Bourbon Empire (11 page)

As for Kentucky, the war put the state’s whiskey industry in a precarious position. By that point, its natural advantages were obvious: it was well placed for distribution, its reputation was growing, and it was strongly associated with the catchy name that was increasingly used for a distinctive style of whiskey. However, three years of raiding and battle had reduced the number of distilleries in the state by half, down to about 150, according to some estimates.

Nevertheless, the thinned-out competition during a period when large producers were already pushing aside smaller ones helped ease the way for the “bourbon aristocracy” of names and successful brands that would come after the war—Dant, Pepper, Pogue, Taylor, and Wathen. The fortunes of those families, however, would forever be subject to a new whiskey tax that Lincoln revived in 1862 to pay for the war. Such taxes had been overturned by Jefferson in 1802 and were briefly reinstated between 1813 and 1817 to pay debts caused by the War of 1812. Lincoln’s tax started at twenty cents per proof gallon (a gallon of 100-proof whiskey). As the cost of war increased, however, so did the tax, climbing by steady increments until it reached two dollars by 1865. Once the southern states returned to the Union after the war, they were also subject to the levy.

Thus was born the moonshiner, a new kind of war, and bourbon’s black sheep cousin.

 • • • 

When Confederate soldier Amos Owens returned to North Carolina after the war and learned that his only slave had been freed, he vowed never to pay the whiskey tax. Owens had nearly died in a Union prison camp and harbored a lingering resentment of Yankees. Returning to a broken South back under Federal control, he was confronted by this new whiskey tax, as well as other new legislation Congress had passed during the absence of obstructive southern delegations: a transcontinental railroad, higher-education support, the abolition of slavery, a national
currency, and the Homestead Act. The war was over, but not all the fighting, and Owens “registered a blood red oath that this tax he’d never pay.”

Owens’s life as a moonshiner and his battles with law enforcement would become the stuff of legend. His court appearances were dramatic affairs, covered widely in the press, and he would create the archetype of the backwoods moonshiner. The newly established Bureau of Internal Revenue Service enforced the whiskey tax and, with four thousand employees, was instantly the largest single department in the U.S. government. Agents were deputized to find and punish tax evaders like Owens, relative smallholders dwarfed by an expanding segment of the whiskey industry that was growing more consolidated and industrial (and thus easier to tax).

Distilling in the isolated hollows of Appalachia and other rural areas had changed little since the days of the Whiskey Rebellion. The “benefits” of economic, cultural, and technological shifts often arrive at such places last, while the disadvantages of those same changes unfortunately arrive there first. In the hills, older methods of making whiskey continued: small stills, sweet mashes, minimal or no aging.

Even though the quality of these spirits no doubt varied widely, genius occasionally made an appearance. A few moonshiners earned legendary reputations as master craftsmen whose “white lightning” inspired the noble traditions of country life. They made spirits for their personal circles, caring more about the quality of their product than a farmer-distiller selling whiskey as a bulk commodity to a wholesaler might. Even though an exceptional unaged whiskey is a difficult endeavor, a few were able to pull it off—a fleeting miracle of the woods.

But many others, preoccupied with evading the law and turning a profit, quickly turned to cheap shortcuts. They abandoned pricey copper pot stills for sheet metal, which doesn’t remove sulfur compounds as well as copper does. Copper bonds with the sulfur, limiting compounds like hydrogen sulfide (which makes rotten eggs smell) and dimethyl trisulfide (which tastes like rotten vegetables). Moonshiners would mimic the effects of aging by adding charcoal to the jug and shaking it.
Or they’d just put sawdust in a tobacco pouch—like a hillbilly tea bag—and place it in the whiskey. Some aged their hooch in small three-gallon pickle barrels.

Ingredients also suffered. Moonshiners quickly began swapping grain for cheap sugarjack, a low-quality grade of sugar, which produces a high yield of very low-quality alcohol. Some used hog feed, a cheaper grain more likely to be infected with things like ergot, a parasitic fungus that can cause hallucinations and seizures.

