Barrel Strength Bourbon. Carla Harris Carlton

and because the round-trip to New Orleans took a year or more, there would not have been enough shipments invoiced to Limestone to allow that connection to be made. Limestone (now Maysville) had been part of Mason County, Kentucky, for more than 30 years when the Maysville firm of Stout and Adams advertised “Bourbon Whiskey by the barrel or keg” in a newspaper in 1821—the earliest documented use of the term.

      Another theory says that people drinking the aged spirit in New Orleans started asking for “Bourbon Street whiskey,” which got shortened to “bourbon.” In any case, bourbon came to mean excellent whiskey from Kentucky.

      “Wall Street for Whiskey”

      To accommodate the growing number of steamboats, the city of Louisville built a canal that allowed the boats to bypass the Falls of the Ohio. River traffic grew exponentially with the opening of the Portland Canal in 1830, as did Louisville’s population. By 1850, Louisville was one of the 12 largest cities in America, bigger even than Chicago. The arrival of railroads made Louisville even more important as a transportation hub, with lines connecting the city to points north and west.

      If you operated a distillery anywhere in the region, you shipped it from Louisville. Whiskey interests from all over opened offices and warehouses along a 12-block stretch of Main Street near the Ohio River that became known as Whiskey Row.

      George Garvin Brown, cofounder of Brown-Forman distillery (Photo courtesy of Brown-Forman)

      Whiskey Row was also the home of rectifiers, who created new products either by blending several whiskeys together or by blending whiskey with neutral grain spirits. While some of these products were legitimate, it was easy to tamper with them since bourbon was sold directly from a barrel. There was no way of knowing exactly what you were going to get, even from reputable distillers, because one batch could differ from the previous one.

      In 1870, a young Louisville distiller named George Garvin Brown landed on a solution to the problems of consistency and potential tampering. His Old Forrester Bourbon, named for a Union Army hero, Dr. William Forrester, was the first bourbon to be sold exclusively in bottles. (Incidentally, Dr. Forrester was not old; he was probably in his early 30s. “Old” denoted that the bourbon was aged, which implied quality.) At some point in history, Old Forester lost one of its Rs, but it is still the flagship brand of the Brown-Forman distillery. Bottled bourbon did not become common until after 1904, when Michael J. Owens patented a machine that could make four uniform bottles per second.

      Several other measures enacted in the late 1800s and early 1900s were designed to protect consumers and ensure authenticity in bourbon production. The Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 developed “Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits,” among them that spirits had to be produced by one distiller in one distilling season at one US distillery, which was to be identified on the label; had to be aged in a federally bonded warehouse for at least four years; and had to be bottled at 100 proof. The “federally bonded” part made the government responsible for guaranteeing that the standards were met. Bonded warehouses were padlocked, and only US Treasury agents had a key.

      In 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act required that all products, including whiskey, carry a label that listed their contents. But what was “pure whiskey”? The chief chemist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided it was a spirit distilled from grain that was aged in oak barrels and had nothing added but pure water; anything else would have to be labeled as “imitation whiskey.” This upset the rectifiers, who were putting neutral grain spirits, flavoring, coloring, and who-knows-what-all into their whiskeys. President William Howard Taft finally settled the question “What is whiskey?” with the Taft Decision of 1909.

      { Just A SIP }

      According to the Taft Decision, “straight whiskey” was to be made only from grain (not fruit or molasses) and water, and whiskey flavored with other spirits would be defined as “blended.” Taft allowed the terms bourbon and rye for identifying the dominant grain; the language was later expanded to account for grains such as wheat. And now you know something that President Taft did besides commission an oversize bathtub in the White House to accommodate his 340-pound girth.

      By the turn of the 20th century, there were nearly 100 whiskey-related concerns operating on and near Whiskey Row in Louisville, according to the Louisville City Directory, and not just from Kentucky; they also hailed from places like Cincinnati, Chicago, and New York. “This was the greatest accumulation of whiskey companies in the world in one place at one time,” Chris Morris says. “It was like Wall Street for whiskey.”

      Unfortunately for both Wall Streets, big crashes were coming.

      From Famine to Feast to Famine

      The growth of distilling—and of cities, for that matter—in the early 1900s was not welcomed by everyone. A new temperance movement that blamed alcohol consumption for society’s ills was gaining momentum. Women played a large role in this movement. Somewhat ironically, one of the most well-known members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was a native Kentuckian. Carry A. Nation, whose first husband was an alcoholic, smashed up saloons with her famous hatchet from December 1900 until her death in 1911. Joining religious protestors were some wealthy business owners who believed that sober workers were harder workers.

      Prohibition supporters got a boost when the United States entered World War I in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson instituted a temporary wartime prohibition during which distillers could produce only industrial alcohol. That same year, Congress submitted for state ratification the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, transportation, and sale—but not use—of intoxicating liquors. The amendment received the support of the required three-quarters of US states in 11 months.

      The 18th Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919, and took effect a year later. In October 1919, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act—commonly known as the Volstead Act, in reference to Rep. Andrew Volstead of Minnesota, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee—which provided guidelines for enforcing Prohibition.

      Alcohol could be legally sold only for medicinal purposes, and just six distilleries in the entire country had licenses to produce this “medicine.” Doctors could prescribe 1 pint of 100-proof whiskey per patient every 10 days. Needless to say, a lot of people fell ill in those days.

      Generally speaking, the provisions of Prohibition were enforced much more strongly in rural areas, where residents tended to support them, than in urban ones. (This dichotomy continues even today in Bible Belt states like Kentucky, where, despite its prodigious bourbon production, 77 of its 120 counties were classified as dry in March 2016, according to the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.) Overall, rather than curtailing distilling, Prohibition just shifted control of it to the criminal element. The 1920s saw the rise of bootleggers, speakeasies, and gangsters such as Al Capone, who reportedly earned $60 million annually from illegal operations associated with alcohol.

      { Just A SIP }

      Al Capone was a frequent guest at The Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, as was Cincinnati mobster George Remus, known popularly as the “King of the Bootleggers.” Remus, who befriended writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was stationed with the Army at nearby Camp Taylor, was said to have inspired Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan were married in Louisville at “The Muhlbach.”

      Prohibition cost the country lots of jobs, not just in the distilling industry but also in ancillary businesses such as cooperages, bottle manufacturers, and taverns—even farmers were affected. By the 1932 presidential election, with the country in the midst of the Great Depression, it was clear that the so-called “Noble Experiment” had failed, and candidates for both major parties promised to do away with it.

      Under President Franklin Roosevelt, Congress proposed the 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th, in February 1933, and the states ratified it in December