what proof was whiskey in the 1800s

But while all this technology was helping people reach out and touch someone, other events were starting to bode badly for the whiskey men of America. 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. Until then, glass bottles remained fragile, expensive, hand-blown vessels that were very dear in every way. Was it a specific person on a specific date? George A. Dickel died in 1894 from injuries sustained in an 1888 fall from a horse. The law allowed settlers to lay claim to 400 acres of land provided that they build a cabin and plant a patch of corn prior to 1778. Methyl alcohol has a direct affect on the optic nerve, and as little as one ounce has been known to cause death. J. When whiskey spends time in a barrel, it may seem to be sleeping, but in actuality it is growing up. Every straight bourbon produced today is a sour-mash whiskey, in which a portion of the residue from one batch of mash is used to start the next, much as sourdough starter is used to start more batches of dough. But 21 years had passed since Prohibition had taken such wonderful, big-bodied, rich, flavorful whiskeys away from the public. Although these rogues would grow more prevalent during the latter part of the century, by 1860 there was already at least one book on the market that gave instructions on how to make imitation liquors and wines. Two quotes from Lincoln often are used out of context and make him sound like a drinking man; both are taken from a speech he made to the Springfield Washington Temperance Society in 1842. Advertisements in magazines and newspapers of the time gave consumers the chance not only to buy whiskey at reduced rates, but also to receive special offers, such as an elegant gold-filled watch sent free to all who influence ten new customers to each order one gallon or more of our goods. If you had only four friends, you could receive the most beautiful set of Limoges China Dishes you ever saw for persuading each of them to order a gallon of spirits from the Security Distilling Company of Chicago. 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. However, the treasury was not to be deterred. Happily, the atmosphere was nowhere near as oppressive as it had been for our forefathers at the beginning of this century. My observations have convinced me that many fewer would drink were it not illegal.. Suddenly though, from out of the woodwork, Betty Ford, Ringo Starr, and Liz Taylor came clean, publicly said goodbye to John Barleycorn, and a new interest in sobriety was born. They wanted their own liquor. For George Garvin Brown, this book was more than his way of countering the drys movement, it was a personal mission; he was a deeply religious man whose association with his church had been threatened because of his involvement in the whiskey business, and he honestly deplored the drys using the word of the Lord to promote their quest. 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. The below information has been republished with permission of the authors, Gary Regan and Mardee Haidin Regan. But, no, this grand-scale scam featured a bunch of characters whose aim was to control production and prices in the whiskey industry. was the most consumed alcoholic liquor. His policies were bitterly opposed by the Republican majority in Congress, which unsuccessfully initiated impeachment proceedings in the Senate, and he was chided for supporting Sewards Folly, the purchase of Alaska (and its yet undiscovered gold) from Russia for $7,200,000. He claimed that the ringleaders had encouraged the spirit of opposition by misrepresentation of the laws calculated to render them odious, and had sought to deter those who might be so disposed from accepting offices through fear of public resentment and of injury to person and property, and to compel those who had accepted such offices by actual violence to surrender or forbear the execution of them. He went on to say that the distillers had been inflicting cruel and humiliating punishments upon private citizens for . They installed grain-handling machinery that would do the work of 30 men; their two gigantic stills (one of them erected on an entirely new principle about which we can find no details) contained 10 tons of copper and produced enough used grain to feed 5,000 hogs. Elijah Pepper (James E. Pepper and Old Crow Bourbons) settled in Old Pepper Springs, Kentucky, in 1776. Follow the American Whiskey Trail and the Distilled Spirits Council on Facebook! 