Telling Whiskey History in Tell City (Part 3)

 

Krogman made many different products post-Prohibition.

So well regarded was the Krogman name that, after Prohibition, a group of Tell City businesspeople decided to revive the distillery and its brands. Tell City had affection for the Krogman and Voelke families and felt Will and Claudina had been unfortunate victims of an even more unfortunate failed public policy. Moreover, the investors believed the Krogman name could still sell whiskey. They formed a corporation and issued stock. Ed Schultz was president; William Gerber was vice president. His son, Will Junior, was secretary and plant manager. The Krogman family was not involved. 

The distiller was John Striewe, Krogman’s pre-Prohibition distiller. The distillery was projected to consume 500 bushels of grain daily. They announced willingness to buy 2,000 bushels of apples per day in the fall for brandy. 

Because of the robbery and fire, there wasn’t much left of the plant in 1933. It took $130,000 to rebuild and get distilling going in December of 1934. Another $40,000 was spent the next year to build a new 15,000-barrel maturation warehouse. They produced 55 barrels of whiskey a day and used 520 bushels of grain to do it. The brandy business never quite materialized. In the end they put in about $300,000 (about $6.5M today).

In fall of 1935, Krogman released its first bourbons. Obviously, they were very young. Lincoln Trail was 8 months old and 100° proof, Brushy Fork was 8 months old and 93° proof, Duchess was 6 months old and 90° proof, Deer Creek was 4 months old and 93° proof, and Millstone was 4 months old and 90° proof. Those last two, Deer Creek and Millstone, were aged in half barrels (24 gallons) in heated warehouses, an experiment in rapid aging. 

Selling whiskey at such young ages was not unusual in the immediate aftermath of Prohibition. People wanted something to drink, were happy to get it, and the distillers needed income. The nuances of aging and proof in the portfolio suggest a customer base that understood the significance of each. These were inexpensive whiskeys aimed at savvy but cost-conscious consumers. They could have drunk vodka or gin, but they preferred whiskey. Properly made four-month-old bourbon was still better than vodka, in the estimation of Kroman's customers.

Krogman distilled on-and-off for about three years. After that, selling the whiskey in its warehouses as it matured kept the company nominally in business until 1941, when it was sold to a national company. The Tell City News tried to put the best possible face on the local ownership’s failure. The sale, “will probably prove to be beneficial for the city of Tell City,” it opined. “The plant has not been running for several years and very little labor has been employed.” They reported that the new owners promised to operate the plant and “employ local labor as much as possible.” 

The journal could not, however, gloss over the fact that, “from the standpoint of investors who put up money to build and start this plant in Tell City, this move will not be so good for they will lose much of their original investment but from the standpoint of the city generally, there is little doubt but that it will be a benefit.”

Mostly, the local newspaper was just happy “our little plant” would be “in the hands of a reputable concern.”

Not so fast.

Joseph Park and John Mason Tilford opened a small grocery store in New York City in 1840. They built it into a large, successful chain of stores that sold wine and liquor as well as groceries and tobacco products, especially cigars. Their sons succeeded them in the business. 

The loss of alcohol sales hit the company hard when Prohibition took effect; that left cigars as their big moneymaker. 

In 1923, Park and Tilford was sold to David A. Schulte, a competitor in the cigar trade. Cigars were still a huge business despite growing competition from cigarettes. Schulte considered Park and Tilford “the best retail merchandising name in the country.” He merged the two companies under the Park and Tilford brand and kept most of the existing organization in place. He even married the widow of the company’s treasurer. 

Park and Tilford became Schulte’s vehicle for acquisitions in medicinal alcohol and fragrances, two Prohibition loopholes he exploited. 

In 1925, Schulte bought Pennsylvania’s Old Overholt Distillery. The seller was U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who had been partners in the distillery with Henry Clay Frick. Best known as a steel industrialist, Frick happened to be Abraham Overholt’s grandson. Mellon was Frick’s banker and had owned the distillery outright since Frick’s death. He gave it one of the six medicinal whiskey licenses, but since the Treasury was responsible for Prohibition enforcement, it didn’t look good for the Secretary to own a distillery, even a legal one, so he sold it to Schulte.

Well, it looks like this is at least a four-parter. More to come.

Telling Whiskey History in Tell City (Part 2)

 

Krogman's jugs are a popular collectible in the Tell City area.

