The Evolution of Frontier Distilling

 

"Moonshine Still 1" by Daniel Eskridge

When the livelihood of most people is subsistence farming, as it is on the frontier, communities are important, but households must be self-sufficient in food production and other basic needs. Survival is often precarious. The better you are at using what you have, and what you can find around you, the better your chances.

Because the new continent was so vast, America had a frontier from the beginning of the 17th century until the end of the 19th, nearly 300 years.

On that frontier, a typical homestead grew one or more cereals, an assortment of fruits and vegetables, and kept animals for work, transportation, food, textiles, hunting, and companionship. They foraged and hunted too. 

One of the first specialists to emerge in a community of grain farmers is a miller and since frontier millers usually are paid in grain, many became distillers. A farmer might take grain to a miller-distiller and instead of taking it back as milled grain, take it back as whiskey (less the miller-distiller’s cut). Whether by farmers themselves or by miller-distillers, most of a frontier community’s surplus grain was distilled into whiskey eventually.

Another early specialist in a typical frontier community was the metalsmith. Blacksmiths made, sold, and repaired iron tools and implements. Coppersmiths made, sold, and repaired copper items, mostly cookware, including stills. An alembic still is, after all, just a pot with a tight-fitting lid, like a pressure cooker. A trickier piece of equipment is the worm, a coiled copper pipe which, submerged in cold water, is used to condense alcohol vapor back into liquid.

Blacksmiths were usually rooted in the community, but coppersmiths often became itinerant peddlers.

A still that held ten or fifteen gallons of mash was big enough for a household supply and maybe a little to trade, depending on how big your family was and how much they drank. A bigger still was usually on the wish list. 

Although copper has always been preferred, stills can be made from other materials. J. W. Dant allegedly made a still from a hollow log. If true, his log still was likely an expedient, quickly replaced with something more suitable. 

How does that even work? The log is hollowed out, as you would a canoe. That’s your fermenter and your still. When fermentation finishes, you place it over hot coals, hot enough to vaporize the alcohol but not so hot as to burn a hole through the log. Then you cover the opening with a heavy wool blanket. When the blanket becomes saturated you wring it out into another vessel. If your still holds out, you can try raising the proof with a second distillation. 

If the whole thing sounds crazy that’s because it is. Don’t try this at home.

A practical still can be made from wood and many were. Commercial-scale wooden stills were common before Prohibition but didn’t come back after repeal.

In time, some farmer-distillers and miller-distillers evolved into full-time distillers. The Beam family claims Jacob Beam made the transition in 1795. The presence of two or more stills in a household’s inventory usually indicates a commercial-scale operation.

There are no good records as to who did any of these things first, just legends and oral histories passed mostly through families. 

We know the first people into a place, as soon as they got their hands on something fermentable, they fermented it. European colonists brought beer and wine with them on their voyages to the New World and tried to make beer from the indigenous grain they called ‘Indian corn’ almost immediately. 

Corn beer didn’t catch on, so they imported barley then grew it.

Once they had fermented more of something than they could drink right away, they distilled it. 

Individuals with the necessary skills were not rare. Almost everyone raised on a farm, which was almost everyone, knew the basics of fermentation and distillation. Some city folks did too. Before refrigeration, fermentation was a kitchen skill for preserving fruits and vegetables, and for making cheese, as well as for alcoholic beverage production. 

Some people, of course, were better at it than others. 

A note about the image: Although its title is "Moonshine Still," the setup depicted is a fair representation of a distillery on the American frontier in just about any period, though probably nicer than most.

The Beginning of Bourbon

 

John Barleycorn headed for the still.

Whiskey plays an outsize role in American history, especially during the late colonial period. Not that alcohol wasn’t part of American life from the beginning. Beer, cider, and wine were as ubiquitous as bread in the diets of the 17th century Europeans who colonized North America. Alcohol production, including distilling, was a common pioneer activity as the American frontier advanced westward through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

Among settlers on those frontiers, whiskey making was an adjunct to grain farming. Almost everyone who grew grain distilled some of it into whiskey, one way or another, and almost everyone grew grain. 

