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| Two of the 150-year-old warehouses destroyed in yesterday's fire. (Photo taken in 1991-92.) |
Regardless of who owned them, the shame of it is that no one thought the warehouses were worth preserving for their historical significance. The photo above was taken 35 years ago. A neglected building can deteriorate a lot in 35 years. I thought they were beautiful; sturdy examples of red brick industrial architecture from the late 19th century. At about 150-years-old, they were the oldest extant maturation warehouses in the state.
When Jim Beam Brands acquired the beverage alcohol assets of National Distillers in 1987, one of their first acts was to stop distilling at Old Crow and Old Grand-Dad (located northeast of Frankfort on Georgetown Road). National had stopped distilling at its third Frankfort-area distillery, Old Taylor, in 1972. Old Grand-Dad was the newest facility of the three and although it never distilled again, Beam used it for maturation, bottling and distribution. They still do. The bottling and distribution operation has been expanded several times.
Beam used the Old Crow and Old Taylor facilities exclusively for maturation. There was a lot of capacity, and they also rented space to Wild Turkey and others. Eventually, they and other distilleries that looked into the properties, primarily for the warehouses, decided aging conditions in that river valley were not ideal. Sites on high ground are preferred.
The former Old Taylor property, today's Castle and Key Distillery, adjacent to Old Crow, was an attractive restoration because of its unique architecture and historic gardens, and because some of the equipment, specifically mash cookers and fermenters, was still usable. It was viable as a distillery, tourist attraction, and events space. It is successful by all accounts.
Glenn's Creek Distilling occupies the Old Crow property. They too are a going concern. None of the property used for their operation was damaged.
When I made the documentary "Made and Bottled in Kentucky" in 1991-92, after Beam's acquisition, I was given access to Old Taylor, but not Old Crow, which was already looking very run down. We got a few shots of it from the other side of the fence. In the office building at Old Grand-Dad, there were a lot of photographs we used. I also met some of the guys who worked there, who were mostly former National employees, including one who identified himself as the last master distiller at Old Crow.
His theory about Crow's rapid and sharp decline in the late 60s and early 70s had to do with product quality. He said National had expanded the facility in the early 1960s and recklessly changed some things, including the amount of setback in the mash, an essential part of the sour mash process pioneered by James Crow. The whiskey didn't taste right after that. He and his entire tasting panel agreed, and they were receiving negative feedback from consumers too, but all upper management cared about was volume, pushing as much liquid through the pipeline as possible.
Either he or one of the other guys told me that the doublers at Old Crow were actually the pot stills from the original Old Crow Distillery, at what is now Woodford Reserve. At the original distillery, it was all pot stills, no columns. Columns came in with the new distillery, and the old pots were converted to doublers.
I have no idea what happened to them or, for that matter, if any of those stories are true.
4 comments:
Hi Chuck
Old Crow sour mash whiskey and the Old Crow Distillery on Glenn’s Creek went through many significant production changes and flavour iterations in its first 100 years, including changes to its stills.
The original stills were based on traditional British copper pot stills. Whether they were engineered by local coppersmiths or imported from Britain is unknown. Edmund Taylor Jnr. designed the Old Crow Distillery in 1868 and the Old Hermitage Distillery in Frankfort in 1870. He modelled his survey on British malt distillery apparatus and standards he inspected in 1866. He adapted the best whisky practices in the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Ireland) to Crow’s plan, using thick American mashes and beer rather than British washes and wort. Although the new distillery did not start production until January 1872, Gaines Berry, under William Mitchell, moved Crow whiskey from the Oscar Pepper distillery down the creek to an old, pre-existing Crow-plan stillhouse on the Old Crow Distillery site and began making whiskey in August 1869, while construction continued, marketing barrels to agents by November. When the new state-of-the-art Old Crow Distillery started production, the distillate came off at 120P and was barrelled at 100P, which correlated with British pot still yields, rarely exceeding 155P, and met U.S. Federal regulatory requirements. All the still furnaces were originally open wood-fired. The integration of Crow’s earlier methods (sour mash) with the new copper equipment was not documented. In some cases, only a clue remains of the opaque IP these innovative distillers/engineers employed. A letter dated June 27th, 1874, described that the doubling still ‘vapours are intercepted by arrangement of a cap still.’ This suggests they invented a proprietary purifier, or dephlegmator-style separator, to extract and divert noxious fusel alcohols distilled from the low wines, originating from the fermentation of high corn and rye mashes.
In the early 1880s, the distillery undertook major plant modifications, changed bioprocesses, and increased capacity from 84 bushels per day in 1870 to 840 bushels per day. Along with Old Hermitage, these two distilleries made Gaines, Berry, now W. A. Gaines & Co., America’s largest distiller. The new distilling column increased ethanol yield to 4.2 gallons per bushel, up from 3.5. The only way to achieve this was to replace the traditional wash or singling stills with copper stripping columns. This is evident in the 1886 Sanbourne W. A. Gaines & Co., Old Crow Distillery map schematics, which describe coal and wood as fuel, the use of steam (for boilers), three steam stripping columns, and six individual wood-fired beer stills. Photograph (below) from the 1920s show these spirit stills, or doubling stills, described as beer stills, remained traditional pinched, lantern-shaped copper post stills. So it was highly likely that, post-Prohibition in 1934, when a new modern plant was installed by National Distillers, the old spirit stills in the brick furnace had not been scrapped like the other plant. They were likely converted into continuous doubling stills, no longer beer stills for separate batch distillation of low wines into high wines whiskey distillate.
Even after Prohibition, Old Crow whiskey continued to be a victim of corporate rationalizations, as whiskey flavors changed with new fermentation processes, new distilling plants, aggregated production techniques, and corporate acquisitions that, at each turn, took one of America’s greatest whiskeys of the pre-Prohibition era downmarket: rye sour mash and whiskey sour mash, ergo straight bourbon.
More details about the Old Crow Distillery in the 19th century at https://thewhiskeywash.com/bourbon/the-james-crow-chronicles-part-8-old-crow-distillery/
1886 Schematic and 1960 aerial photograph
Not sure the three attached photographs could be posted
Thank you as always for your insight Chuck. I miss the reader but look forward to your blog posts. The whole Old Crow saga is endlessly intriguing, though I would trade all that to have it taste today like it did in its heyday as I never have had an opportunity to try the "good stuff"
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