The First Bourbon Country Reader of 2009 Is Here

Squeezing in just under the wire, the January 2009 issue of The Bourbon Country Reader is out. Now in its unlikely 16th year of publication (the fact that we're still in Volume 11 shows there have been some years when publication was erratic), the Bourbon Country Reader is still the only periodical devoted entirely to American whiskey.

We are always independent and idiosyncratic. We have no distillery affiliation and accept no advertising.

To get on board, go here.

The main story in this issue will be of interest to anyone who has a spirits collection, especially if you live in Tennessee. The case of the million-dollar Jack Daniel's collection has been settled but its meaning to collectors is unclear.

Or is it?

In an effort to clarify the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission's thinking in reaching this settlement, I wrote to TABC Executive Director Shari Danielle Elks. My letter to her is here.

The gist of my inquiry, sent shortly after the settlement was announced, was to ask how Tennessee citizens should behave in light of this agreement. "Are you, for example, saying that although the law remains in effect that it is illegal to sell alcohol without a license, the ABC will not treat the sale of collectible bottles whose contents are considered 'incidental' as the illegal sale of alcohol?"

I report in the story that I am still awaiting the Director's response. Naturally, it arrived as I was picking up the new Readers at the printer. It doesn't change anything, but her letter is here.

One fact of the case not reported in the Tennessee media is that because Mr. Piper had no prior record, he was eligible for pre-trial diversion. Pre-trial diversion is an alternative to prosecution that diverts certain offenders from traditional criminal justice processing into a program of supervision. Mr. Piper pleaded guilty to one of the criminal charges against him, of selling alcohol without a license.

The Director did not rise to my bait about enforcement policy but did point out that the purpose of her agency is to enforce the laws of the state. "Until such laws are changed by the General Assembly, a license is required to sell alcoholic beverages."

So that is the bottom line. You cannot sell alcohol without a license. There is no collectibles exception and there is no incidental contents exception. If the TABC catches you selling something with alcohol in it and you don't have the necessary license, they may prosecute you. There is only one way to mitigate that risk. Don't do it.

If you subscribe to The Bourbon Country Reader before our next issue is published (scheduled for March), your first issue will be Volume 11 Number 5, which contains the full Jack Daniel's story. If you subscribe thereafter, you can always request that your subscription begin with that issue. (We're very agreeable here at Reader Tower.)

What Are The Chances For Real Change In Illinois?

It has been noted that, despite the reputation of Illinois for political corruption, this is the state’s first gubernatorial impeachment.

It should also be noted that while many Illinois public officials, including several governors, have been tried and convicted for criminal offenses, no major public corruption case has ever been brought by an Illinois prosecutor. They have all been federal, investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Like this one.

The Illinois General Assembly has done its duty by removing Rod Blagojevich, but it needs to do much more. Everyone involved in Illinois government must concede what they all know. Corruption here is routine and Governor Blagojevich’s offense was one of scale, not of type.

Even in corrupt systems, there are sometimes limits. The guys behind the guys set those limits. Exceed them and you threaten the entire, corrupt edifice. Therefore, any person who goes off the reservation like Blagojevich did must be removed. It always goes down the same way. Federal authorities mysteriously receive enough evidence to begin an investigation. In time, they receive enough evidence to convict the targeted individual, and perhaps some co-conspirators, but never those at the center of the web.

Look at the Michael Segal, Near North Insurance case (2002-2004). One day he was favored, friend to the great and near great, then he was a goat. What changed? Did the feds just happen to discover his crimes or had he outlived his usefulness? Who made that decision?

It is likely that the prosecutions of Tony Rezko, Stuart Levine and Ali Ata were probably meant to send a message to Blagojevich, to get with the program or he would be next. He didn't and he was.

What does it say that not one of these guys has sung? Not one has told the tale and really laid out how it all works and who calls the shots. Once convicted, they quietly do their time. Levine sang, of course, which netted Rezko and others, but he has probably told all he knows. Segal, Ryan, and Sorich (Mayor Daley's patronage guy) have all been mum. Not one of them has told the whole story. Why is that?

It is hard to discuss the corruption of government in Illinois without reference to Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. He calls it "the combine." Its members consist of corrupt political leaders, both public office-holders and private citizens, Democrats and Republicans. The third leg is organized crime.