Will Krogman married Claudina Voelke, whose father owned Tell City's largest brewery. When Claudina’s parents died, the Krogmans moved into her family’s mansion on the grounds of the old brewery. Their elder daughter, Willie, was 21 but still living with them. Their Etta was just 13.

They tore down the brewery, landscaped the grounds, and renovated the house. It was heralded as “one of Tell City’s handsomest residences, on a site of commanding elevation.” 

In 1911, the year Will and Claudina moved into their renovated mansion, a Tell City man was feuding with his neighbors about some chickens. He shot and killed one of the neighbors, was convicted of murder, and sentenced to life in prison. His victim’s family claimed the murderer was drunk on Krogman’s Whiskey when he committed the crime. They sued Krogman for $10,000. 

After several tries, in an atmosphere of growing hostility to alcohol, the family found a jury willing to award them $7,000 (about $140,000 today). That award was set aside by a subsequent trial, where Krogman prevailed. The victim's family appealed that decision to the Appellate Court of Indiana, which also ruled in Krogman’s favor. The ordeal dragged on for seven years.

Then things got worse for Will Krogman. On the heels of the lawsuit’s resolution, Indiana Prohibition shuttered his distillery, two years before national Prohibition. Most of Will’s capital was tied up in his plant and the whiskey aging in his warehouses. Was all that now worthless? 

‘Medicinal sales’ were somewhere in the future, but the feds were dunning him for unpaid excise tax now. How did they expect him to pay his taxes if he couldn’t sell his whiskey? Will was desperate. He decided his whiskey should be liberated. He knew he could sell it if he could just get his hands on it. 

To that end, he got together four pals and planned a heist. The warehouse had been hit several times already, mostly by kids stealing a gallon or two. Will and his crew worked on their plan for a year. They would make it look like the previous, legitimate robberies, then torch the warehouse to conceal the crime. 

They got away with about 800 gallons. They had buyers ready and expected to net about $20,000. Everyone would get their cut and go their separate ways. That was the plan.

But the fire didn’t take. The Fire Chief could tell it was an inside job. The first people they caught took deals and ratted out everyone else. Eighteen individuals were arrested, including Will Krogman. They were tried together in federal court in Indianapolis. 

Coincidentally, 800 gallons worked out to 18 barrels of whiskey, one for each defendant. All pled guilty. Their sentences ranged from a few months in county to a year or more in the federal lock-up in Atlanta, where Al Capone, George Remus, and other Prohibition criminals did time. Will Krogman got two years in Atlanta and was fined $2,000.

At trial, one of Will’s confederates, a fellow from Chicago, testified that Will offered to ‘sell’ him whiskey for $12 a gallon, all he had to do was go get it. That was the caper. Will diagramed everything and assured the Chicagoan he could take the whiskey out of the warehouse and the Treasury agents guarding the place would not interfere. (They didn’t.) 

As Will directed, whiskey was siphoned from barrels into jugs, which were passed through a drainpipe to other “whiskey gangsters” outside, who loaded the jugs into cars, then onto boats on the Ohio River, to be transported to Evansville, the bigger town fifty miles downstream. About 15 gallons stayed behind in Tell City, hidden at a baseball park.

In addition to Will Krogman, several other upstanding citizens were convicted, including the manager of an Evansville hotel, the secretary of that city’s parks board, and two former sheriffs. 

After the trial, Will tried to run. He left Tell City but was caught in Louisville and hauled back to Indianapolis for sentencing.

When Will was released from Atlanta he was 61. He and Claudina traveled a bit, settling for a time near Brownsville, Texas, where they grew citrus fruit. Krogman’s conviction didn’t hurt his social standing in Tell City. Local journals continued to report the couple’s coming and going in the society columns. They returned to Tell City for good in 1930. He died two years later, while visiting Etta in Illinois. Claudina died in 1937, while visiting Willie in Ohio.

Although the Krogmans themselves were gone, Krogram's Distillery continued or, rather, returned after Prohibition. Next time, in Part 3, the revival and ultimate demise of Krogman's.

Telling Whiskey History in Tell City (Part 1)

The Krogman Distillery in Tell City, Indiana, post-Prohibition.

Matt Colglazier is Chief Merchandising Officer at Big Red Liquors, a chain of retail liquor stores with 103 locations throughout Indiana. 

If you know the name "Krogman's," it's probably from a side project Colglazier did in 2019, called Krogman's Old Master. Although the website is still there, the whiskey is long gone. Here's the story.

