American whiskey production and consumption — from the animal kingdom to Prohibition to today’s boom.
Histories of alcohol consumption usually begin in the animal world; histories of alcohol production begin in the ancient one. By the time it reached the American colonies, drink was woven into daily life — the Mayflower carried barrels of beer in its hold, considered safer than water. By 1830, the average American over 15 drank the equivalent of some 88 bottles of whiskey a year.
The oft-repeated story credits the first bourbon — a mash of at least 51% corn — to the Reverend Elijah Craig, around 1789 in Georgetown, Kentucky. More likely, Kentucky whiskey was first distilled around 1774 at Fort Harrod. Settlers used methods brought from Scotland and Ireland, but with a New World twist: corn, unknown to Europeans before Columbus, grew easily in Kentucky soil, and surplus corn became whiskey.
The name is easier to trace than the drink. One of Kentucky’s original nine counties was Bourbon County, named for the French royal family. Whiskey shipped from Limestone, a port in Bourbon County, down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans — and the name traveled with it.
Whiskey was tangled with American politics from the start — the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s was a fight over exactly the kind of excise tax that still funds the Treasury today. Through the 1800s the industry expanded, brands and distilleries multiplied, and temperance movements gathered force in waves across the century.
The 18th Amendment launched national Prohibition in 1920. A handful of distilleries survived by producing medicinal whiskey under federal license — among them the makers behind Old Forester, the Geo. T. Stagg Distillery (later Buffalo Trace), Stitzel (later Stitzel-Weller), and James E. Pepper. Bootleggers like George Remus made fortunes in the shadows. The 21st Amendment repealed it all on December 5, 1933.
Jack Daniel’s sits in Moore County, Tennessee — a dry county, despite being home to the oldest registered distillery in the United States.
After the hard times of the 1950s through the 1990s came the modern revival. Japanese enthusiasm from the 1970s onward helped keep the category alive; by 2018, production reached its highest level since 1972, and exports had tripled in volume and value since 1997.