Because they are all part of a criminal enterprise, they value secrecy and eschew publicity. Anyone who calls too much attention to themselves has to be removed. Periodic demonstrations of this fact, including evidence that even a governor is not immune, serve their purpose. In itself, the removal, conviction and imprisonment of Rod Blagojevich does nothing to change the system.

Only when crime doesn’t pay will it cease.

Bourbon Event To Help Retired, At-Risk Thoroughbred Racehorses.

The historic Seelbach Hilton Hotel announced today the first-ever "Old Friends Along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail" dinner and bourbon tasting, to benefit the famed Old Friends Equine, a haven for retired thoroughbred racehorses.

The evening will begin at 6 p.m. on Saturday, February 28, at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel, 500 South Fourth Street in downtown Louisville. Tickets are $100 per person and the hotel is offering a reduced room rate of $75 for the night.

"This will be a great match of two of our state’s signature industries – bourbon and horses," said Jon McFarland, the Seelbach’s general manager. "It’s going to be one of Louisville’s premiere events while helping such a dignified, worthy cause."

Old Friends Equine, located in Georgetown, Kentucky, is a home for at-risk thoroughbreds whose racing and breeding careers have come to an end. Among the many champions housed there are the great sprinter Ogygian and Eclipse winners Sunshine Forever and The Wicked North.

"I can’t think of a better way to spend a night in Kentucky," said Michael Blowen, President and Founder of Old Friends. "Great bourbon, unforgettable horse tales and a world-class hotel. And it all goes to help these great Kentucky athletes."

A live and silent auction will offer equine art, horse racing memorabilia, and other items for bid.

Each guest will receive a commemorative Kentucky Bourbon Trail/Old Friends rocks glass from the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. The Kentucky Bourbon Trail links eight of the state’s legendary distilleries and is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.

The evening begins in The Seelbach’s famous Rathskellar, the only surviving Rookwood Pottery room in the world. Seven of Kentucky’s Master Distillers will be there to offer samples of the Commonwealth’s finest bourbon.

They are: Harlen Wheatley of Buffalo Trace; Jim Rutledge of Four Roses; Parker and Craig Beam of Heaven Hill; Fred Noe of Jim Beam; Kevin Smith of Maker’s Mark; Jimmy Russell of Wild Turkey; and Chris Morris of Woodford Reserve.

Blowen, KDA President Eric Gregory, and Larry Johnson, the Seelbach’s celebrity historian, will also be on-hand to discuss the event and their respective Kentucky treasures.

Bourbon-inspired appetizers will be served, followed by a magnificent dinner in The Oakroom. The menu, prepared by Chef de Cuisine Nicole Walker, and served in the only AAA Five-Diamond restaurant in the region, will be a bourbon-inspired feast, followed by dessert and a live auction in the Rathskellar. Bluegrass and other regional music will be performed by Steve Cooley and Mike Shroeder.

For more information, call (502) 807-3463 or go to www.seelbachhilton.com.

For those guests enjoying the special reduced-rate rooms, there will be an after-hours party in The Old Seelbach Bar featuring jazz musician Dick Sisto. Sunday brunch will be available from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for $29 per person.

For more information on Old Friends Equine, call (502) 863-1775 or go to www.oldfriendsequine.org. The farm is open daily to tourists by appointment.

For more information on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, call (502) 875-9351 or visit their web site at www.kybourbontrail.com.

Here’s the dinner menu:

First Course

SWEET POTATO BISQUE
Topped with Bourbon Smoked Goat Cheese Flan
Bourbon Crème Fraiche
Pancetta Brittle

Main Course

KUROBOTA PORK SHANK
With Anson Mills Polenta

Heirloom Winter Vegetables
With Bourbon Reduction

Bourbon Roasted Apples

Dessert

OAKROOM CHOCOLATE BOURBON BREAD PUDDING
With Fee Brothers Orange Bitters

"We Will Restore Science To Its Rightful Place."

In a speech full of significance, those eight words from President Obama yesterday may prove to be the most significant.

Science is the objective search for answers. It is not the pursuit of evidence to support conclusions that have already been reached.

This problem manifests itself in many ways, some more weighty than others, but the abuse or undermining of science and scientific method has to be pointed out and resisted wherever it occurs.

