Celebrate
There is something about bourbon that’s captured our global
attention. In North America sales have soared and in the U.S.,
where bourbon originates, one of the nation’s most popular whiskey makers reversed a decision to water down its recipe in an
effort to meet worldwide demand.
Bourbon’s roots are tied to the migration of settlers west from the
original colonies, in the 18th and 19th centuries. They included
Scots-Irish descendants of the men who invented Scotch and
Irish whiskies, but they also included other English, Welsh, German, and French settlers.
There is no single person or family credited with inventing bourbon. Elijah Craig, a Baptist preacher and distiller, sometimes gets
attributed with the creation of the spirit, but that’s doubtful.
The Bourbon name comes from Bourbon County, a large
Kentucky district founded after the American Revolution. This
county was ripe for crops and corn especially. According to
Charles K. Cowdery, by the time Bourbon County was formed in
1785, there were dozens if not hundreds of small farmer-distillers making whiskey throughout the region. In those days, with
few roads and even fewer local markets for farm products, the
only practical way for farmers to sell their corn crop was by first
distilling it into whiskey. If they did not have a still, they found
a neighbor who did and traded some percentage of the output in
payment for the distilling services.
Along with Kentucky’s other main export product, hemp, surplus whiskey was loaded onto flatboats and shipped via the Ohio
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River to New Orleans for sale. The barrels were stamped with the
words Old Bourbon, what residents commonly called Bourbon
County, and the name stuck.
Certain political, social and cultural events helped shape the
development of this liquor. Prohibition, which took place from
1920 to 1933, made life difficult for American whiskey makers.
During World War II, bourbon distilleries were retrofitted to
make fuel alcohol and penicillin. Since penicillin is a by-product
of fermentation, bourbon distilleries were a natural choice to
make it in large quantities.
In the late 1800s, there were hundreds of distilleries in Kentucky.
Now, ten major whiskey makers produce hundreds of brands,
including many of the top-priced single-barrel, small-batch, and
cask-strength variations.
Lyndon B. Johnson gave bourbon his presidential stamp in 1964
when he signed an Act of Congress that designated bourbon as
“The Official Spirit of America.
Some say the rise in bourbon sales is due to the growth of small
batch and single barrel bourbon in the 1990s, while others say it
has to do with the resurgence in popularity o