"Born in Tell City, Indiana, this pre-prohibition brand is back and better than ever! Two 90 proof expressions of bourbon and rye, along with the most unique single barrel offering in the country. Bottling nine different MGP mashbills as non-chill filtered, cask strength, single barrels, which are individually selected, and each given a unique nickname. Collect them all, and taste every recipe from one of the world’s premier whiskey distilleries. Hand-bottled in Bloomington, Indiana. No BS, just full disclosure barrel proof, single barrel all day long!"

An original bottle of Krogman's Old Master Bourbon.

It was an all-Indiana project. The MGP distillery, now sometimes known as Ross & Squibb, is in Lawrenceburg, on the Ohio River at the Ohio border, just west of Cincinnati. Bloomington, where it was bottled, is about 100 miles due west of Lawrenceburg. Tell City is on the Ohio River too, about 100 miles south of Bloomington. The Lawrenceburg to Tell City route is the hypotenuse of the triangle.

But there is more to the Tell City and Krogman's story. Much more.

In 1856, a group of German-speaking Swiss immigrants met in Cincinnati to organize the Swiss Colonization Society. They acquired 4,000 acres on the Ohio River between Louisville and Owensboro in Perry County, Indiana. They named it Tell City, after the mythological Swiss hero, William Tell. 

They considered sites in Kentucky and Missouri but rejected both because of slavery. “None of our colony would ever forget the sacred principles of Republicanism so far as to make use of such a privilege,” as one society member put it.

The plan was to quickly develop an industrial infrastructure, “organized more for the common benefit of the poorer class of our countrymen, which consists mostly of intelligent mechanics and farmers," according to official documents. It became a manufacturing center, mostly for furniture. Although the company that made them folded in 2011, solid maple Tell City chairs remain popular. 

There were breweries and distilleries in Tell City almost from the beginning but the biggest and most important one was August Krogman's. 

Not everyone in Tell City was Swiss. Krogman was from Holstein, in what was then the German Confederation, where he learned brewing and distilling. There had always been German immigrants in the Americas, but the trickle turned into a torrent after the unrest of 1848. Krogman came in 1855, at age 34. He worked at a brewery in Iowa before moving to southern Indiana.

Throughout that part of the state, coal seams are very close to the surface and easy to mine. Many farmers in the region also mined coal. Krogman was one of them and used those profits to start his distillery.

Like many, Krogman's distillery made bourbon whiskey but also apple and peach brandy. August ran the distillery successfully until his death in 1905 at the age of 84. His son, William ‘Will’ Krogman, took over and ran it until Prohibition. 

Will started out strong. He owned Tell City’s biggest distillery, and his father-in-law was the city’s biggest brewer. 

But Prohibition was in the wind and Will's problems began even before the drought, next time, in Part 2.

How Likely Is a Brown-Forman, Pernod Ricard Merger?

 

A rolling billboard for Old Forester and other Brown-Forman
brands at the company headquarters and distillery
on Dixie Highway in Louisville (1936).

Today Bloomberg and Reuters, two generally reliable news sources, reported that Brown-Forman and Pernod Ricard are in talks about a merger of some sort. The reports are based on anonymous sources and neither company has confirmed anything, but the story is being widely reported with headlines like this one from the Lexington Herald-Leader. "Reports: Kentucky whiskey company Brown-Forman, Pernod Ricard in merger talks."

This pops up whenever there is upheaval in the distilled spirits industry. On paper, Brown-Forman looks like a great acquisition. It has one superior brand and a couple of pretty good ones, primarily in the American whiskey space. It's a well-run company, profitable, and not overloaded with debt. 

Pernod Ricard is the world's #2 distilled spirits company after Diageo, with annual gross sales of $12.3B. It owns Absolut Vodka, Jameson Irish Whiskey, Chivas Regal Scotch, Martell Cognac, Havana Club Rum, and a bunch of others. Though well-endowed with Scotch and Irish whiskey, it is light on American whiskey, although it owns a few craft producers such as Kentucky's Jefferson's and Rabbit Hole, West Virginia's Smooth Ambler, and Fort Worth's Firestone & Robertson, which produces the TX Whiskey brand.

Usually when these Brown-Forman merger rumors appear the finger is pointed at Bacardi, sometimes Diageo. 