Cities had their own moonshining problems, often worse than the rural enclaves more frequently but erroneously associated with moonshine culture. In 1867, a detachment of marines was sent to Philadelphia to smash illegal distilleries. And in 1869, marines sent to Brooklyn to dismantle illegal distilleries were beaten off by a mob. But regardless of bootlegging’s urban infestations, the image of rural moonshiners stuck in the nation’s mind. For some it was simply a way of life—they were dirt poor and just trying to get along as they always had. But for others, like Amos Owens, moonshining was also an act of defiance. He came from a line of Scotch-Irish distillers dating back to a grandfather who had fought at the battle of Kings Mountain, and the tax no doubt dredged up comparisons to Ireland’s whiskey wars and America’s Whiskey Rebellion. Owens, a former slave owner, declared with no self-reflection whatsoever that his freedom was hampered by a federal government denying his right to turn crops into “legal tender.” To him, moonshining was just carrying on the proud tradition of his blockading ancestors practicing their “inalienable right” to make a living from their land.

Point taken, but moonshining in another sense was also defiance for the sake of defending the status quo, resisting the inescapable changes of a war that would transform America. During the early 1870s, a North Carolina division of the Ku Klux Klan, another group dedicated to preserving the status quo, teamed up with moonshiners—united in their hatred of the government—to intimidate revenue collectors and government informants. In Pickens County, Georgia, twenty-seven moonshiners formed an order called “the Honest Man’s Friend and Protector.” They adopted the same hoods and gowns of the KKK, only in black instead of
white, and would occasionally set fire to the homes of their neighbors. The period of moonshiner resistance to government in postbellum Georgia is sometimes called the “Georgia Moonshine Wars,” and by some estimates was responsible for more than three-quarters of federal court cases. It was the fallout of a nation in transition.

 • • • 

There are few more compelling portraits of the Civil War’s aftermath than those provided by today’s whiskey bottles: their labels, how they are arranged at the liquor store, who owns them, and their marketing. They are a collective symbol that can be interpreted to reveal the rifts that once divided a nation, and how those injuries continue to heal. They show how we remember, and how we forget.

An age-old hierarchy at the liquor store is determined by what shelf a brand occupies. The choicest brands are on top—the position of dominance and prestige—and from there everything else trickles down. Like all pecking orders, this arrangement is not always fair. Today’s bottom shelf is the home of the moonshine, or “white whiskey,” as it’s sometimes called. It’s often sold in Mason jars or ceramic crocks, as if a bootlegger running from the law just delivered it by moonlight. Of course, this isn’t real moonshine—it is made by legitimate, taxpaying companies. Much of it is just a gimmick, inexpensive vodka dressed up with a different label to capitalize on moonshine’s romantic outlaw appeal. This Disneyesque marketing simply gives faux-moonshine’s façade the same feel as a Confederate flag bumper sticker or those T-shirts featuring Che Guevara as a mascot for World Revolution, Inc. What isn’t vodka is usually white dog: unaged whiskey made from quality grains instead of the cheap sugarjack used in most real moonshine. White whiskey is mostly sold by young, cash-strapped distilleries hungry for quick revenue without accruing any additional aging expenses. Surprisingly, white whiskey often costs more than superior aged whiskies—hillbilly heritage sold for
Beverly Hillbillies
prices. This is because young distilleries have relatively higher overhead costs and smaller economies of scale than their more established counterparts. In a way, the high price tags
are aspirational—the white whiskey will support the young distilleries’ eventual transition to aged whiskey as they emerge from their isolated backwaters and climb to higher rungs of the liquor store’s social ladder.

Sitting above the faux-moonshine is Jack Daniel’s, a brand symbolic of a long-running interstate rift. Jasper Newton “Jack” Daniel was from Tennessee, a state that once wasted no love for its northern Kentucky neighbor that originally supported the Confederacy but pragmatically reversed course and joined the Union. As a brand today, Jack Daniel’s emphatically asserts that it is
not
bourbon. It technically qualifies, and could be labeled as bourbon if it wanted, but proudly uses the label “Tennessee Whiskey”
instead. The term is broadcast on the label in huge letters trumpeting the brand’s state pride.

