Bardstown, Kentucky, Is The Most Beautiful Small Town In America, Says USA Today.

The Best of the Road contest, sponsored by Rand McNally in collaboration with USA TODAY, has named Bardstown, Kentucky, as the most beautiful small town in the United States.

The area's bourbon whiskey producers are a big part of the reason, according to judges Nikki and Dusty Green. "Bourbon is Bardstown's history and tradition and the countryside is beautiful, but we probably got fewer scenic shots in Bardstown than anywhere else," said the Greens. "The people turned us around. We realized maybe we're not just here to see mountains and rivers, maybe there's something else. Our hearts are still in this place."

They were smitten by downtown's "classic Norman Rockwell" look and feel. Danville, Kentucky, was one of the runners-up and another category, Friendliest, was won by Murray, Kentucky.

The picture above shows pretty much the whole downtown business district, with the county courthouse in the center.

Bardstown, which calls itself 'The Bourbon Capital of the World,' is the site of the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival, September 11-16.

Is Black Maple Hill The Next Pappy?

David Driscoll is the spirits buyer for K&L, a chain of booze stores in Northern California. He makes regular blog posts and podcasts, reporting about new products and trends in spirits. He writes extensively and well about whiskey.

The K&L spirits blog, written mostly by Driscoll, has been added to the blog roll of this blog, if you look to the right and scroll down. The blog roll shows the five blogs with the most recent posts. The K&L spirits blog is called 'Spirits Journal.'

Driscoll is not afraid to stir the pot. Last Friday he wrote about Black Maple Hill, which he believes could be the next Van Winkle. Today's post is called 'The NAS Dilemma.' It's provocative stuff.

Driscoll, like any large retailer in a major metro, has a good feel for market trends, even more so for being in always trendy No. California. I appreciate that he told it like it is about BMH, that it's a non-distiller producer (NDP) that won't or can't reveal its sources, and that scarcity and perceived scarcity are driving the market.

You can't give BMH much credit for any of that. They are the beneficiary of forces largely outside of their control.

The older folks among us have lived through two very different bourbonian periods. In the pre-boom era, we had gallons of good, cheap, glut-era whiskey from numerous NDPs, some better and more ethical than others. We could buy whatever we wanted at will, whenever we wanted, and turn our noses up at the rest.

Was that the golden age? Maybe, but it wasn't sustainable. Now whiskey is hot and newbies are flooding the market looking for 'experts' to tell them what is 'the best,' so they can avoid any heavy lifting on their way to connoisseurship. Plenty of self-proclaimed 'experts' have appeared, eager to oblige. They don't try to educate, they can't, they don't know anything. Instead they just pass along recommendations they have heard, like Van Winkle.

That's not Driscoll. He knows his stuff and when he's uncertain about facts, he does the necessary research. Plenty of other people out there do not.

Since the instant experts need a second act, and Van Winkle has become nearly impossible to find, the search is on for the next Van Winkle. It has to be expensive to be good, and hard to get, the older the better, high proof is good too, and a Van Winkle-like back story doesn't hurt, if it can be boiled down to a few easy-to-remember bullet points.

BMH is as good a candidate as any.

And so a fool and his money are soon parted.

In addition to availability problems, the loss of age statements, and higher prices; other unpleasant by-products of the current boom have been eBay, flavored whiskeys (honey, cherry, cinnamon), white whiskeys, celebrity whiskeys, and quasi-whiskeys (blended whiskey, spirit whiskey).

On the other side, how great is it that the LDI 95% rye finally saw the light of day, even though it took a creepy outfit like Templeton to do it?

I'm old, and crotchety by nature as you all know, but I understand that dynamism usually accompanies success. They need each other. So we need to embrace change in general, even if we choose to reject some of the specifics.

What The Bloomberg Businessweek Cover Has To Do With Me.

Bloomberg Businessweek cover, July 16, 2012

The already-infamous Bloomberg Businessweek (BB) cover depicts John the Baptist baptizing Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, the founders of the Mormon Church. It is a based on a scene often depicted in Mormon art, but BB used it for satire. The story inside is about the church's business interests. 

What does this have to do with me? Oliver Cowdery is my second cousin, seven times removed. My ancestor, Ethan Cowdery, was born in 1788 in Hartland, Connecticut, on high, stony ground near the Massachusetts border. Oliver Cowdery, his second cousin, was born 18 years later in Wells, Vermont, a small town also on a border, the one between western Vermont and eastern New York.