Is Brown-Forman in play? Probably not, inasmuch as these rumors have always fizzled in the past. Although publicly traded, Brown-Forman is still controlled by the Brown family. They're generally happy with things the way they are. It would be very hard, perhaps impossible, for a determined suitor to force a sale.

I've always heard that the Brown family doesn't like the Bacardi family, which is why that tie-up always falters. I don't know how they feel about the Ricard family.

An observation: When I made the "Made and Bottled in Kentucky" documentary, I mentioned in the script that Brown-Forman was then "a three-billion dollar company." If I remember correctly, that was their gross sales for the previous year. That was 30+ years ago. Brown-Forman's gross sales for 2024 were $5.32B. Considering inflation, the company may actually be smaller today. That may tell you more about the distilled spirits business than it does about one particular company.

By contrast, Brown-Forman's principal rival in the American whiskey space, Suntory, is much bigger than Jim Beam Brands was 30 years ago, but they have grown by acquisitions more so than by growing their core business. Brown-Forman has bought some brands over the years, but I don't think they've bought a rival company since the 1950s, when they bought Jack Daniel's. 

Booze is a good business but it's not AI. There's not a lot of potential for growth. The market generally dislikes diversification so that leaves acquisition as the only path to growth, and the liquor business seems to be hard on its #2. When Diageo passed Seagram's as #1 at the end of the 20th century, Seagram's went out of business.

One peculiarity of the American whiskey business is that the four largest distillers, who together make about seventy percent of America's whiskey, are all closely held. Some of Brown-Forman's stock is publicly traded. The other three, Suntory, Sazerac, and Heaven Hill, are entirely family owned. In all three cases, the principal shareholder is a man in his 80s. 

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Late today, after this posted, Brown-Forman confirmed that it is exploring "a merger of equals" with Pernod.

Pride Goeth Before the Fall

 

Fawn Weaver and company, startled by the Harold Washington
animatronic at the DuSable Museum in Chicago, June 25, 2024.

The Uncle Nearest saga began eight years to the day before the above picture was taken.

That was when Clay Risen revealed Nathan 'Nearest' Green's story to the world, or at least to readers of the New York Times, in an article headlined "Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave."

Fawn Weaver credits that article with inspiring her to create the Uncle Nearest whiskey brand. These days, she and the brand are in a heap of trouble.

Eight years is a good age for American straight whiskey. At least to my taste, eight to twelve years is the sweet spot for whiskey aged in new, charred oak, which bourbon and whiskeys like it must be.

But I digress.

To build a premium whiskey brand from nothing to approximately 150-thousand cases a year seems like a remarkable accomplishment, especially for someone with no previous industry experience and little more than a good story. The liquid, though perfectly fine for what it is, is not extraordinary. That's not why people buy it. It's the story or, I should say, stories, Green's but also Weaver's. 

They are inextricably linked.

From the beginning, I've been impressed by Weaver. She seemed to make all the right moves and experience nothing but success. Seeing her perform in person, during her 2024 book tour, just increased my estimation, even though by then I had heard troubling rumors that all in Tennessee was not as it appeared.

But, in person, Weaver absolutely owns the room. She's dazzling. She casts a spell and makes you want to believe. She held her own last night and two weeks ago on ABC's "Shark Tank" TV show. (Both episodes were recorded last summer, before the current troubles.) 

There have been many facts and counter-facts floating around. Weaver is all over social media but the receiver and the bank she owes $100M+ to only speak through their filings with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, where Case No. 4:25-cv-38 is being adjudicated.

Let's focus on that $100M number, which is closer to $200M when you add the unsecured creditors. I have it on good authority that she raised a similar amount, about $200M, from investors. Suddenly, that 150-thousand cases per year after eight years doesn't seem so impressive, if they spent $400M to get there. For all intents and purposes, the company is broke. Like everything else, the value of its tangible assets is in dispute, but it's way south of $100M, let alone $400M.

Even more disputed is the value of its intangible assets, specifically the Uncle Nearest brand, which ranges from zero to infinity.

My previous post on this subject was a reaction to those who assume the whole thing was a scam from the beginning. If it was, it was a poor job, because that money appears to be gone and not in anybody's pocket. Judge Charles Atchley Jr., who is presiding over the case, used the "out over your skis" idiom at one point. Based on everything we know, that seems as good an explanation as any. 

Judge Atchley is expected to rule soon on Weaver's motion to end the receivership and the receiver's motion to add seven other Weaver businesses to the package.  

