Category Archives: The Culture of Booze

Roll Out the Barrel

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In Lynchburg, Tennessee, a steady procession of black box trucks bearing Jack Daniel’s name commences at six in the morning, ferrying barrels to and from warehouses located miles from the distillery. At Buffalo Trace the warehouses are clustered around the cistern room and connected by a system of parallel rails that use gravity to get the job done. Barrel rollers heave the barrels onto the track then push them in groups of fifteen to twenty toward one warehouse or another. If this batch is going to the third floor, then the barrels are loaded five at a time into a freight elevator. On the third floor they’re rolled from the elevator to the ricker, a four-foot-square platform mounted on a hydraulic lift. Each barrel is lifted to the man kneeling on the platform and the two in turn are lifted to the empty tier and the worker “sets” the barrel. All the barrels in a warehouse are resting “money side up” or with the bung hole topside to guard against leaking and to provide access to the barrel’s contents. Straight up noon is the goal but variance toward one o’clock or eleven o’clock is tolerated. Cheat sheets are sometimes written on the end of ricks. “Start bung, 9 o’clock.” So if the man on the platform sets the first barrel so that the bung hole points to 9 o’clock, then the barrel will roll the 26 feet to the end of the rick and stop money side up. The second barrel will be set at 10 o’clock, and so on.

Barrel rollers have noticeable biceps and are good at their job. One of the most popular events at the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival in Bardstown is the barrel rolling competition, the whiskey maker’s version of rodeo. Both male and female teams from each distillery compete against each other for time and skill at rolling the money side up.

“It takes us four hours to roll about 380 barrels to the warehouse and rick ‘em,” Obie Kemper told me. After working decades at Buffalo Trace he’s retired now but showed me around the distillery on a visit pre-retirement. “Sometimes we have women choose the warehouse,” he says, “and I tell you, they’re healthy women. We used to have crews of leak hunters but the barrels have got so much better we don’t have to do much of that anymore.”

One week Kemper retrieves samples from “every day of October whiskey” and the next week he’s on to November whiskey. Armed with a small rechargeable drill, a cedar plug, and an empty bottle he drills a quarter-inch hole, fills the bottle, and pushes in the plug within a minute or two, never spilling a drop.

In other decades retrieving a sample meant prying open the bung hole and inserting a bourbon thief to draw out a taste. A bourbon thief, also called a whiskey thief since it’s also used by Scottish and Irish distillers, is a hollow copper tube two to three feet long, about two inches in diameter. One end is capped and the other is open. The capped end is centered with a small hole that one covers with the thumb after the thief has been inserted into a barrel through the bung hole. The thief is withdrawn and when the hole is uncovered the whiskey runs out the open end, like a simple straw siphon. A thief was once a daily tool and now considered an antique.

Kemper is trim and muscular and has a reputation as a pretty good barrel dancer. For years he performed at the Bourbon Festival with a 500-pound partner on a small wooden stage about eight feet square. With the first few notes of Sweet Georgia Brown, Kemper set the rhythm then twirled and bounced the barrel like it was nothing. You can see him giving a casual twirl at Buffalo Trace at youtube.com/watch?v=WUzFlTKN22U.

The Violet Hour

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This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow again and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen magically along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn.
Bernard DeVoto, The Hour

The concept of Mr. DeVoto’s violet hour was not one of familiarity in my family, this hour spent sipping cocktails in the gloaming while quietly discussing the day just finished. But being the experienced drinkers we are, no telling how many unicorns have been sighted.

The Violet Hour has become a play, a novel, a band, a song, and a bar in Chicago, the kind with mixologists rather than bartenders. DeVoto, who published The Hour in 1948, kept it simple however. He was of the opinion that there are only two cocktails: a slug of whiskey and the martini. The first, and my personal favorite, was made by simply pouring whiskey over ice, and he goes into loving detail about the making of a martini. Six o’clock is the hour and the goal is purification, apparently from the woes and cares of the day. With the first sip of the first cocktail “illusion ebbs away; the water of life has swept us into its current…. Your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart.” Not to mention the unicorn.

On my bookshelves reside several other fine old volumes that include recipes from the early days of cocktail culture. The Gentleman’s Companion, Volume II, Around the World with Jigger, Beaker, and Glass, by Charles H. Baker, copyrighted in 1939, is one and includes indigenous recipes from Singapore to Saigon to Cuba and ports in between. His adventures included drinks with Hemingway in Key West and Havana. Baker set out to “…bring you famous liquid classics from odd spots of the world—classics which, through the test of time and social usage, have become institutions in the place of their birth.” A number of these classics are still around, like the daiquiri, mojito, Fish House Punch, and some, like the Sazarac, are making a comeback. (Volume I, by the way, is about food—Around the World with Knife, Fork and Spoon.)

