Ancient writings on tanned reindeer skins, which date back to pre-Christian times, have been discovered during excavations beside the River Liffey in Dublin city. The crude scratchings and scribblings have been painstakingly deciphered by learned archaeological academics and appear to be the work of one ancient scribe.
In fact, the skin writings constitute a diary of sorts. It appears that this distant diarist was some sort of shaman, wizard, alchemist — whatever the Celtic equivalent was in those far off days — who dabbled in a type of distillation from grain and water. Now, while it is true that the original record is incomplete and indecipherable in places, it has nevertheless been possible to piece together a pretty clear chronological picture of what this ancient distiller was about.
His name, roughly translated, was Pah-Dee, and he lived on the southern bank of the river Liffey. It seems to have been very cold while he was alive and he mentions wearing fur garments. There are drawings of large creatures, probably elks and bears. Although he records that other people lived nearby in the region which would become the city of Dublin , it is apparent that Pah-Dee was a scribe, wise man and inventor rolled into one.
Tastes bad. Made me dizzy and sick and I had to lie down. Later, chieftain Gurk and his retinue came by. I showed them my two wooden discs joined by a straight branch I made yesterday.
Gurk said he could see no use for such a device, so I threw it in the fire. So, although the new law did help somewhat on the financial side, the distillers still paid taxes on their product considerably before they could sell it at a decent price. Still, the government had made some changes and provided a modicum of relief for the whiskey industry, and the years that followed were to shape the business into what it has become today. This time period remained in effect until the Forand Act of increased it to 20 years.
To further help the distillers, the government agreed that stores of whiskey could be used as collateral for taxes when they came due. Whiskey bonds became a very valuable commodity. However, much whiskey was being sold in bulk to rectifiers and bottlers of the time, and the problem of unscrupulous wholesalers and retailers adulterating good whiskey just had to be tackled.
Taylor, the man responsible for giving us Old Taylor bourbon in , was known as a discerning distiller who focused on the high quality of his products. Along with many other reputable distillers and rectifiers, Taylor was worried that the bad whiskey in the marketplace would reflect badly on the whole industry.
Thus, he teamed up with Secretary of the Treasury John G. This act stipulated that bonded whiskey must be: made at one distillery in one batch; aged for at least four years in warehouses supervised by the government, and bottled at ? The act gave legitimate distillers the ability to prove the quality of their products, but the fight for honest labeling had only just begun. The battle eventually was won by the blenders, but back on this side of the Atlantic, similar battles were being waged.
In the early years of the twentieth century, large food companies had already started shipping foodstuffs all over the country, and there was growing concern about the preservatives and dyes being used, as well as the sanitary conditions in the packaging plants. Laws that would properly define foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals, and help protect consumers, were, therefore, presented to Congress, and luckily for us, whiskey was one of the items under discussion.
Just as their counterparts in Scotland had done, the American producers of blended whiskeys argued that their products were purer than straight whiskeys since they contained fewer impurities. However, they had to contend with a certain Dr. Wiley, head of the Bureau of Chemistry, a part of the Department of Agriculture, and a true believer in straight whiskey. At one point Wiley is rumored to have taken a bottle of bad whiskey to President Teddy Roosevelt who examined the product and declared that if people could no longer get a decent glass of whiskey, it was time that something was done about it.
All whiskeys were, once again, whiskeys--some were blended, and some were straight--but the label had to declare which type was in the bottle. However, those nineteenth-century temperance movements had been gaining momentum, and the whiskey industry was about to confront its most formidable enemy. According to Patricia M. Rice, author of Altered States, in , Eliza Jane Thompson, a woman with a passionate distaste for the drinking classes, led 70 women to drugstores and bars in her hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio, where they stood outside and sang hymns and prayed.
After news of the occurrence reached the ears of similar-minded women around the country, over 50, promoters of temperance followed suit. No tale of Prohibition would be complete without a few words on this colorful woman. In , she married a physician and alcoholic, Dr. Charles Gloyd, and was widowed when her husband, despite her remonstrations to the contrary, reaped the rewards of drinking too much.
Less than 10 years later, Carry married David Nation, a lawyer and minister of the Christian church who eventually divorced her because of her slightly insane ways of demonstrating her distaste for alcohol. Not that she hated only alcohol, mind you, Carry also hated sex, tobacco, and Teddy Roosevelt. Anyway, this woman believed that she had conversations with Jesus and that He had directed her to destroy saloons. And that is exactly what she did. In , Ms. Nation gathered a group of supporters, rolled into a drugstore in Kansas which was dry at the time , rolled out a cask of brandy, and promptly smashed it to smithereens with a sledgehammer.