A contemporary of Oliver and Ethan was another cousin, the famed Dr. Jonathan Cowdery. He was a first cousin once removed to both men.

Jonathan was the oldest of the three, having been born at Sandisfield, Massachusetts, in 1767.

The three men were related through their grandfathers, three brothers named Jacob, William, and Jabez. Born in Massachusetts of old Puritan stock, the three eventually moved to Vermont, where William and his progeny remained until Oliver’s generation. Jacob moved around throughout New England before returning to Vermont at the end of his life. For seven years, in the 1790s, he lived in western New York near Canandaigua.

Many years later, in the 1820s, Oliver and most of his family also moved to the Canandaigua region but Ethan’s parents by then had taken advantage of the opening of the Northwest Territory and moved their family to Ohio, to the southeastern corner of the state, close to the Ohio River.

Jonathan, son of Jabez Cowdery, had several different New England addresses, including some near his cousins, before settling in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1805.

Both Jonathan Cowdery and Oliver Cowdery were famous men in their day.

 
In 1800, Dr. Jonathan Cowdery was commissioned as a Surgeon Mate in the United State Navy. He served aboard the frigate Philadelphia, under Commodore Stephen Decatur, in the West Indies and Mediterranean. In 1803, the Philadelphia and all her crew were captured by the Tripolitans and held for eighteen months. Dr. Cowdery’s memoirs of that experience were published in a Philadelphia newspaper and widely read.

Oliver Cowdery’s fame also came through publication. In New York, he became acquainted with a cousin on his mother’s side named Joseph Smith, with whom he started the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormons. Oliver was Smith’s scribe, writing down the Book of Morman from Smith’s dictation and overseeing its original publication.

The third and non-famous cousin, Ethan Cowdery, my ancestor, was a successful farmer and mill operator in Ohio.

There is no evidence the three ever met.

Grandpa Ethan died in 1848 at the age of 60. Cousin Oliver died less than two years later, just 46. Cousin Jonathan died in 1852 at age 85.

Cincinnati. Whiskey Town

Nth Degree Distilling is the name of the micro-distillery project being launched by the folks behind The Party Source in Newport, Kentucky. Their official ground-breaking is July 19. That, and the recent sale of LDI, bring to mind the era when Cincinnati was a whiskey town to rival Louisville.

In the pre-Prohibition era, the distilleries were in the countryside. They sold whiskey to middle-men in the cities, who rectified, packaged, re-sold, and shipped it out to customers via railroads or riverboats.

The man who would go on to own the largest post-Prohibition distilled spirits company grew up in the business in Cincinnati. Born in 1891, Lewis S. Rosenstiel belonged to one of the first families of the Queen City’s Jewish community. He was a grandson of Frederick A. Johnson, the first Jewish child born in that city.

Rosenstiel’s family owned a distillery in Milton, Kentucky, south of Cincinnati on the Ohio River. He went to work there as a teenager and ended up running the place, until Prohibition closed it. Rosenstiel and his associates immediately formed a medicinal whiskey company. They bought a Pennsylvania distillery called Schenley for its medicinal license and its name.

Rosenstiel’s Schenley had a hit after Prohibition with a line of inexpensive whiskeys called Old Quaker, a revived pre-Prohibition brand that originated in Peoria, Illinois. Schenley bought two old distilleries in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, near Cincinnati, to make it.

From Quaker Oats to Quaker Oil, ‘Quaker’ has long been used to convey purity and integrity. The real Quakers don’t get anything from all that publicity. In 1939, Time Magazine reported that the Society of Friends was especially offended by Old Quaker Whiskey, since Quakers aren’t supposed to drink. The brand eventually fell out of favor and was discontinued. The distillery was closed in the 1980s, although the associated bottling plant continued to operate into the 1990s under independent ownership.

The medicinal whiskey business gave Schenley a head start when Prohibition ended. It became market leader, with a 25 percent share. In 1937, Rosenstiel moved Schenley from Cincinnati to the Empire State Building in New York.

As owner and chief executive of an alcohol industry leader, Rosenstiel was a frequent target. He was accused of everything from racketeering to cross dressing.

Rosenstiel’s son-in-law, Sidney Frank, who worked with him at Schenley, was a major force in the distilled spirits industry until his death in 2006. His most famous successes were Jagermeister and Grey Goose Vodka.

