a steamboat all the way down to New Orleans? Crazy. Create a giant metal wheel more than twenty stories high that people could ride in at the 1893 World’s Fair? Crazy. Manufacture a pull-tab to make it easier to open your beer can? Crazy. (But oh-so fitting for the ‘Burgh.)
As it turned out, I did return to Pittsburgh, taking a job with the Senator John Heinz History Center. And one of the first places I visited when I came back was Wigle Whiskey. At the very least, it was the neighborly thing to do, since both organizations reside in the Strip District. Since that time, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Meredith Grelli and the crew at Wigle on multiple programs and research projects. Their growth and success over the last few years has been nothing short of astonishing. And yet, as Meredith and Mark argue in this book, in some ways what they’re offering isn’t so completely new after all. Craft distillers such as Wigle represent the rebirth of a once robust local heritage; a tradition that was lost, and one that is still in the process of being recovered.
Wigle’s role in that rebirth has been twofold. While they were not the first craft distiller in the region, they were the first to bring whiskey back to the city of Pittsburgh. And just as crucially, Wigle’s strategic decision to tap into the history and lore of the Whiskey Rebellion as part of their origin story added an aura to their efforts that gave it a different kind of urgency. Indeed, the family’s active involvement with the political campaigning necessary to change the state’s antiquated liquor laws animated the sense of “rebellion” with which they identified. This same rebellious sense fit well with the climate of the region: a “Whiskey Rebellion II” campaign in 2008 was launched to protest an Allegheny County drink tax. In 2010, nearby Washington County inaugurated the first Whiskey Rebellion Festival, a community celebration that is now one of the biggest draws of the calendar year. For Wigle, reclaiming this history gives the distillery a sense of place and heritage that goes beyond marketing and touches something intangible, yet vital.
It should be acknowledged that the Whiskey Rebellion as a historic event—the first major test of the fledgling American government—was never forgotten in western Pennsylvania. Multiple museums and historic sites in the region interpret the story; some have been doing so with nearly all-volunteer staffs for decades. Volumes have been written on it. Early accounts were saturated in partisan politics while new scholars began taking a more balanced approach by the 1980s. But increasingly today for many people, history solely accounted on the page or even at a historic site seems distant, abstract. History in a glass? Well, that’s another story. It’s worth considering. Savoring. Maybe more than once. If this volume, part of Belt’s “Notches” series of extended essays that illuminate stories impacting the shape and nature of the Rust Belt region, encourages more people to sample both rye whiskey and the history of its rise and fall in western Pennsylvania, then so much the better.
This book also offers readers a unique perspective of the sense of mission and heritage that animates Wigle’s team, the sort of drive echoed by other family initiatives in other Rust Belt cities that are seeking to add new vitality to neighborhoods and communities in the twenty-first century. It’s not just about the Whiskey Rebellion, or the later role of the Overholt Distillery. This is history as told by industry insiders with the zeal of the convert. How could it not be so? To invest the time, money, effort, and emotion into something that even Meredith herself admits was “a terribly stupid idea,” they had to believe. Throughout this book, recurring themes tie the chapters together in ways that speak to human motivations far beyond the mechanics of distillation, although some may argue that is motivation enough: the catalyzing force of family; the drive of industry and achievement; the impact of perseverance and vision; the intertwined paths of capital and resources; the age-old combustible mix of liquor and politics.
It’s a story worth telling, one that encompasses events that shaped this region long before the industries that gave rise to the Rust Belt ever had a chance to collapse. A story that illustrates the emergence of new businesses that are again shaping a sense of place for this city that has seen so much reinvention before. So pour yourself a glass of Monongahela rye or mix up a cocktail from the recipes outlined in the back of this book, and then sit back and explore The Whiskey Rebellion and the Rebirth of Rye: A Pittsburgh Story. Enjoy this tour of the Rust Belt region’s spirited past.
