Bourbon Empire by Reid Mitenbuler Page A

spirit sweetness by neutralizing acids found in the raw alcohol. The process usually involved a tub with a false bottom punctured with holes: flannel was placed over the bottom and covered with a pile of charcoal made from green wood such as sugar maple or hickory, and raw spirits were poured through.
    But charcoal filtering was only a quick fix for smoothing out the liquor’s rough edges. Kentucky still hadn’t earned its legendary reputation for producing particularly tasty whiskey.
    And this is where today’s marketing comes in, fantastically but erroneously crediting Craig with the idea of aging bourbon in charred oak barrels. As the story goes, once Craig was settled in Kentucky he continued preaching but devoted an increasing amount of time to distilling (other Baptists started criticizing his entrepreneurship, claiming it was impossible to serve God and Mammon both). The legend as it’s told by Heaven Hill today is that a barn fire was responsible for accidentally charring the insides of barrels Craig had intended to use to store and ship his whiskey. The frugal frontiersman addressed this problem by using the barrels anyway, serendipitously discovering the unique flavor their charred interiors gave his whiskey.
    And, so the legend goes, bourbon was born.
    But it’s not true. The Elijah Craig brand has existed since 1986, and Heaven Hill was first established in 1934. Naming the brand after afirebrand historical figure gives it an instant heritage anchored in a romanticized past.
    The Craig myth first appeared in 1874, when the historian Richard Collins claimed that Craig made the “first” bourbon. He didn’t use Craig’s name, but he wrote under a list of “Kentucky Firsts” in his sixteen-hundred-page
History of Kentucky—
which for decades was standard in Kentucky classrooms—that “the first Bourbon Whiskey was made in 1789, at Georgetown, at the fulling mill at Royal Spring,” which identified Craig by the location of his distillery. Collins, of course, provided no evidence that Craig’s whiskey was different from any of the other whiskies that had already begun flowing out of Kentucky at that time. Modern historians speculate that the Craig story was a way for Collins to defend the reputation of whiskey, which was under attack by the temperance movement when he made his claim.
    It is no mystery why Heaven Hill would run with the Craig tale—it’s far more exciting than a dry explanation that the rise of bourbon was an organic affair, emerging from the collective efforts of thousands of nameless farmer-distillers who, over time, adopted a succession of good practices after word spread over the countryside. The distillery understands that great tales can’t have a flock of heroes, they can only have one, and Craig won the casting call.
    In bourbon marketing, stories like Craig’s are the rule rather than the exception. For many years, the companies behind the brands were the only sources explaining the history of the industry, and there is no advantage whatsoever in telling the boring version of the story. Don’t believe 90 percent of the tales you read on whiskey bottles, but don’t forget to enjoy them either. The stories are just like the whiskey itself. They start as a vapor, condense, and then sit unseen in a barrel for years. Finally they emerge, transformed into something entirely different and enchanting.

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    Every whiskey barrel is a sort of medieval alchemist’s laboratory, a dark and sooty place from which a clear spirit poured inside emerges yearslater, golden and transformed. Barrels first started as humble shipping containers for whiskey, but over the centuries were promoted into something else: an ingredient as well as a vessel.
    Barrels have been used to transport all matter of goods—whale oil, fish, nails—since at least the first century AD , when Pliny the Elder noticed their use in the Alps. As a shipping tool, barrels have been compared in importance