Cincinnati itself does have one active distillery, a micro called Woodstone Creek.

Who Has A. H. Hirsch?

In my recent ebook, The Best Bourbon You'll Never Taste, I wrote that while I assume some bars still pour A. H. Hirsch Reserve Straight Bourbon Whiskey, I can't name any. Here are two.

Since how much they have is unknown and there is no way for them to get more, this information may already be obsolete.

Here in Chicago, Delilah's (2771 N. Lincoln Ave) still has it, or did as of the last time I was there, maybe a month ago. They have the 16-year-old gold foil.

Today I learned that The Eveleigh Club in Los Angeles (8752 W. Sunset Blvd) has the 16-year-old red wax, which is even more rare. They were using it to mix cocktails!

They also have Hirsch 22-year-old rye but, as we all know, that's a completely different animal and not from the Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, distillery where the A. H. Hirsch Bourbon was made.

According to the web site Thirsty in L.A., the Hirsch whiskeys were supplied by Maurice Chevalier IV, Brand Development Director at Anchor Distilling, so maybe they aren't a regular thing. 

Speaking of names and especially that Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, distillery where A. H. Hirsch Bourbon was made, I am going to stop calling it Michter's. Maybe I'll just call it by its real name when the A. H. Hirsch Bourbon was distilled there, Pennco.

Here's the thing. A company called Chatham Imports picked up the Michter's name after it was abandoned and now claims for itself all of Michter's past glory, all 260 years of it. They're playing the old marketing game of telling the literal truth while being grossly misleading.

Their latest outrage is this statement from a recent press release: "Michter’s has been distilling in Bardstown, Ky., since the 1990s, using other companies’ facilities."

Translation: Since Chatham re-registered and began to use the Michter's trademark, they have hired Bardstown's Kentucky Bourbon Distillers Inc. (KBD) to produce their Michter's products. KBD recently began to distill on a small scale but their primarily business is buying whiskey from distilleries, bottling it, and marketing it under various brand names, including names supplied by customers such as Chatham.

In other words, you didn't just buy a new Ford. You manufactured it in Detroit using other companies' facilities.

Here's the plan. Chatham did nothing wrong. They obtained the Michter's name fair and square. So, from now on, when I mention 'Michter's,' I will be talking about them. If I'm instead referring to the historic distillery in Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, where A. H. Hirsch Bourbon was made, I'll refer to it like that. I may, at times, just shorten it to 'Schaefferstown,' even though the distillery there was never called that.

Which brings me to the third person plural. When Michter's says 'we' in reference to its activities since it grabbed the name, that's okay, but when they say 'we' in reference to anything that happened in Schaefferstown, I will call them out, because that's a lie.

Finally, if none of this makes any sense to you but you'd like to understand what all the fuss is about, read The Best Bourbon You'll Never Taste, The True Story of A. H. Hirsch Reserve Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Distilled In The Spring Of 1974.

In The Lousy Queen We Trust

This post is not about bourbon or Kentucky. If you only want to read those kinds of posts from me, turn away now.

Yesterday on Facebook, I posted a small piece of my personal philosophy. I wrote: "It is wrong--morally, ethically, and legally--to impose your religious beliefs on other people. Any questions?"

Inevitably, there was a small effort to equate religious beliefs with non-religious beliefs, the familiar 'Humanism is a religion' argument. This is easily refuted. Religious belief systems involve supernatural entities, non-religious belief systems do not. Because a religion’s beliefs are issued by supernatural entities they cannot be challenged by mere humans.

That's why we can't allow anyone to impose their religious beliefs, with regard to sexual preference, or alcohol consumption, for example, on the rest of us. This should not be a dispute between religious believers and non-believers, because if you believe in American liberty and the U.S. Constitution, you have to subscribe to this philosophy, no matter how religious you may be.

Thinking about this, I always recall a speech I heard Kurt Vonnegut Jr. make at an American Civil Liberties Union fundraiser many years ago in Louisville. He explains it so much better than I can. He uses an analogy involving playing cards that makes the dilemma, and the answer, so clear. He repeated it in his book, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (Dial Press, 1999). It is excerpted below from an excerpt used by the publisher to promote the book.
________________________

I will speak of Thomas Aquinas… I will tell you my dim memories of what he said about the hierarchy of laws on this planet, which was flat at the time. The highest law, he said, was divine law, God's law. Beneath that was natural law, which I suppose would include thunderstorms, and our right to shield our children from poisonous ideas, and so on.

