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Who Made the First Bourbon?

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A number of pioneer distillers have been named the first to make bourbon but such claims remain without documentation – Jacob Spears, Wattie Boone, Elijah Pepper, Marsham Brashears, Jacob Froman, Jacob Myers, Irish brothers Joe and Sam Daviess are but a few. Evan Williams is often cited as the first to distill corn whiskey in Kentucky in 1783 in a small distillery on the river at the foot of Fifth Street in Louisville. The Reverend Elijah Craig, equally active at preaching and distilling in Kentucky’s Scott County around 1790, is often credited with being the first to mix and distill bourbon’s holy trinity: corn, rye and barley. In truth, assigning the accolade of being first to any one person is impossible simply because distilling was so common that whomever got to Kentucky first surely made the first batch of Kentucky whiskey shortly thereafter.

The Reverend Craig is also named for accidentally inventing charred barrels while burning away the odor left in fish barrels so he could fill them with whiskey. Another story tells of an unnamed cooper who heated his staves so he could bend them more easily and charred a batch in the process. Being a frugal pioneer, he made them into barrels anyway and delivered them to a distiller. Months later the distiller requested that all his barrels be charred. Still another suggests that the purifying benefits of charcoal were already known and used in Europe and China, and that the application was deliberate.

The truth remains tucked away in history somewhere and hardly matters, really, except that we inventive Americans like to have a name to go with every invention. Such development often is not linear, but rather a convergence of intentions and mistakes, misunderstanding and insight, all scrambled around until serendipity asserts itself and a good new thing is recognized and passed along.

The first distiller to put bourbon in a bottle, however, is well documented. It wasn’t until 1874 that distillers began insuring the quality of their product by bottling their whiskey rather than sending it to retailers in barrels. Distillers included hand blown glass decanters with the barrels of whiskey to be used for serving or selling the barrel’s contents. Filling the decanters with a cheaper product or diluting the barrel contents happened as often as not.

That year George Garvin Brown addressed the problem with the sale of his Old Forester Straight Bourbon Whisky in labeled and sealed bottles, a brand still popular, still bottled in Louisville by Brown-Forman Distillery, and still spelled without the e in whiskey. (Scots and Canadians drop the “e” while the Irish keep it, and American distillers use both spellings.) The idea immediately caught on. According to Oscar Getz in Whiskey, An American Pictorial History “the demand by distillers for bottles was so great that the distilling industry is credited with giving the greatest impetus to the growth of the glass bottle manufacturing industry during the twenty-five years after Mr. Brown first introduced his bottled Bourbon.”

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.