Not content with that destruction, Carry Nation then set fire to the contents. Later that year she actually smashed up an entire saloon in Kiowa, Oklahoma.
We must give a little credit here to the lady; her tactics certainly had an effect on the illegal bars at the time--many of them closed. The woman had a mission, but her ways were too radical even for the WTCU--they eventually rejected her, leaving her without financial support.
Not one to be sidetracked for long, Ms. Nation took to lecturing on the vaudeville circuit to raise money, and traveled to every state in the country, breaking up bars as she went. In , she even ventured to Britain and Ireland, where she spread the word of Jesus and His dislike of neighborhood taverns. Carry Nation died of a stroke in I do not believe that men can be legislated into angels--even red-nosed angels.
Though temperance societies had sprung up at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and grew stronger, larger, and more adamant about their quest after the Civil War, gone were the days of espousing moderation.
By the turn of the century, total abstinence was the goal. In more than , retailers sold liquor in the U. By , many of the smaller temperance societies had either given their support to or had become part of the Anti-Saloon League, founded in Their mission was to fight for the death of the saloon.
The most influential group on the other side of the Prohibition debate was The Wine and Spirits Association, formed in to counter the propaganda of the Anti-Saloon League and all of the other similarly prohibitionistic societies. However, since the majority of brewers and distillers thought of the drys as not much more than religious fanatics, they chose not only to ignore them, but foolishly carried on doing business as usual--a bad move, and one that would eventually lead to their downfall.
In fact, the drys had some very serious legitimate issues that needed to be addressed. Around the turn of the century, most saloons were unruly places that served liquor, wine, and beer to almost anyone--young or old, sober or drunk, morning, noon, or night. George Ade, author of The Old Time Saloon , noted that, in Chicago, once a saloon keeper got his license, he would throw the key to his bar into Lake Michigan so that his doors could never again be locked.
It was common practice for corrupt local officials to accept bribes to assure lenient treatment of wayward tavern keepers and drunken customers alike. A good number of bars were no more than dens of iniquity where one could buy drugs, consort with prostitutes, hire strong-armed boys to do a little dirty work, or bribe voters with a few shots of whiskey. In New York, when a law was passed that made it illegal to sell drinks on Sunday except when they were accompanied by a meal, many hotels took to placing a sandwich on each table.
The sandwich was never eaten--but many drinks were sold. Of course, many respectable bars existed in the pre-Prohibition era, and one such establishment was the Old Waldorf Bar in Manhattan.
The bar opened in and closed its doors when Prohibition was enacted. By his accounts, this bar was indeed one worth frequenting. Crockett also mentions a tradition of this era that was never properly re-established after Prohibition ended--the free lunch table. There is no doubt that liquor was being abused, and one fellow, George Garvin Brown, creator of the Old Forester brand and a founder member of the Wine and Spirits Association W S A , did take steps to counter the prohibition movement.
Members lectured and wrote to prominent people on both sides of the issue trying to bank the fire a little. But Brown had some priorities of his own, and he decided to take on the religious fanatics who he felt were hiding behind the skirts of the pulpit. One such quote was from Deut. This passage shows the fallacy of the position taken by some agitators that even though wine was used authoritatively in Bible times, it was home-made wine only, and not bought and sold.
And he was right, the Anti-Saloon League was doing just that. Baker, D. It is what its name indicates--a League. It is a league of organizations. It is the federated church, and under all circumstances loyal to the church. It has no interest apart from the church. It goes just as fast and just as far as public sentiment of the church will permit. It has not come to the kingdom simply to build a little local sentiment, or to secure the passage of a few laws, nor yet to vote the saloons from a few hundred towns.
These are mere incidents in its progress. It has come to solve the liquor problem. The U. Actually, by that year, every state in the union had some form of prohibition. It was statewide in some instances, and under various forms of local option towns, counties, municipalities, or city districts having the right to legislate and enforce prohibition in others.
The Anti-Saloon League had structured its tactics to make sure that a number of individual states went dry before lobbying for national prohibition, and they were succeeding at an alarming rate. While all this was going on, the whiskey industry had been making good use of a loophole in the law by selling liquor by mail.
It was a grand system that had actually been around since about when bottles became more common as a way of packaging whiskey, but as local Prohibition spread, drinkers in dry areas began writing away for whiskey like never before, and they were treated to some marvelous offers and premiums.
Mail-order liquor, of course, was not restricted to dry states, the whole country took advantage of some of the sizeable discounts the system offered. Rye whiskey was still very popular during the early twentieth century, and the number of bottlings of Pennsylvania Rye or Monongahela rye whiskey generally outnumbered the bourbons in advertisements of the time.
In , the Webb Kenyon Interstate Liquor Act was passed, effectively preventing the traffic of liquor from wet to dry states.