Opening a whiskey distillery was a lark for our family, an idea inspired by a bout of wine drinking while visiting family ice vineyards on a trip to Canada. We are not a family of barflies. We are a family that loves great food and drink, history, and our region of western Pennsylvania. These are the things that brought us to rye whiskey. When we started our distillery, these passions fueled us through the first five years of immense financial investment, government lobbying, nonexistent or limited salaries, and persistent twelve- to eighteen-hour workdays.
In many ways, opening a grain-to-bottle whiskey distillery is a really stupid idea. The business of whiskey is a backwards one. The vast majority of what we produce sits in barrels for years and the traditional metrics of success—a break-even point, profitability—are quaint, abstract notions. But the very peculiar, long-term nature of whiskey distilling has freed us to approach what we do through the lens of a life project rather than as a traditional business. And so we’ve come to think of our Pittsburgh distillery as our love letter to the region and to American whiskey.
Our motivation to write this book comes from a similar place. America is currently undergoing an explosive rediscovery of rye whiskey; according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, sales of the spirit grew 536 percent between 2009 and 2014. Despite rye’s status as America’s original whiskey, much of its history remains submerged beneath decades of marketing around the more popular Kentucky bourbon. This book is our effort to revisit that story, pique our country’s interest in America’s original whiskey, and revisit the remarkable national history that revolves around its production.
In the first part of this book you will read about the Whiskey Rebellion that pitted George Washington and Alexander Hamilton against rural Pittsburgh distillers, about how rye whiskey produced one of America’s robber barons, and about how it helped give birth to the American steel industry. Much of this history is based in western Pennsylvania, as rye whiskey was to that region what bourbon is now to Kentucky. We do not attempt herein a comprehensive history of rye distilleries across the state, nor do we even approach Maryland’s rye history, which is quite interesting and important as well.
While the area around Pittsburgh is now well beyond its industrial heyday, the city’s name still conjures images of belching smokestacks. The rye whiskey that fueled these industries, however, has been largely forgotten in the American imagination—a history wiped out by the long slog of Prohibition. But the impact rye whiskey had on our country’s first 150 years cannot be overstated. The western Pennsylvania distilleries inspired the country’s first tax, launched the first test of federal power, fueled the businesses of America’s great industrialists, and lubricated the Republican political machine. They’re too important a piece of our national story to collectively forget. This short book is our modest contribution to this effort and draws on the work of many writers before us. Our hope is that it inspires others to capture the stories of the multitude of important distilleries that made Pennsylvania their home pre-Prohibition.
The second part of the book explores the current state of the American rye whiskey industry and where it may be headed. American whiskey never fully recovered from the dramatic blow delivered by Prohibition. In chapters three and four, we explore the consolidation of the rye whiskey industry—one of the most dramatic industrial consolidations imaginable in America—wherein we moved from tens of thousands of distilleries in the United States to just two major producers of rye. We also explore how this industrial consolidation resulted in one of the most stagnant and misleading consumer product landscapes in the country, and how the rise of grain-to-bottle craft distillers promises to reinject American rye whiskey with its original spirit of place and regionality. Today’s craft distillers are channeling the fighting spirit of the eighteenth-century whiskey rebels. They’re also situating themselves in communities much in the same way that distillers did before Prohibition—as community builders with a product intended for men and women of all stripes.
Rye is not an easy whiskey. It’s big, spicy, and robust. At its most aggressive it can kick you in the face. At its best it has a character and depth singular to its grain. Rye has a backbone that made it the muse for America’s classic cocktails—the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, and the Sazerac—as well as the ones developed by western Pennsylvania bartenders that you will find in this book. We encourage you to sit back and enjoy one of these classic drinks as you rediscover the story of this lost American whiskey.