Wherever fruit was cultivated it was fermented into cider or wine and distilled into applejack or brandy. Fruit that was damaged or otherwise no good for the table was ideal for the still.

Honey was another source of fermentable sugar from which a distillate might be made. In the South, there was sorghum. Further south, sugarcane. Anything that could be used to make alcohol was used to make alcohol.

Alcohol-making was ubiquitous. If you never were taught that, you are entitled to wonder why. 

Neither makers nor consumers were too particular about types or styles. Liquor was liquor. Alcohol and its effects, that was the point. Alcohol that tasted good was a bonus but neither expected nor required. It all tasted about the same, bad by modern standards. Nostalgia for spirits of olden times is generally misplaced. Distillate rarely spent time in wood, and was often below proof, that is, less than 50 percent alcohol. Liquor today is better in every way.

In the frontier economy, distilled spirits were not just another consumable. They were more valuable and easier to store, package, transport, and sell than either the agricultural products from which they were made or the intermediate, fermented products (e.g., beer, cider, and wine). 

Hard cider is great, but whiskey never unintentionally turns into vinegar.

Where currency is scarce, as it typically was in pioneer communities, distilled spirits were a handy substitute. Everyone had a general idea how much a barrel of whiskey or applejack was worth. As a liquid it was easy to divide, and liquor is always in demand. Businesspeople today talk about ‘liquidity’ and ‘liquid assets.’ On the frontier, liquidity was literal. Whiskey was money.

You probably weren’t taught any of this in school. Alcohol and other intoxicants are among the subjects people prefer to gloss over, like war, slavery, and genocide. But just like war, slavery, and genocide, alcohol played a significant role in the story of European colonization of the Americas and the eventual formation and history of the United States. Leave them out and you don’t know what happened, not really. 

If portrayed at all, frontier distillers usually are pictured as drunks, clothed in rags, clutching a jug labeled “XXXX,” with two more X’s where their eyes should be, the stereotypical comic hillbilly wasted on mountain dew.

It wasn’t like that at all.

This Meme Is Both Wrong and Right (Sort of)

 

The meme is wrong but raises an interesting point.

Earlier this week, I posted the following on Facebook.

"There is a meme making the rounds that says Canada is the largest purchaser of Kentucky bourbon. That is false. The largest purchaser of Kentucky Bourbon is the United States, but among export markets Canada is only fifth, after the EU, Australia, Japan, and the UK. Export is about 20% of total sales and Canada is about 5% of the export market. So, yes, Canada is an important market and tariffs are bad, but those are the actual facts."

The meme in question is reproduced above. It's still wrong and my statement above is still correct, but in conversations about the meme and my response, I learned something interesting. Canada is, in fact, Kentucky largest export market for distilled spirits products of all types. That means whiskey but also other things, such as vodka, gin, liqueurs, brandy and tequila.

Wait a minute! Brandy and tequila? I know Kentucky has a small grape crop and a few wineries, some of which also make brandy, but that's very small volume. Tequila! That has to be made in Mexico, so that can't be right.

Some Tequila can be shipped in bulk, be bottled in the U.S., and still be called Tequila. If that happens in Kentucky, as it does at several producers, then it counts as a Kentucky export. Brandy is an even bigger part of the equation. Of the five best selling California brandies, three are distilled in California from California grapes, but the distillate is shipped to Kentucky where it is aged in used bourbon barrels, then bottled. That, too, becomes a Kentucky product and a Kentucky export. 

The source for this statistic is the Kentucky Distillers Association (KDA), specifically KDA's annual report on "The Economic and Fiscal Impacts of the Distilling Industry in Kentucky," Prepared for the Kentucky Distillers’ Association by Paul Coomes, Ph.D., Economic Consultant and Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Louisville, and Barry Kornstein, Economic Consultant. This is from the 2023 report. The 2024 report hasn't been released yet. 