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. Pennsylvania was solidly in the Union, but Kentucky, and Maryland were two of the four border states in which slavery existed and was legal, yet whose political leanings were mostly with the Union. And even east--to exotic ports such as New York City where, according to Luc Sante, author of Low Life, Lures and Snares of Old New York, for under a nickel, you could drink all the whiskey you could manage by sucking it through a rubber tube until you had to stop to take a breath. We might as well ask who was the first person to bake bread. The company was acquired by the Jim Beam Brands Company in the 1980s. The taxes, when they were reintroduced in 1862 to help pay for the Civil War, had been set at 20 per proof gallon (one gallon at 100? The Confederate troops, on the other hand, didnt get their fair share of whiskey, not only due to their lack of hard cash, but also because the South couldnt afford to use what valuable grain there was to make such frivolous stuff as whiskey; people were wanting of the basic necessities just to exist. To cap off the Lincoln question, two more instances give insight into his views: In 1854, after Lincoln refused to partake of whiskey on a particular occasion, Stephen Douglas asked him if he were a member of a temperance society. W. L. Weller (W. L. Weller Bourbon), whose grandfather, Daniel, had owned a distillery in 1800, formed a wholesale whiskey business in 1849, using the slogan "Honest whiskey at an honest price.". Although many pre-Prohibition brands of whiskey made their way back to the shelves after Repeal, they werent always identical to their older namesakes. Undeterred, they turned their talents to fermenting other fruits--and even vegetables. But in a strange, labyrinthine manner, this new batch of concerned citizens not only did what they set out to do (for which they deserve much accolade), but they also paved the path for the return to the bold, rich flavors of straight American whiskey. One immediate solution to the American distillers problem was to sell blended, rather than straight whiskey, thereby stretching the good stuff with neutral spirits and flavorings. The straight wooden staves that are used to form a barrel must be heated in order to bend the wood into the familiar barrel shape. It was cheaper than beer, wine, coffee, tea, and milk in the 1820s than to buy whiskey. proof (50 percent alcohol.) In that year, after further reducing the taxes but still not getting cooperation from the Pennsylvanians, George Washington, for the first time in the history of the United States, rallied federal troops to quell the uprising. Later that year she actually smashed up an entire saloon in Kiowa, Oklahoma. Residents of Lincoln County, Tennessee, are becoming more and more upset with the Jack Daniel's distillery due to ethanol emissions in the air, which they believe to be causing "whiskey fungus," or black fungus. 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 100? Back in the mid-1800s, the Crown began taxing barley a strategic way to indirectly tax the single-malt whiskey (whiskey that . The James B. Beam Distilling Company was formed in 1933; it was purchased by what is now the American Brands Company in the 1960s and is currently called the Jim Beam Brands Company. Suddenly, liquor store shelves were filled with new bottlings of old brands of fine American whiskey, old-looking bottlings of new brands, and a variety of new terms were being bandied about. Heres a list of prominent whiskey men whose products hit the shelves between 1800 and 1860 (The current-day whiskeys with which these families became connected are noted. After watching people in Saghetti Westerns and Civil War Documentaries shoot whiskey like it was nothing, I was wondering about the strength of alcohol in the 19th century. According to Gerald Carson in his book, The Social History of Bourbon, one such tax collector, who had employed the services of a dozen soldiers to guard his house, had it burned to the ground nonetheless. Craigs family didnt keep up the tradition of whiskey-making that Elijah started, although a whiskey has since been named for the man. Upon his release from jail McDonald accused Grant of taking part in the Ring in his book, Secrets of the Great Whiskey Ring (1880). So it is with American whiskey--the original concept may have been imported from far away lands, but some 300 years later, American whiskeyis a product unto itself. Members lectured and wrote to prominent people on both sides of the issue trying to bank the fire a little. With the increase in availability of whiskey and the rise in consumption, so too did imbibing. Most of them didnt linger long to mingle with the settlers on the coast--they had left Ulster to go west and go west they did. Lest you suffer under the misapprehension that Prohibition never reared its ugly head until 1920, you should know that various states introduced the noble experiment, in statewide or local-option form, way before then. In fact, according to Mike Veach, archivist at United Distillers, it is more probable that Elijah Craigs name was used to fight the prohibition movement in the late nineteenth century simply because he was a Baptist minister. During the Whiskey Rebellion, some Pennsylvania farmers fled to Kentucky, adding to the number of distillers in the new state. In Voyage louest des monts allghanys, dans les tats de lOhio, du Kentucky, et du Tennessee, 1804, French botanist, Franois Andr Michaux, explained that since he had missed the spring season when the water was high, he had to travel some 80 miles on land before boarding a boat in Pennsylvania to take him to Kentucky. Typically available by the end of August until it sells out. In Europe, the first temperance organization had come into being in Ireland in 1818 (later known as the Ulster Temperance Society), and similar organizations sprung up in Scotland, England, Norway, and Sweden in the first half of the nineteenth century. Fact was, that by passing on the taxes to the general public, whiskey had become too expensive for the common man. Most settlers from Maryland and Pennsylvania started their trip to Kentucky in Pittsburgh and floated down the Ohio River on flatboats into Kentucky. Of course, settlers in the islands made their own rum, and that, too, was exported to the American Colonies, ready for immediate consumption. 