CHAPTER 1
The Whiskey Rebellion
On September 6, 1791, about twenty whiskey rebels, armed and in disguise, waited in the isolated woods near Pigeon Creek, thirty miles south of Pittsburgh. When Robert Johnson, tax collector for the US Treasury Department for the Fourth Survey of Pennsylvania, appeared on the trail, they surrounded him. They shaved his head, covered him in tar and feathers, took his horse, and left him in the woods. The heavy scent of whiskey lingered in the air.
Johnson recognized two of his attackers and soon pressed the sheriff for warrants. The sheriff hired John Connor, a cattle drover, to serve the papers. When the rebels learned Connor had been hired, they intercepted him. They tarred and feathered him, too, then tied him to a tree.
When word reached Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, George Washington, in the third year of his first presidential term, and his thirty-six-year-old treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, knew they had problems in western Pennsylvania. But the true depth of those problems was just starting to become clear.
Whiskey, Politics, and Hardship on the Frontier
The local whiskey rebels who attacked Johnson and Connor were largely Scotch-Irish, people who had come to America with their love of whiskey and knowledge of whiskey making. Back home, their grain of choice had been barley, but in western Pennsylvania, they had discovered that rye grain, grown in the winter and harvested in the summer for hay or straw, could also be distilled into a spicy, flavorful whiskey. It didn’t take long for rye whiskey to become a way of life on the frontier. It was the “common drink”—consumed at weddings, funerals, and political debates. Men used it as a midday “strengthener” in the fields. Women drank it and gave it to their children for medicinal purposes.
In Washington County, Pennsylvania, in 1790, there was approximately one whiskey still for every ten families. And if a family didn’t have a still, they formed relationships with neighbors who could transform their rye grain into alcohol. Millers ground the grain into a grist, and then cooked it at a high temperature with water. As it cooled, malted barley was added to the mash, converting the starch into sugar. A whiskey maker would add yeast to the sugar mash, and it would ferment into a low-alcohol beer, or wash. Then, a distiller would work his magic by turning the beer into a clear whiskey that was as good as cash in the western country.
It was good as cash because whiskey was widely bartered in western Pennsylvania. Selling it was also good business. A horse could pull about four bushels of rye, but that same horse could pull the equivalent of twenty-four bushels if it were converted into whiskey. Barrels of whiskey were also far easier to transport over the mountains to the east than grain was. It also sold for twice as much out East, and that brought a lot of money back over the mountains.
At this time, Pittsburgh was a village of 376 people where wealth was concentrated among a small number of families. John Neville, a brigadier general with Washington during the American Revolution and the richest man on the frontier, lived in a mansion on Bower Hill, just south of Pittsburgh. He was one of the largest whiskey distillers in the western country, having secured a contract with the US Army, which included the drink as part of its daily rations. Neville owned a ten-thousand-acre plantation and lived in a style that contrasted starkly with the rest of the frontier. While most settlers made do with log cabins, Neville’s home had expensive art hanging from pla
ster walls. Although many Quaker abolitionists lived in Pennsylvania, Neville had enslaved people who worked his land and lived in outbuildings on his property. His son, Presley, had been an aide to the Marquis de Lafayette during the American Revolution and served as chief burgess (mayor) of Pittsburgh. His daughter, Amelia, was married to Isaac Craig, an entrepreneur and quartermaster for the army garrison in Pittsburgh, who also eventually served a term as the town’s chief burgess.
The Neville-Craig families dominated Pittsburgh society, politics, and power. They were also dedicated Federalists, fiercely loyal to Washington and Hamilton. And as the local whiskey rebels mounted their insurrection against the federal government, the “Neville Connection” became one of their chief antagonists.
For most settlers on the western Pennsylvania frontier, life was hard. They were hemmed in by geography and enemies: the British ruled the world to the north, the Spanish controlled the Mississippi River to the south, and the American Indian tribes, fighting for survival, were creating havoc to the west. With the Mississippi cut off, the westerners were forced to trade across the mountains to the east, which was an expensive, time-consuming challenge. Their pleas to open the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers for southern trade, however, had been met with indifference from the political power brokers in Philadelphia and New York.