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.