And the lowest law was human law.

Let me clarify this scheme by comparing its parts to playing cards. Enemies of the Bill of Rights do the same sort of thing all the time, so why shouldn't we? Divine law, then, is an ace. Natural law is a king. The Bill of Rights is a lousy queen.

The Thomist hierarchy of laws is so far from being ridiculous that I have never met anybody who did not believe in it right down to the marrow of his or her bones. Everybody knows that there are laws with more grandeur than those which are printed in our statute books. The big trouble is that there is so little agreement as to how those grander laws are worded. Theologians can give us hints of the wording, but it takes a dictator to set them down just right–to dot the i's and cross the t's. A man who had been a mere corporal in the army did that for Germany and then for all of Europe, you may remember, not long ago. There was nothing he did not know about divine and natural law. He had fistfuls of aces and kings to play.

Meanwhile, over on this side of the Atlantic, we were not playing with a full deck, as they say. Because of our Constitution, the highest card anybody had to play was a lousy queen, contemptible human law. That remains true today. I myself celebrate that incompleteness, since it has obviously been so good for us. I support the American Civil Liberties Union because it goes to court to insist that our government officials be guided by nothing grander than human law. Every time the circulation of this idea or that one is discouraged by an official in this country, that official is scorning the Constitution, and urging all of us to participate in far grander systems, again: divine or natural law.

Cannot we, as libertarians, hunger for at least a little natural law? Can't we learn from nature at least, without being burdened by another person's idea of God?

Certainly. Granola never harmed anybody, nor the birds and bees–not to mention milk. God is unknowable, but nature is explaining herself all the time. What has she told us so far? That blacks are obviously inferior to whites, for one thing, and intended for menial work on white man's terms. This clear lesson from nature, we should remind ourselves from time to time, allowed Thomas Jefferson to own slaves. Imagine that.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

Most teachers and parents and guardians do not teach this vital lesson because they themselves never learned it, or because they dare not. Why dare they not? People can get into a lot of trouble in this country, and often have to be defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, for laying the groundwork for the lesson, which is this: That no one really understands nature or God. It is my willingness to lay this groundwork, and not sex or violence, which has got my poor book in such trouble in Island Trees–and in Drake, North Dakota, where the book was burned, and in many other communities too numerous to mention.

I have not said that our government is anti-nature and anti-God. I have said that it is non-nature and non-God, for very good reasons that could curl your hair.

Well–all good things must come to an end, they say. So American freedom will come to an end, too, sooner or later. How will it end? As all freedoms end: by the surrender of our destinies to the highest laws.

To return to my foolish analogy of playing cards: kings and aces will be played. Nobody else will have anything higher than a queen.

There will be a struggle between those holding kings and aces. The struggle will not end, not that the rest of us will care much by then, until somebody plays the ace of spades. Nothing beats the ace of spades.

Barton v Beam: Too Close To Call.

If you saw these two bottles next to each other on a shelf, what would you think?

They're both handsome bottles, but what else? Are they the same product in two different bottles? Two different products from the same maker?

You probably would not think that, although both bottles contain bourbon whiskey, they have no other relationship to each other. The typefaces in which the numbers are set, while not identical, are very similar, as are the numbers themselves. Too similar, perhaps?

On the left is a bottle of Ridgemont Reserve 1792, a Sazerac product, made at the Barton 1792 Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky. It is widely distributed throughout the U.S. It is an 8-year-old straight bourbon, bottled at 46.85% ABV. It costs about $30 a bottle at retail.

The number 1792 refers to the year Kentucky became a state.

On the right is a bottle of Jim Beam. According to the UNCRATE web site, it is an eight-year-old, 47.5% ABV straight bourbon. Limited to 200 bottles, it is available only in the Heinemann Duty Free store in the T1B Schengen lounge in Frankfurt, Germany. The price is €140 ($178).

A different source says it is also being sold in Australia, for about $190.

1795 is the year, according to Beam family tradition, that family patriarch Jacob Beam sold his first barrel of whiskey in Kentucky.

The similarity is all the more interesting considering Ridgemont Reserve's history. It was originally called Ridgewood Reserve 1792, a fact that rubbed Brown-Forman's Woodford Reserve the wrong way. They sued for trademark infringement and won.

In response to inquiries, Sazerac said it does not comment on matters subject to pending litigation.