The page you want is #68 in the printed version, #70 in the PDF. Although it mentions "liqueurs and cordials," it's also those other things. If it gets bottled in and distributed from Kentucky, it's a Kentucky product. If it's then shipped out of the country, it's a Kentucky export.

Heaven Hill and Sazerac, especially, produce full lines of value brands in virtually every distilled spirits category. If you're the LCBO (the liquor distributor for the Canadian province of Ontario) and you're buying a few pallets of bourbon and rye, why not throw in a few pallets of triple sec, coffee liqueur, or peppermint schnapps? Canada produces some of that stuff too, but Kentucky's big producers make so much of it they can compete favorably with Canada's smaller producers. 

If you look at the graph, you will see that only in exports to Canada are the two segments, whiskey and "all other spirits" roughly equal. And that makes Canada #1 for spirits exports from Kentucky. 

Although some Canadian whisky is bottled in Kentucky, I believe that is only for the U.S. market. It's not exported back to Canada. Likewise, U.S.-bottled Tequila isn't exported back to Mexico, but some of it goes to Canada. All that will, of course, change if there's a trade war. 

So, if the meme had said "the largest export market for Kentucky distilled spirits is Canada," it would be correct.

Kentucky is a small state, and because it produces so much whiskey, distilled spirits are one of its largest industries. Except for its Democratic governor and the representative from Louisville, all of its major elected officials are Republican. The legislature has a veto-proof Republican majority and Trump won Kentucky by 26 points.

Fred Rosen, Creator of the Modern Booze Superstore, Has Died

 

Fred Rosen, former CEO of Sam's Wine and Spirits, the first booze superstore.

Forty years ago, when I was contemplating a move to Chicago, a friend from my Louisville days, a Chicago native, advised me on many matters. He helped me get a lawyer, told me where to buy my suits, and because his father-in-law had been a liquor distributor in Chicago, he told me about Sam's.

Sam's was named for its founder, Sam Rosen, who started it in 1942, but it was his son, Fred, who put Sam's Wine and Spirits on the map, building it into a local institution, described by some in the industry as the first liquor superstore. Fred Rosen died on February 4 at age 88.

The original Sam's was on Halsted Street at North Avenue, then a much more marginal neighborhood than it is now. The legend, according to my Louisville friend, was that there was no glass in the windows, but the store was never robbed because it was guarded by ferocious German shepherds.

As Ashok Selvam wrote in his appreciation of Rosen on Eater, "He transformed a cut-rate liquor store into a destination where out-of-towners would visit and fill up their trunks with booze they couldn’t find anywhere else."

Fred Rosen moved the store from Halsted into a much larger space in a new shopping center further west on North Avenue, then into an even larger space in the same complex. A few branch locations followed. Binny's bought Sam's in 2009. The Marcey Street Binny's is the former Sam's.

Chicago has a long tradition of colorful booze merchants, beginning in the 19th century with Gardner Chapin and Jim Gore, whose Chapin & Gore store and saloon dominated the Chicago market until Prohibition.

In the post-WWII era, three names stand out. In addition to the Rosens at Sam's, you had Harold Binstein, founder of Binny's, and "Max the Hat" Zimmerman.

Binstein opened his first Gold Standard Liquors store in 1948, one block south of Wrigley Field. Binny's house brand is Clark & Sheffield, a reference to that first store's location. Harold died in 1995. His son, Michael, runs Binny's today. 

"Max the Hat" Zimmerman had the biggest store in downtown. It's now the Binny's on Grand Avenue. Zimmerman opened his first liquor store in Chicago in 1933, as soon as he could after Prohibition’s demise. It was in the old Cambridge Building on North Wells. He mostly sold whiskey and other spirits at first. The only wine in the store was in pints. “Sweet wines were big, stuff like Mogen David,” Zimmerman told a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1992. Known as “Max the Hat” for his trademark Stetson, Zimmerman died in 1998. 