Weaver's latest gambit, filing bankruptcy for a company she no longer controls, which didn't last 48 hours, and also filing a defamation suit against the bank which, even though she is a Californian whose company is in Tennessee and the bank she's suing is in Kentucky, she filed in New York. It all just seems weird at this point, like she's grasping at straws. 

Self-confidence will only take you so far. 

Don't Judge Uncle Nearest Too Harshly

 

The Uncle Nearest Distillery in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

I'd like to take a moment to offer some perspective on the Uncle Nearest situation. This is especially for folks who jumped to the conclusion that it was a scam from jump.

FAT Brands is a global franchising company in the fast-casual, quick-service, casual dining, and polished casual dining segments. Some of their better-known brands are Fatburger, Johnny Rockets, Ponderosa and Bonanza. (Those last two are revivals of brands from the 60s.)

FAT is bankrupt and their debt is so big, even debtors who thought they were safe may be impacted.

According to Bloomberg, FAT has $1.4 billion in bonds supported by just $40 million in annual earnings. Like Hooters and T.G.I. Fridays before it, FAT pledged virtually all its earnings to a debt structure that became too much to bear.

It's not the same as Uncle Nearest, of course, but in both cases the scheme fell apart when the market for the company's products suddenly changed, and they didn't have enough wiggle room in their financing to adapt.

That doesn't change anything. I'm just saying many businesses are a house of cards in the sense that a sudden change beyond their control can bring it all crashing down.

America's True "Same as It Ever Was" Whiskey

 

E. H. Taylor was one of the prominent distillery
owners who lobbied on behalf of the Act.

Last month I posted “Whiskey’s Biggest Lie,” debunking the marketing practice of brands claiming ancient recipes and unchanged methods, implying that whiskey in the past surely was better. Since the industry began, distillers have claimed they did things “the old fashioned way,” whether they did or not.

The prevalence and persistence of such claims suggests there is an itch bourbon drinkers long to scratch, to taste whiskey their parents or grandparents would recognize. People scour liquor stores for dusties. They buy Prohibition-era bottles at auction. Some search for authenticity in moonshine, legal and illegal.

There are problems with all these approaches. Many dusties are glut-era bottlings. They represent what people were drinking then, but it wasn't typical. Many bourbon producers in the 1980s bottled whiskey that was much older than was customary for those brands, just to get rid of it. Those bottlings are representative of that relatively brief period but not, for example, of the periods immediately before or after it, and not of everything sold then. The biggest brands, such as Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s, didn’t do this. They had not grievously over-produced, so they didn't have to do much correction. It was contract producers and smaller brands, some on their way to oblivion, that bore the brunt. (The same thing is happening now.) 

Even a decade or more after they were produced, a lot of those bottles were still out there. If you got your hands on them, they were very good and usually cheap. But bottling better whiskey didn’t save them and most whiskey that was so treated is now gone or priced stratospherically on the secondary. A. H. Hirsch Reserve is a similar story. It was aged that long because the owner didn't have a use for it. Some of those bottles are still out there but they cost a fortune.

Earlier bottlings, including those Prohibition-era pints, are also pricey. Much of the whiskey bottled during and immediately after Prohibition was mishandled or simply in wood way too long. A lot of it, maybe most of it, disappoints. Either way, it’s not representative of what your great-grandparents drank before the drought.

Moonshine, legal or illegal, has its own set of problems.

But there is one way to taste something made today in virtually the same way it was made more than a century ago. Its main parameters haven’t changed because they are dictated by federal law.

That, of course, is bottled-in-bond whiskey. The Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 was proposed and supported by distillers such as E. H. Taylor and opposed by rectifiers. Taking advantage of the law was voluntary. The business between distillers and rectifiers could continue as it always had but now distillers had a way to ensure that their customers received what Taylor called "the genuine article." 

As an incentive to participate, the Act allowed distillers to defer payment of the Federal Excise Tax until whiskey was withdrawn from the bonded premises. To get the deferred taxation benefit and the privilege of labeling their whiskey “bonded” or “bottled-in-bond,” the distiller had to follow several rules having to do with how the whiskey was produced and sold. Those rules are still in effect today.

In a way, they codified practices already followed by many distillers, some of which differ from modern practice. Today, it is common for distillers to mix whiskeys of different ages, even whiskeys produced at different distilleries. There’s nothing wrong with that, many very good whiskeys are created that way, but it was less common 129 years ago when the Act was passed.

