Most of You Reading this Should Be Reading Something Else

 

The New Reader is on its way to the Post Office.

The Bourbon Country Reader is a one-of-a-kind newsletter from the same source as this blog. But it is not the same content. The Reader is news, history, and analysis of American whiskey you won't find anywhere else. It is the oldest publication devoted entirely to American whiskey.

If you enjoy the writing you find here at The Chuck Cowdery Blog, there is a good chance you will enjoy The Bourbon Country Reader too when it arrives in your mailbox about six times a year. It is modestly priced and advertising free, unlike virtually everything else in your life. Subscribe now to rediscover the pleasure of old-fashioned words on paper, savored perhaps with a well-aged bourbon or rye.

The Reader itself is a bit of bourbon history. It debuted in 1994 with something like 17 subscribers. It has grown a little bit since then. The Reader has literally tracked the Bourbon Boom from beginning to now, when it seems to be entering a new phase. This new issue is dated as March 2025, even if it did get mailed a week into April. (It says right on the front page, "Always Independent & Idiosyncratic.") This new one is issue #1 of Volume 23.

If you find yourself coming here, to the blog, for straight talk about the American whiskey industry, you probably should be reading The Bourbon Country Reader too.

Give it a try. A six-issue, approximately one-year subscription is just: 

$25 for mailing addresses in the USA. 

$32 for everybody else. (That is, addresses on earth but not in the USA. Interplanetary service is not yet available.)

The links above take you directly to PayPal, where you can subscribe securely using PayPal, Venmo, or any major credit card.

If you are unfamiliar with The Bourbon Country Reader, click here for a sample issue. 

In the current issue:

We think of small, local distilleries proliferating in the 21st century as something new but they echo, in many ways, the pre-Prohibition history of Tell City, Indiana and towns like it, at a time when drinking locally-made whiskey was normal.

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 their new town "Tell City" after the mythological Swiss hero, William Tell.

Distilleries came and went in Tell City. The biggest and most important one was there for 100 years, in one form or another, on both sides of Prohibition, despite the arrest and conviction of its owner for Prohibition-related crimes.

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