While the taste of Jack is very similar to bourbon, and the methods and ingredients used to make it are nearly identical, there is one big difference between the two whiskey styles. Before Tennessee whiskey is put in the barrel, it is filtered through a column of charred sugar maple to remove the young spirit’s rough edges. The practice is known as the Lincoln County Process, and it gives the whiskey a slightly smoky flavor alongside a glass-smooth texture and round sweetness. Contrary to popular belief, the Lincoln County Process doesn’t disqualify whiskey from being labeled as bourbon, but nonetheless helps set Tennessee whiskey apart since spirits labeled as bourbon tend not to use it.
*

Jack Daniel was born around 1850 (historians are unsure of the exact date) and for much of his career was known as a kind of wunderkind “boy distiller,” a reputation largely owing to the fact that he was barely five feet tall. He boosted both his height and his ego with high-heeled boots and commonly dressed to the nines in colorful vests, frock coats, and a wide-brimmed planter’s hat. When Daniel began his distilling career after the Civil War, his native Tennessee lay in ruins—only Virginia had seen more battles—and animosity toward the North ran high.

Kentucky’s relatively quick success in rebuilding its postwar whiskey industry could only have been watched by its southern neighbor with a mix of scorn and envy. Tennessee’s distillers considered the Kentuckians “proud, almost arrogant, about their whiskey,” according to Jack Daniel biographer Peter Krass. They increasingly used a snooty name associated with French royalty to describe their whiskey and were beginning to develop “the tradition and the name recognition Jack wanted for himself,” Krass writes. For an ambitious distiller like Daniel, the goal would be to build an equal reputation with something called Tennessee whiskey, not bourbon.

Jack Daniel’s today is often seen as a bit downmarket, the quaff of biker bars and a prop of Guns N’ Roses band photos. This is likely because the brand isn’t particularly expensive and its relative sweetness and low proof help it go down easy, just right for a shot. Critics today sometimes complain that its overpowering sweetness makes the drink one-dimensional and a little boring—this is perhaps a result of the Lincoln County Process adding sugars to the spirit while stripping it of certain chemical compounds and neutralizing acids that, if left in the distillate, might evolve into more nuanced flavors. But despite these critiques, Jack Daniel made respectable whiskey for his era. In his time he wasn’t always competing with whiskies that matched modern standards—the Lincoln County Process would have quickly given his whiskey a welcome smoothness and distinguished it from competing brands.

As Daniel built his company in the postwar years, sales of his brand slowly increased as the relationship between North and South improved. It wasn’t a huge brand back then, as it is often described today, but it was successful enough to afford Daniel a comfortable lifestyle. After Daniel’s death in 1911, the distillery fell under the control of his business partner, Lem Motlow, who successfully restarted it after Prohibition. Until the 1950s, however, the distillery spent very little money on advertising and was virtually unknown outside of Tennessee, aside from a small cult following that included luminaries such as William Faulkner and Winston Churchill (Churchill’s mother was American, and he greatly annoyed the Scots when he divulged his enjoyment of Jack instead of scotch).

Then, in 1956, Louisville’s Brown-Forman, the spirits company that still owns it today, bought Jack Daniel’s.
Time
magazine claimed it was the “ultimate compliment” that the bourbon titan, from a place many Tennesseans still scorned, could pay to the small distillery. The
Nashville Tennessean
was less happy about the acquisition, dredging up the bad blood between the border states by writing that Jack Daniel’s “never again will seem quite the same now that it has fallen into the hands of Kentuckians.”

But regardless of any lingering interstate resentment, Brown-Forman catapulted the brand’s success into the stratosphere. After the acquisition, it hired a man named Angelo Lucchesi as Jack Daniel’s first marketing agent. Lucchesi, who accidentally lost an arm in his dad’s sausage grinder as a youngster, was friends with Frank Sinatra and kept the singer supplied with the brand. One day while onstage, Sinatra raised a glass of the drink before his audience and called it “the nectar of the gods.” (When he died, the singer was even buried with a flask of it for his trip into the afterlife.) After the Brown-Forman acquisition, a bigger advertising budget—and no doubt Sinatra’s celebrity endorsement—boosted sales by 10 percent annually for two decades and then tripled them the decade after that. Although Jack Daniel’s might secretly envy the pedigree of bourbon, its staggering sales numbers—far beyond Jim Beam, the best-selling bourbon—probably help take the salt out of any lingering wounds.