The mail-order business continued, but with not nearly as much spirit as before. Along with the rest of the country, the whiskey industry braced itself for more setbacks. The Lever Food and Fuel Act was enacted later that year; designed to preserve food supplies during World War I, it made all distillation of beverage alcohol illegal.
Drinking was still legal in some areas of the country--but not for too very much longer. Just over two years later, on January 17, , after the Volstead Act that enabled the National Prohibition Law, had been passed by votes to , the nation was officially dry. That year saw the birth of yet another organization, The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, made up of many brewers, distillers, and some very wealthy and influential people, DuPont family members among them.
The association felt compelled to keep the government informed of the drawbacks of Prohibition; stressing mainly, that without taxes from alcohol, the economy was suffering; that farmers had lost a market for their grains and the surplus subsequently had brought grain prices down, and that unemployment in related industries was rising steadily. It was partially due to these efforts that Prohibition would be repealed some 13 years later. The years between and are usually associated with speakeasies, bootleggers, bathtub gin, and gangsters, and, indeed, for some, those were the highlights of the decade.
If you were in with the in crowd, the nightlife was sparkling, and it was in the fun-filled, mobster-run clubs of this era that the twenties roared with a hoarse throat, worn dry by bad liquor.
However, it is also true that most people of the time thought that all their neighbors were involved in the antics associated with illegal liquor, when in fact, although many drinkers might have kept a bottle at home, the speakeasies were frequented by a relatively small percentage of the population. One of the strangest, most unpredictable effects of Prohibition, however, was this: Hard liquor actually became more popular than it had been prior to the Noble Experiment. Simply because it packed more alcohol into a small quantity of liquid than wine or beer, and it was, therefore, easier to transport and hide from the authorities.
People who had once enjoyed a few beers at the local saloon were now tossing back shots of whiskey and drinking fanciful cocktails made with poor-quality booze.
It is estimated that, although relatively little wine or beer was poured during Prohibition, consumption of the hard stuff actually increased by more than 15 percent per person. It then declined by about 25 percent after Repeal.
Felix graf von Luckner, a visitor to America during Prohibition, painted a marvelous scene of the effects of the experiment in his book, Seeteuful erebert America, Everyone knows this, even the powers of the government. But this profession is beloved because it is essential, and it is respected because its pursuit is clothed with an element of danger and with a sporting risk.
Now and then one is caught, that must happen pro forma and then he must do time or, if he is wealthy enough, get someone to do time for him. The filthy saloons, the gin mills which formerly flourished on every corner and in which the laborer once drank off half his wages, have disappeared.
Now he can instead buy his own car, and ride off for a weekend or a few days with his wife and children in the country or at the sea. But, on the other hand, a great deal of poison or methyl alcohol has taken the place of the good old pure whiskey.
The number of crimes and misdemeanors that originated in drunkenness has declined. But by contrast, a large part of the population has become accustomed to disregard and to violate the law without thinking. The worst is, that precisely as a consequence of the law, the taste for alcohol has spread ever more widely among the youth.
The sporting attraction of the forbidden and the dangerous leads to violations. My observations have convinced me that many fewer would drink were it not illegal. In his book, The Great Illusion, Herbert Asbury quotes a telegram that listed over 30 people and places that supplied liquor in Manhattan. Roosevelt was wont to serve cocktails from his desk every afternoon at four.
Six distilleries were given permits to sell medicinal whiskey during Prohibition--A. This legitimate whiskey was prized for its high quality, since unless people could get hold of smuggled Scotch, most of the other available whiskeys were roughly made and seldom aged by the moonshiners who produced them.
Horrible stories about people going blind after drinking bootleg liquor are true. Some bootleggers took a shortcut and produced highly toxic methyl or wood alcohol instead of ethyl beverage alcohol.
Methyl alcohol has a direct affect on the optic nerve, and as little as one ounce has been known to cause death. Others, either those not versed in the art of distillation or too concerned with time and money, would not adhere to the art of the distiller wherein only the center section of the whiskey is deemed suitable for consumption. All sorts of ploys were used to make this rotgut at least look good.
The Volstead Act all but destroyed many of the legitimate whiskey distilleries. Most of them were dismantled, and of the 17 plants operating in Kentucky prior to Prohibition, only seven were making whiskey in But toward the end of Prohibition, those who were still producing whiskey were busy making plans for Repeal. Prohibition finally ended at P. During the months leading up to Repeal, speculation was rife about how the liquor industry would handle the expected new business. One thing was for sure--there would be major changes in the way the industry conducted itself.