Fred Rosen's youngest son, Brian, is the founder of InvestBev, the nation’s largest beverage alcohol private equity fund.

Hitchcock, "Blackmail," and Sliced Bread

The crucial scene in "Blackmail" (1929).

There is a new documentary out called "Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail." It is currently available on TCM and MAX. It shows how director Alfred Hitchcock in "Blackmail" (1929) and other early films was developing his signature style.

"Blackmail" was Hitchcock's first 'talkie' and, in fact, the first film by a British studio that was entirely synchronized. There had been earlier films with lip sync in maybe one scene. So-called 'talking pictures' were so new and unproven that "Blackmail" was also released in a silent version, with title cards in place of spoken dialogue.

That's not what this post is about.

After watching the documentary, I wanted to see "Blackmail" itself. It's interesting for many reasons. The murder for which the heroine is blackmailed is actually self-defense, to stop an attempted rape. With nearly Victorian modesty, the attempt takes place entirely behind a curtain. Because there is sound, we can hear the struggle. Suddenly, we see a hand reach out through the curtain in desperation. On the bedside table is a loaf of bread and a bread knife--the murder weapon!

This is where I got distracted. Was it realistic, in 1929, to show an unsliced loaf of bread, needing to be sliced at table with a knife? Or was this a cinematic contrivance, a way to introduce the murder weapon? Was sliced bread still that uncommon in 1929?

It turns out, the answer is yes. One-hundred years ago, if you wanted a sandwich, you took a loaf of bread from the bread box, got your bread knife, and cut off slices of the desired thickness. This was not something you did once in a while, with a home-baked loaf or something special from the bakery. This was every day. Bread did not come sliced. If you wanted a slice of bread, you sliced it yourself.

(Whether or not a bread knife would be sufficiently stabby is a different question.)

The first practical bread slicing machine was invented in 1928, so right about when "Blackmail" was being made. It caught on so quickly that by 1933, 80 percent of all bread was sold already sliced. It was a big deal and led to a saying you still hear today, when some new invention is dubbed "the best thing since sliced bread."

It never occurred to me, when I heard that expression from my grandparents, that they remembered when bread was not sliced.

The transformative power of technology is nothing new and does not need to involve computer chips. Some innovations can change our lives so quickly we forget how it used to be in a generation or two. I'm old, so I remember when television was brand new.

To veer back into my usual lane, another technological change that occurred during that same period was to bottle-making. Bottles have been around since antiquity but until the early 20th century, bottles were all individually hand blown and expensive. Products like whiskey were not routinely sold in bottles. If they were, the bottles were likely filled by a dealer, not by the distillery. Brown-Forman began to sell Old Forester Bourbon in bottles in 1870. The Bottled-in-Bond Act was passed in 1897, but bottling didn't become common until Michael Owens invented the first commercially successful, fully automatic bottle-making machine in 1903, in Toledo, Ohio. When alcohol was re-legalized in 1933, bottling was not only common, it was mandatory. By law, distilled spirits like whiskey could only be sold in sealed bottles.

I also remember 78 RPM records. They were already old-fashioned when I was a kid, but my mom had quite a few. One of our favorites was the original cast recording of the "Peter Pan" musical, which we also enjoyed on TV. Captain Hook, in those broadcasts, was played by the actor Cyril Richard, who was the rapist in "Blackmail."

After 20 Years, Old Commonwealth Bourbon Is Back (Sort of)

 

The original.

In 2019, three entrepreneurs purchased a historic distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky and several brands associated with it. One of those brands, Old Commonwealth, was the distillery's name when Julian Van Winkle owned it and that’s the name the new owners are using. Last year, they relaunched the Old Commonwealth brand.