Like in my area of interest, alcohol policy.

Neo-Prohibitionists are very fond of citing 'research' to support their crackpot ideas about underage drinking. The Illinois General Assembly, led by my own State Senator and State Representative, has been in there pitching the crap about so-called alcopops, as I wrote about here and elsewhere.

Lew Bryson, on his blog, pointed me in the direction of this post by wine enthusiast Tom Wark, about the abuse of science and scientific method by Neo-Prohibitionists who are attempting to build a case to shut down online alcohol sales.

In case you've never received a shipment of alcohol from UPS or FedEx, the package will not be released without an adult signature so, essentially, it's the same control that occurs in a liquor store. Kids cannot obtain alcohol over the internet any more easily than they can from their neighborhood retailer. It's as simple as that.

So why is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation willing to spend $400,000 to prove something else?

I'm not saying the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is a bad outfit. Quite the opposite. They do a lot of good work, but this is nonsense.

A Little Bit More About the Barton Sale.

I keep struggling with what to call this transaction, as 'Barton' is the name American whiskey enthusiasts know, but with the exception of Very Old Barton Bourbon, the Barton name had just about disappeared at Constellation even before it sold off the last assets that connected it to the heritage of Chicago's Barton Brands, Inc.

I wrote about the sale of those assets, by Constellation to Sazerac, on Monday, here.

Before I tell you the little bit of additional information I've learned, a moment of silence for the end of a proud American whiskey company.

Chicago businessmen Oscar Getz and Lester Abelson founded Barton shortly after Prohibition ended in 1933. They were family too, as Oscar was married to Lester’s sister.

Both men had been whiskey brokers before the drought and founded Barton to enter that business again. In those days, by the way, there was no distilled spirits business. It was the whiskey business. This was even still true after Prohibition, although people had by then acquired a taste for gin and other things. There was always a brandy market too, but most spirits drinkers drank bourbon, rye or some kind of blend.

Barton went along for a few years, buying and selling, but the business had changed. In 1944, to ensure a reliable source of whiskey, they bought an old distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, called Tom Moore, which they renamed Barton. It made neutral spirits for the military during WWII, but switched back to bourbon production thereafter.

Although they made good whiskey, Barton was always in the commodity or "cats and dogs" business. Their products were not household names, and were moderately priced, but it was a good business that thrived in good times and survived the bad.

Oscar Getz was president and a colorful personality. He loved the heritage of America's whiskey business and collected whiskey memorabilia. In time, he built a small museum in the distillery's Bardstown offices, which was open to the public. He also wrote and published a book, Whiskey: An American Pictorial History (1978).

Oscar Getz died in 1983. I'm not sure when Lester Abelson died, but he was gone by then too. After Getz's death, Barton closed the museum. The 70s had hit the industry hard and by 1983, many distilleries had closed and most that had not only operated for a few months each year, as they already had plenty of whiskey in their warehouses. Barton considered the collection Oscar's personal property and asked his widow, Emma (Abelson) Getz, to do something about it. She donated it to the City of Bardstown, along with enough money to get a small museum started. That museum is still small, but it's still going, and it is called the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History.

Emma passed in 1995, in Chicago, at age 95.

Constellation Brands, a wine company, bought Barton Brands in 1993, but it continued to be called Barton Brands, with its headquarters in Chicago and a whiskey distillery in Bardstown. It also acquired the old Glenmore Distillery in Owensboro, Kentucky, which no longer had a distillery, but did have warehouses and a modern bottling house. In addition to the spirits business, the acquisition gave Constellation the U.S. marketing rights to Corona beer, one of Barton's most valuable assets.

About a year ago, perhaps in preparation for an eventual sale, Constellation divided its spirits business into two divisions and renamed the overall spirits company Constellation Spirits. The realignment divided the portfolio between 'value' and 'premium' products. The value group retained the Barton name and the premium group got a new name, Ascender.

All of the brands in the Barton group are now owned by Sazerac.

Also last year, Constellation changed the name of the Bardstown distillery back to Tom Moore.

The sale announcement did not say anthing about the Chicago office. However, someone in Fairport told the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle that the remaining spirits business will be moved to corporate headquarters there.

Chicago's Barton Brands is now surely and truly dead.