Once again, it would be the men with deep pockets who could afford to cope with the new regulations that came with Repeal. The whiskey men of America were somewhat nervous that much of their audience was gone. Since good straight whiskey was hard to come by during the dry years, the public had become accustomed to gin. Why gin? During Prohibition, not only did heady flavor of juniper help disguise just how poorly the liquor had been made, it also gave the drinking public what they wanted--a highly flavored spirit.
Since most people were used to the bold body and heady flavors of good whiskey, gin was far preferable to vodka, a spirit that was virtually unknown in America at the time. Even by when Charles H. Baker Jr. There was, however, another factor that worried the post-Prohibition whiskey men: Their supplies of aged whiskey were critically low.
December, saw an America with only about 20 million gallons of whiskey on hand compared to the some million gallons of surplus whiskey when Prohibition began. The Canadians and the Scots, on the other hand, had plenty of aged whiskey, and they were champing at the bit to ship it into the States. The hope was that it would tide them over for a few years until they had enough aged straight whiskey to please the public. On May 29, , Franklin Roosevelt declared a national emergency that had been brought about by a series of events that culminated in the stock market crash of and the massive unemployment that followed.
As part of this deal, Congress passed his National Industrial Recovery Bill that effectively suspended anti-trust laws and compelled industries to write their own fair trade codes, which would be examined by the President before approval. The idea, in general terms, was to make each industry share the available work among as many people as possible. Just over six months later, when Prohibition was repealed, the beer, wine, and spirits industries had to devise codes of their own.
Their aim was to unite the entire distilled spirits industry, write a code of conduct it was actually drafted by Harris William of the Department of Agriculture that would be acceptable to all, and convince everyone to sign it.
The idea was that the distillers would show their willingness and ability to police themselves from within and prevent post-Prohibition bars from becoming the seedy, unregulated dives they had been prior to To a large extent, it worked. Also in December, , President Roosevelt formed the Federal Alcohol Control Administration, an agency charged with establishing codes--separate ones for liquor, beer, and wine--to which any company in the beverage alcohol business was legally compelled to adhere.
This agency eventually became part of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. During the dry years, Seagram had used the same name in Canada, but American bootleggers sold an inferior whiskey that they called Golden Wedding, and thus the public was still very aware of the name.
The upshot? Public confusion. Was this a blended whiskey? Many of the other straight whiskeys on the market at this time were merely young--they were bottled at to months-old and sold under familiar labels. And we are willing to bet that if you had to choose between a one-year-old straight whiskey and a well-made blended whiskey, you, too, would pick the latter. By the early s, however, the distillers had managed to age sufficient quantities of straight whiskey to have an appreciable amount of good, aged bourbon and rye back on the shelves.
But 21 years had passed since Prohibition had taken such wonderful, big-bodied, rich, flavorful whiskeys away from the public. Tastes had changed, and blended whiskeys had become increasingly popular.
All was by no means lost, however--good whiskey men never have given up that easily. In some instances, distillers ventured into importing, exporting, and distilling different products to diversify their lines. During the war, American distilleries were enlisted to produce industrial alcohol for the war effort, and once again the whiskey supplies began to dwindle.
Surprisingly, drinkers in India consume the most whiskey, though the country's own whiskey is rarely exported. The word "whiskey" comes from the Gaelic uisge , a shortened version of uisge beatha meaning "water of life," also known as aqua vitae in Latin. Whiskey was originally used as a medicine, both as an internal anesthetic and an external antibiotic.
Distilling techniques were brought to Ireland and Scotland sometime between and by monks. Since wine was not easily obtained there, barley beer was distilled into a liquor which became whiskey.
The manufacturing of distilled spirits was limited to apothecaries and monasteries until the late 15th century. Whiskey made its way to North America with Irish and Scottish immigrants and has spread across the globe as well. Though the various styles of whiskey use slightly different methods, all are essentially made in the same way.
Whiskey starts out just the same as beer with a mash of grains—commonly barley, corn, rye, or wheat. Some, as in the case of barley, may also be malted. The grains are mixed with water and yeast for fermentation, which converts starches to sugars that become alcohol. Afterward, the beer is run through a still—either a pot still or continuous column still—that heats the liquid into a concentrated vapor.
This comes out the other end as a high-proof liquid distillate that is clear. Almost all whiskey is then barrel-aged for at least a few years. This imparts oak and wood flavors, darkens the liquor, and mellows out the harsh alcohol.
After barreling, whiskey is then blended with other barrels or different styles of whiskey and often diluted to bottling strength. Whiskey is typically bottled at 40 percent alcohol by volume ABV, 80 proof or slightly higher. Some barrel-strength whiskeys, which are not diluted, may reach proof. Every style of whiskey and each brand within the style will have different flavor characteristics. See the vast collection of whiskys and whiskeys from around the world.
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