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, 1928: Prohibition has created a new, universally respected, a well-beloved, and a very profitable occupation, that of the bootlegger who takes care of the importation of the forbidden liquor. Fortunately, however, the government rethought their actions when they realized that much of the whiskey being consumed at the time wasnt being taxed at all. Over 65 million gallons of the hard stuff was consumed by Americans. The Stitzel distillery joined forces with the Weller company to form Stitzel-Weller. 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. One report states that General James Wilkinson built a distillery at Harrodsburg, the earliest permanent settlement in Kentucky (1774), but that report is probably untrue since there is no record of Wilkinson being in the area until about 10 years later. It was a grand system that had actually been around since about 1870 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. One embarrassment was Jay Gould and James Fisks 1869 attempt to corner the gold market. In 1867 the Chapeze brothers founded their first commercial distillery and gave birth to a whiskey that would become known as Old Charter. This bourbon was rested for 7 long years in hand-selected white oak barrels. Those choosing to give up all forms of booze had their names marked in the register with a T for Total--they were the worlds first tee-totalers. Jefferson once asked the question, Who would drink whiskey if wine were cheap enough? Well, those who lived in the Bluegrass State might have argued the point. Stitzel, Glenmore, Schenley, Brown-Forman, National Distillers, and Frankfort Distilleries--and these companies were allowed to store whiskey and sell it to licensed druggists, who in turn, could mete it out to customers who had a doctors prescription. 60During the 1800's, many ventured west in search of a new frontier. The idea, in general terms, was to make each industry share the available work among as many people as possible. A Few Other Whiskey Men Who Appeared in Kentucky Before 1800, All of these families helped bring the tradition of American whiskey-making into the nineteenth and right through to the twentieth century. It reads that there were only 1800 bottles produced in this one-time release. They had fought the law. 19 gallons were needed to produce one 16-inch naval shell. Meanwhile, during the late 1700s, the Scots-Irish, a huge group of immigrants from Northern Ireland began arriving in the United States. Within four years he was selling whiskey. Two bottles were sold in Glasgow in 2010, one to a US-based collector and one to a UK-based investor. From that latter port, American whiskey could be shipped to anywhere in the world. Courtesy image. All of the ingredients needed for whiskey-making were available to these early Kentuckians, but in a quest for the origins of a specific style of whiskey, its necessary to work backwards. Colonel Albert B. Blanton became plant manager at the George T. Stagg distillery in 1912. 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. Though many types of grapes were native to America, the wines they produced were unlike the ones the Europeans were used to, and the colonists tried to cultivate European strains. After the Civil War, many of the smaller distillers just didnt have the capital to comply with the law since the tax was due upon production--as soon as the whiskey ran out of the still, the tax was due. Bourbon vs. Tennessee Whiskey Fast Facts. 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. Multiply the amount Americans drink today by three and you'll have an idea of what much of the nineteenth century was like." What exactly was going on in the 1800s? Consequently, some at least were repeatedly looking for new land to farm. Dating back to 1608, this brand has stood the test of time and not much has changed since the beginning. Certainly that was not enough time in the wood to soothe its soul completely, but undoubtedly, it was long enough for the whiskey to have gained some color and mellowed sufficiently for quaffers to notice the difference. Heres what was happening to the brand names at this time: Of Hymns To Be Sung and Axes To Be Wielded. Though the first glass factory in American was built in Jamestown in 1608, it would be 1903, when Michael J. Owens invented the first automatic bottle-making machine, before selling whiskey in bottles was financially viable for most distillers. Has stood the test of time and not much has changed since the beginning of this century whiskey. 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