Free Bourbon Empire by Reid Mitenbuler Page A

of twenty-year-old bourbon that most would find undrinkable after having absorbed too many wood tannins from aging so long. But blended with younger bourbons the older spirit lends the kind of dryness wood tannins offer, helping balance the young bourbon’s heavier grain notes. Zoeller doesn’t distill, but he does have a refined palate, a quality that shines through in the layered complexity of the whiskies he creates.
    Big versus small. That’s sometimes how the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson is described. There are benefits and drawbacks to both, and it’s a battle cry constantly sounded throughout America’s economic history. The respective sides of Jefferson and Hamilton’s ideas are still argued among politicians today, and Americans are reminded of it every time they open their wallets and find images of both men emblazoned on U.S. currency. Only Jefferson, however, has his image on a bottle ofbourbon.

• CHAPTER THREE •
DARK AND BLOODY GROUND
    M odern distillery visitor centers rumble and shake like revival tents. Stories boil out of them, shouting the creation myths of their brands. In Kentucky, you hear the names of many different early settlers—Elijah Craig, Jacob Boehm, Evan Williams, Basil Hayden—but their tales all follow a similar pattern: once these people arrived at the frontier, they dedicated themselves to the simple principles of making whiskey, establishing the legacy behind whatever bourbon you’re drinking today. Every account is a classic American success story, rooted in a fabled past. And even though the tales are often embellished, exchanging mundane reality for serendipity and style, we tend to look past any inconsistencies. This is because the story matters just as much as the facts—it’s what we buy into, literally and figuratively.
    The stories are also designed to make you believe specifically in Kentucky. The state holds a special connection to bourbon, even though many other places possess the exact same qualities that make Kentucky’s whiskey so good: water filtered by limestone, the ability to grow grain, and climates defined by hot summers and cool winters. So what accounts for Kentucky’s primacy today? Much of the answer would come after Prohibition, explained by the state’s business and lobbying savvy, but that falls later in the tale. Much earlier than that, Kentucky would begin to give its whiskey special prominence with its ability toweave a good story. The frontier didn’t keep careful records, and detailed specifics of bourbon’s early days—involving questions of why distillers started aging the spirit in charred barrels or how bourbon even got its name—were poorly documented. Kentucky, a colorful state with mythic origins, where history collides with mystery, would soon find creative ways to fill in the gaps. The whiskey industry would later call its marketing efforts “history,” but it’s this sort of history that the writer Julian Barnes would later describe as “that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
    Today, the Heaven Hill distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, makes the Elijah Craig line of bourbon. It is named after the man who for many decades was erroneously credited with making the “first” bourbon. Before Craig moved to Kentucky and began distilling, he was a controversial preacher in Virginia who was jailed in 1768 for sermons so fiery that they enraged the colony’s official Episcopalian clergy. Undaunted from his cell, the firebrand pastor continued to preach and draw large crowds, among them a young James Madison, who would later strive to protect religious freedom in the Constitution. Shortly after the American Revolution, Craig decided to start a new life in a freer place. Joining his brother Lewis, he led an exodus of six hundred people to what is present-day Kentucky. The group called itself “the Travelling Church.”
    The Kentucky they arrived in