“One comfortable fact gleaned from travel in far countries,“ wrote Mr. Baker, “was that regardless of race, creed or inner metabolisms, mankind has always created varying forms of stimulant liquid—each after his own kind. Prohibitions and nations and kings depart, but origin of such pleasant fluid finds constant source.” Indeed. Here’s to unicorns.

A Consideration of Drinkers

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Long before Prohibition, religious preferences and practices divided Americans into those who drink and those who don’t. Wherever the Bible belt buckles into the bourbon belt the two wrap themselves into a double helix that marks American culture with equal parts jollity and intolerance. The roots run deep, reaching into the seventeenth century when Scottish, Irish and German settlers came ashore in New England with their pot stills and brewing skills and ran headlong into Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock filled to the brim with ideals, none of which involved distilling. Since then the drinking and non-drinking cultures, the wets and drys, have traded dominance over decades and regions,burning themselves out with excessive zeal only to emerge again from the ashes, renewed and ready to begin another cycle.

As these cycles have evolved, so have Americans’ considerations about the appropriate conduct of drinkers. In the colonial era all the responsibility was with the drinker. Distilled and fermented liquors were a staple of daily living, considered invigorating and restorative. Wine and sugar or whiskey and mint were served with breakfast, beer and hard cider with lunch, and toddies for supper and evening. And there might be a fillip with morning and afternoon work breaks as well. In spite of what sounds like a bottomless cup, public drunkenness was considered a personal failure and drunkards were chastised from the pulpit, humiliated in the stocks, and made to wear red placards bearing the letter ‘D’.

The next 150 years started the pendulum in the other direction as the temperance movement spread in influence and rank, shifting the focus from the drinker to the drink itself. The mainly middle-class and female members of organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the World League Against Alcoholism, and the Anti-Saloon League, campaigned to save drinkers and, in their eyes, the American family itself by doing away with the drink. Members prayed, lectured, and legislated their way into the Eighteenth Amendment, which made the sale of liquor in the America against the law.

Supporters were confident that America’s taste for liquor would simply dry up when there was none to be had. Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919 and it became law at midnight on January 17, 1920. Very little money was designated for legal enforcement because proponents were convinced that without liquor to fuel it, crime would disappear.

BoozeNote2

Paradoxically, Prohibition brought with it far greater harm than any it had intended to prohibit. Some estimates indicate that the consumption of liquor increased from 140 million to 200 million gallons annually, all bootleg except for limited medicinal prescriptions and merchants leaned toward the criminal type, intent on selling any alcoholic concoction they could rustle up and eliminating all obstacles. Literally. In 1930, the Director of the Prohibition Enforcement Bureau estimated that the production of moonshine was more than 800 million gallons a year, most of which went into synthetic gins and semi-lethal cocktails.

Thousands of industry-related jobs were lost as the big distilleries, rectifying factories, bars and saloons were shut down and dismantled. Millions in tax money levied on alcohol products that had previously flowed into the government coffers ceased overnight.

Toward the end of Prohibition the Great Depression shifted public attention from temperance protests to bread lines. Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned on the platform that making liquor legal again would fill government coffers with badly needed tax dollars and put people back to work. Once in office, he pushed repeal and in December of 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment ended what some called the Noble Experiment and what Roosevelt called the “damnable affliction of Prohibition.”

Since then our view of drinking has slowly evolved into something different from that held by either the colonists or the prohibitionists. Distillers encourage patrons to drink responsibly and Mothers Against Drunk Driving raised public consciousness about the dangers of drinking and driving. The American public knows more about alcoholism and now seeks to help those for whom drinking is not a pleasure but a curse rather than forcing them to wear a “D” placard around their necks.

In a slim, acerbic but mostly humorous volume written in 1930 and titled The Future of Drinking, writer and historian Gilbert Seldes writes: “If a law or custom makes drinking a crime, the question becomes social, national, economic—anything but personal. So long as drinking itself remains innocent, its future depends on the drinker; it is as personal as taste or happiness or a headache.”

The drink itself continues to be the perfect taxable item—not necessary but highly desirable.