Sazerac, which already owns the very large Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, has said very little about the transaction so far. They have welcomed the Tom Moore Distillery into the family and indicated that Ridgemont Reserve 1792, a premium bourbon that Barton launched in 2003, was one of the prizes they sought. They also needed more warehousing and bottling capacity. The ink is still wet and the deal won't close for another month or so. Meanwhile, Buffalo Trace is still deciding exactly how the pieces will fit together. The deal, valued at $334 million, is a very big one for Sazerac, though it is impossible to say how big since Sazerac is privately held.

As often happens with blogs, where you're not writing to a target length, what started out as me intending to write a few words about the little bit of additional information I've learned since Monday became, well, this.

David Ellis, Good Writer, Named As Impeachment Special Prosecutor.

Yesterday I wrote about the Illinois House impeachment committee report. Among other things, I said it was well written and wondered who wrote it. Now we know.

Today, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan named David Ellis as the special prosecutor for the Illinois Senate impeachment trial of Governor Blagojevich, which begins January 26. Ellis, Speaker Madigan's legal counsel, was the committee's lead lawyer and primary author of its report.

Ellis also is the author of five novels.

Publisher's Weekly called his debut, Line of Vision (2002), "a wicked courtroom thriller." His next, The Hidden Man, is scheduled for a September, 2009, release.

The Official Word on Old Forester Birthday Bourbon.

I don't usually just post press releases, but the one I got today from Brown-Forman about the new release of Old Forester Birthday Bourbon contains so much good information, I'm going to reproduce it here, verbatim and in its entirety. It covers the same basic ground I did here a month ago, but I didn't have some of the data this contains.

What follows is the release.

ANTICIPATED RELEASE OF OLD FORESTER BIRTHDAY BOURBON HITS SHELVES

Founder’s Birthday Honored with "Belated" Birthday Bourbon

Louisville, KY - Old Forester has released this year’s expression of its Birthday Bourbon in honor of George Garvin Brown, the founder of Old Forester, America's First Bottled Bourbon™. Launched six years ago to commemorate Brown’s Birthday on September 2, Old Forester Birthday Bourbon is a premium, historically award-winning bourbon and a must-have for bourbon enthusiasts.

Due to the one-time release of Old Forester Repeal Bourbon along with complications with the glass supplier, this year’s version of Birthday Bourbon was delayed until now. The bourbon remains the same as it was intended to be released on September 2, having been stored in stainless steel tanks since its maturation several months ago.

"This year's Old Forester Birthday Bourbon is crafted from a 62 barrel batch that was distilled and barreled in the late summer of 1995," said Chris Morris, master distiller of Old Forester. "These barrels were entered on the sixth floor of Warehouse H on September 6, 1995. This is an upper floor location which builds heat in the summer months ensuring a robust, complex barrel character will develop. The result is a taste profile that is much more chewy in terms of rich fruit and caramel character than the 2007 and 2006 releases."

Unlike the standard Old Forester, which is a blend of whisky from several different years, Birthday Bourbon is a vintage-dated bourbon, hand-selected by Morris from one specific day. The result is a one-of-a-kind character and flavor that will never be replicated again. Its unique decanter style glass bottle is a throwback to the late 1800’s when Old Forester was first produced.

Since its introduction in 2002, Old Forester Birthday Bourbon has received unprecedented acclaim and has collected honors from USA Today, Malt Advocate, Wine & Spirits Magazine, and Santé. A favorite among critics, Old Forester Birthday Bourbon has taken home gold from numerous tasting competitions including a gold medal in the 2005, 2006 & 2007 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. The 2007 expression was also named American Whiskey of the Year at WhiskyFest New York.

Depending on the market, Old Forester Birthday Bourbon, a Brown-Forman product, retails between $35 - $40, and is sold at most liquor stores with a wide and varied range of bourbons. The 2008 edition of Birthday Bourbon is bottled at 94 proof.

About Old Forester Bourbon

George Garvin Brown was the founder of Old Forester Bourbon Whisky and Brown-Forman Corporation. Brown-Forman Corporation, Louisville, Kentucky, is a diversified producer and marketer of fine quality alcohol brands, including Jack Daniel’s, Southern Comfort, Finlandia Vodka, Tequila Herradura, el Jimador Tequila, Canadian Mist, Fetzer and Bolla wines, and Korbel California Champagnes.