Bourbon Empire Quotes

“Every whiskey barrel is a sort of medieval alchemist’s laboratory, a dark and sooty place from which a clear spirit poured inside emerges years later, 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.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“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.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Similar forms of trickery eventually evolved into a ritual of drunken trade negotiations that often ended with Native Americans giving away huge tracts of land for little in return. Years later, one settler put it bluntly: “When the object is to murder Indians, strong liquor is the main article required, for when you have them dead drunk, you may do to them as you please, without running the risk of losing your life.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Shortly after the American Revolution, Craig decided to start a new life in a freer place. Joining his brother Lewis, he led an exodus of six hundred people to what is present-day Kentucky. The group called itself “the Travelling Church.” The Kentucky they arrived in was a place of transition, new and unknown. To many, even the state’s name was a mystery. The Cherokee said it meant “dark and bloody ground,” but the Iroquois’s interpretation of Kanta-ke translated to “meadow-land.” The Wyandote interpreted it as “the land of tomorrow,” while the Shawnee claimed it meant “at the head of the river.” Others said it was simply a name invented by white people. The frontiersmen who had lived”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“The label for Knob Creek bourbon might state “Distilled and Bottled by Knob Creek Distillery, Clermont, Kentucky,” making it seem like a freestanding outfit, but it is made at the same plant as many other brands made by Jim Beam. “Knob Creek Distillery” is simply what’s called an assumed business name, otherwise known as a DBA, which is the legal shorthand for “doing business as,” and is a method that can be used to make one company seem like many. But drinkers who sleuth out the origins of most brands will find their whiskey traced back to one of just a few places.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“By the twenty-first century, whiskey producers had figured out that Jefferson’s vision sells: all those small, distinct labels project the romantic image of the independent out on his own. But producers had also figured out something else: Hamilton’s vision was a good way to get that whiskey into bottles efficiently and at an affordable cost. Jefferson’s vision is on the outside of bottles, but Hamilton’s vision often defines the whiskey within. Many brands seem small and distinct, and therefore more personal, which is important for marketing, but much of this is an illusion.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Jefferson denounced whiskey as a “poison.” He wrote, “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.” Jefferson was merely expressing the attitudes of his social class toward whiskey. He was a friend of the workingman, but didn’t care much for the workingman’s unrefined drink, although he did occasionally allow his slaves to drink it.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“On one side was Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s right-hand man since the Revolution and the architect of the hated whiskey tax. Hamilton came from humble beginnings in the Caribbean but had pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps to quickly gain acceptance among the elite power brokers of New York finance. During the Revolution, he was assigned to Washington’s staff and impressed the general, quickly becoming one of Washington’s most trusted advisers. After the war, he was appointed as the first treasury secretary at the age of thirty-two. From that lofty perch he championed industry and big finance and wrote the whiskey tax to promote the advancement of larger, more established distilleries on the East Coast, to the detriment of smaller frontier distilleries. His grave today rests in his adopted city of New York, in a cemetery at the top of Wall Street.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Settlers in isolated regions of the countryside had risen up against the unpopular whiskey tax Washington had implemented three years earlier in 1791. Since then, the insurrection had swelled into a debate over the nation’s soul. The question of how to best tax whiskey would partially determine how to organize a loose collection of isolated areas into a nation. Would big business or small be the guiding force? The rebellion threatened the young nation’s sovereignty, and because Washington had speculatively invested in frontier property, it also threatened his personal fortune.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“John Steinbeck many years later would write in East of Eden, “The names of places carry a charge of the people who named them, reverent or irreverent, descriptive, either poetic or disparaging.” The Scotch-Irish gave the American places where they made whiskey names like Gallows Branch, Cutthroat Gap, or, in one instance, Shitbritches Creek. In Lunenburg County, Virginia, they even named two streams Tickle Cunt Branch and Fucking Creek. They often called themselves “rednecks,” an old Scots border term for Presbyterians. Another title they used for themselves was “crackers,” a term that came from the Scots word craik, which literally means “talk,” but was typically used to describe the kind of loud”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“John Steinbeck many years later would write in East of Eden, “The names of places carry a charge of the people who named them, reverent or irreverent, descriptive, either poetic or disparaging.” The Scotch-Irish gave the American places where they made whiskey names like Gallows Branch, Cutthroat Gap, or, in one instance, Shitbritches Creek. In Lunenburg County, Virginia, they even named two streams Tickle Cunt Branch and Fucking Creek. They often called themselves “rednecks,” an old Scots border term for Presbyterians. Another title they used for themselves was “crackers,” a term that came from the Scots word craik, which literally means “talk,” but was typically used to describe the kind of loud bragging that usually leads to a fight.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“After Standard Oil Company founder John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in the world, he offered gardening advice to a group of young men at a Brown University Bible study. He told his admiring audience, “The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” Rockefeller's audacious winner-take-all metaphor about the American Beauty rose was a description of how Standard Oil had bested its competitors. The clumsy reference to God at the end of the remarks was a meager attempt to morally sanction the ideas of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had recently seduced the robber baron community by adapting scientific ideas like “survival of the fittest” into a loose form of Social Darwinism that defined Gilded Age business.