The distillery had other names and owners in its long history. Before Van Winkle it was most associated with the Ripy family. The most famous brand made there was Ezra Brooks Bourbon, which the Ripys never owned. Neither do the new owners of Old Commonwealth. Ezra Brooks is owned by MGP and made at their Lux Row Distillery in Bardstown.

When Van Winkle owned Old Commonwealth, the stills and related equipment were long gone. He used the offices, bottling hall and warehouses. Van Winkle bought bulk whiskey from Stitzel-Weller, his family’s former distillery, and other sources, which he bottled as Old Rip Van Winkle and other brands. Some of those were store brands, created for a customer. His biggest customer in those days was The Berghoff, a German restaurant and bar in downtown Chicago, for whom he bottled Berghoff Bourbon.

The Old Commonwealth brand was created for Joe Congiusti (Joe C), the legendary whiskey buyer at Sam’s Wine and Spirits, a huge, single-location retailer in Chicago. Joe C wasn’t just a buyer, he was a whiskey enthusiast who participated in the burgeoning whiskey community. When Congiusti moved to Binny’s in 2002, Old Commonwealth Bourbon became available there too. 

Also in 2002, Julian Van Winkle closed the Old Commonwealth Distillery and moved his operation to the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort. 

Binny’s bought Sam’s in 2009, but both Joe and Old Commonwealth were long gone by then. Joe died in 2004. Old Commonwealth Bourbon had died a few months earlier.

Old Commonwealth was a 10-year-old bourbon. It was introduced in 1999 or thereabouts and sold for about $20 a bottle. (For context, a bottle of Jim Beam cost less than $10 then.) I knew from Julian Van Winkle that it was wheated bourbon from Stitzel-Weller, the same batch he was bottling as 10-year-old Old Rip Van Winkle, which was selling for about $30 in those days. I became a regular purchaser of the Old Commonwealth version. Joe C worked out of the Binny’s Lincoln Park location, so I started to buy my Old Commonwealth there, because that store was more convenient for me than Sam’s, and I liked chatting with Joe. 

One day in fall of 2003, I was at Binny’s, talking to Joe, and picked up a bottle of Old Commonwealth to buy. “You know, Julian has discontinued that,” said Joe. “Those are the last two cases.” I bought one of them on the spot.

Later that day I went to the bar Delilah’s to interview its owner, Mike Miller, whose own Delilah’s 10-year-old bourbon was some of that same stock. I mentioned seeing Joe and told him about the Old Commonwealth situation. I later learned that as soon as we finished talking, Miller drove over to Binny’s and bought the remaining case. There may have been a bottle or two left on the shelf, but that was effectively the end of Old Commonwealth Bourbon.

The new Old Commonwealth is also a 10-year-old bourbon, but not a wheater. The new label is very similar to the original, except the new neck label says “Cask Strength” instead of “Small Batch.” The shape is a little different and the subtle 'VW' logo is gone, naturally. The new version is 131.83° proof whereas the original was 107°. Another difference is the price, $20 in 2004, $200 in 2024. 

True Crime Among the Bourbon Barons

 

After Prohibition, Old Crow advertising emphasized the brand's history.

The tale of the 1895 Brown-Gordon murders may seem like a stretch for a publication devoted to American whiskey, but the involvement of a principal in America’s most successful whiskey company makes bourbon part of the story. 

W. A. Gaines & Co., makers of Old Crow Bourbon, revolutionized how whiskey was made and distributed in the United States. They took corn whiskey, a product disdained by most sophisticated drinkers, rebranded it as bourbon, and crushed the old-style rye and malt whiskeys from back east. 

The scandalous 1895 murder of a governor’s son and bourbon baron’s sister-in-law shocked the state and scandalized the nation. It was so consequential it inspired “Careless Love,” a popular song still performed 130 years later. 

We started this story in the previous issue of The Bourbon Country Reader and conclude it in the new one, out now. (Volume 22, Number 6)

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