While bottled-in-bond whiskey isn’t necessarily better, it is different. The sort of blending that is typical today is something a bond can’t do. Everything in the bottle must come from a single distillery and it must have been distilled during a six-month period, either January-June (“Spring”) or July-December (“Fall”), in a single year. 

We have “small batch” and “single barrel” whiskeys. You can think of BIB as “single batch,” the "batch" being all the whiskey produced at that distillery during a six-month period.

The rule also says, “one distiller.” I’m not sure what a distillery is supposed to do if their distiller quits in April, but that’s the rule. Presumably, whiskey distilled from January first through the separation date would be one batch, whiskey distilled thereafter until June 30th would be another batch.

About the only change is that, in the old days, the batch had to be identified on the bottle, usually on a paper strip that “sealed” the bottle in the days before shrink wrap capsules. The distillation season and bottling season had to be noted, e.g., “Fall 2020, Spring 2025.”

That labeling requirement was eliminated in the 1980s but another labeling requirement remains. For BIB spirits, the federal license number of the distillery, known as its DSP number, must be shown on the label. 

All distilled spirits products must indicate on the label the city and state where the producer is located, but it can be any place of business. Typical today is the name of the producer, which can be an assumed business name (e.g., Evan Williams Distilling Company instead of Heaven Hill), followed by one or more cities where that producer does business. 

But that's not good enough for BIB. The number of the distilling DSP must be printed on the label. You'll have to look up the number to identify the distillery, but that's easily done on the internet. If the whiskey was aged or bottled at a different DSP, those numbers have to be there as well.

That requirement allows anyone with a DSP to buy BIB whiskey in bulk and bottle it under their own brand name so long as they disclose where it was distilled, aged and bottled. This is not common, but it is done. Sourced whiskey can be bonded if it meets all the requirements.

BIB whiskey cannot be bottled and sold until it is at least four years old. It can be older, but must all be the same age. If a BIB is labeled ten years old, every drop is ten years old, no more, no less. It also must be bottled at 100° proof (50% ABV), no more, no less.

As for consumer protection, the Act’s purpose was to guarantee the authenticity of whiskey so labeled. It was the first instance of the United States federal government offering a guarantee of this sort. It was the first federal “truth in advertising” legislation.

Back in the late 20th century, several major producers told me they considered dropping BIB. It was always voluntary and as the 21st century dawned, it seemed of little interest to consumers. Because it required deviation from normal procedures, there was no point doing it if it produced no benefit. At that point, few brands still offered a BIB expression. Not surprisingly, many were brands sold only in the South, some only in Kentucky. The best-selling bond nationally was Old Grand-Dad.

But then craft distilleries came along. Every craft distillery that wanted to make whiskey faced a dilemma, what to do for four or five years until that first batch of whiskey matured. They needed revenue and they needed to build a following. Some sold very young whiskey. Others sourced mature whiskey. Others made vodka, gin, rum, amaro, or liqueurs.

For many, the goal they set for themselves was to release a house-made bond. It was a standard they were proud to meet, and many considered that their "arrival." When they were able to offer their bond as a portfolio product, not a limited release, it often became the top of their line, maybe even their flagship.

When consumers responded, this revived interest in the bond segment among major producers. Evan Williams Bottled-in-Bond has been very successful for Heaven Hill. 

Brown Forman, founded in 1870, predates the Bottled in Bond Act and opposed it. Although their Old Forester Bourbon was a high quality, all whiskey product, it was blended using whiskey from three different Kentucky distilleries, none of which Brown-Forman owned. Pre-Prohibition, Brown-Forman was a non-distiller producer. Today their line includes a 100° proof expression that is not bottled-in-bond. Ironically, Old Forester 1897, which is bottled-in-bond, is one of their most popular offerings.

For a bonded bottling, barrel selection is crucial, similar to single barrel. Because blending options are so limited, there is nowhere to hide. Most producers blend to a standard, a literal in-the-bottle sample of exactly how the brand should taste. Quality control consists of trained tasters comparing that standard to each candidate batch. This is done for bonds too. It’s hard to imagine a whole season not producing enough good barrels for a bond release. A producer can always skip a season, I suppose, but I suspect they simply have to tolerate more deviation from the standard with a bond than they would with their non-bonded release.

So, people claiming an unchanged recipe for 250 years are puffing, but 129 years is a different story. Just look for the words "bonded" or "bottled-in-bond."