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Horatio Gates prepared to fight the British in South Carolina during the summer of 1780, as British troops swept up the coast from the south in a series of successful offensives, he found his rum supplies bare. He did, however, have plenty of molasses. Figuring the raw material of rum was better than nothing, Gates distributed the sweet goo among his men without realizing it was a laxative. He ultimately lost to the British.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“When Missouri congressman Henry Blow complained directly to Lincoln, the president famously replied, “I wish I knew what brand of whiskey he drinks. I would send a barrel to all my other generals.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“This common industry arrangement is usually called “sourcing” or “contract distilling” and those companies on the receiving end are typically called NDPs, short for “non-distiller producers” (you can tell them apart on the liquor store shelf by tiny print reading “produced by,” or some similar variation, rather than “distilled by,” since they’re not technically distillers and government regulations prevent them from saying otherwise). For many upstart distilleries, sourcing is simply a way to become established while they wait for their own whiskey stocks to age, although most, understandably, don’t advertise that fact.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“But drinkers who sleuth out the origins of most brands will find their whiskey traced back to one of just a few places.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“The trend was quickly noticed. In a 2013 interview, one market analyst told Whisky Advocate that top-end whiskies were increasingly marketed to people who were simply rich, rather than true connoisseurs. As a result, the quality of the highest-price offerings had slid as a group because their new customer base was less likely to realize when the product didn’t live up to the price tag. Many of these high-priced whiskies were still excellent, but there was indeed a notable uptick in the number of lukewarm reviews they received in knowledgeable ratings publications.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Each year, roughly seven thousand cases were released, just enough to get it nationwide attention with a few bottles in most of the country’s higher-end liquor stores. It had presence, but not so much as to undermine its own sense of exclusivity. This careful positioning, combined with a catchy name and the flashy age statements, put Pappy into the marketing sweet spot bound to attract the celebrity chefs, food writers, and other various apparatchiks of the foodie-industrial complex who are responsible for converting their fetishes into national obsessions.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“The bourbon in a bottle of Maker’s Mark might have changed very little as the company grew, but opinions of the brand are nonetheless influenced by outside factors—it’s yet another reminder that we taste with our minds as much as our senses.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“The same goes for other humble American whiskey brands utilizing similar overseas marketing strategies—Four Roses Yellow Label sits on the top shelves of Spanish and Eastern European bars, as does Jack Daniel’s, which flies off shelves at the Dubai Airport duty-free shop. It’s yet another reminder that we taste and judge as much with our minds—susceptible as they are to outside signals of quality and value—as with our senses.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“These advertising campaigns were left to outside experts, whom Rosenstiel had learned early in his career were the best people for the job. When his company was still young, he had once trained five thousand parrots to say, “Drink Old Quaker” and then gave the birds to bartenders. (The campaign fizzled in all the disastrous ways one imagines it would.)”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“But things for Four Roses would eventually come full circle. In 1945, Four Roses had been a part of America’s most famous image of victory over Japan in World War II. A giant neon advertisement for the brand is present in the background of Alfred Eisenstadt’s Life magazine photo of a sailor and a woman kissing in Times Square during the celebration of the war’s end. Over the next decades, Japan was rebuilt and brought into the fold of worldwide economic integration. Today Four Roses is owned by Japan’s Kirin Brewery Company, another consortium that lovingly retooled the brand’s recipe to make it a straight whiskey and return it to respectability. In a twist of irony, Kirin today happens to sit under Mitsubishi, the global conglomerate that made the A6M Zero fighter planes used by kamikaze pilots in the war that the Life magazine couple had just endured when caught by Eisenstadt in the middle of their kiss.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“In 1905, the ASL’s strategy started reaching a groundswell when it effortlessly ousted Ohio governor Myron Herrick, a Republican who had been elected just two years earlier with the largest plurality in the state’s history. Ohio started going dry. “Never again,” Wheeler crowed, “will any political party ignore the protests of the church and the moral forces of the state.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“The crosshairs also found their way onto other minorities. Temperance was a way to control the Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish immigrants who had been arriving since the Civil War. Rural Republican strongholds like Wheeler’s Ohio feared these immigrants landing in coastal cities, taking up all the jobs, and then voting for Democratic candidates who were backed by political machines.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Wiley’s enemies hired investigators to comb through his trash looking for anything that could discredit him. The reformer responded publicly by claiming he was the “target of a veritable fusillade of poisoned arrows from every track journal, newspaper and magazine which the adulterating interests could control.” Then he put the crusade in simpler terms: “I have stood always for food that is food.” Wiley was good at the clean sound bites. He announced that it was a “sin to be sick,” and that adulterated foods were cheating people from achieving sound mind and body. He called his critics “the hosts of Satan” and said that his own efforts were “a struggle for human rights as much as the Revolution or the Civil War. A battle for the privilege of going free of robbery and with a guarantee of health. It has been and is a fight for the individual right against the vested interest, of the man against the dollar.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Henry George had warned of back in 1879 in his book Progress and Poverty, which claimed that the Industrial Revolution’s advancements in wealth and comfort had come at the expense of the working class.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“The julep’s difficulty and the commitment it requires are part of its appeal. One cool gulp of the minty sweet liquid on a hot day makes up for everything the drink demands. Anticipation is part of the julep’s genius—like Miles Davis playing trumpet on “All Blues,” coming into the song when he’s good and ready, knowing that waiting is just as important to the music as the next phrase. Juleps epitomize the concept of patience.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey