US Law requiring New Oak

[fwrightson]

Can anyone point me to when the US changed its law requiring American whisky to be aged in new oak?

[AdamMY]

Can anyone point me to when the US changed its law requiring American whisky to be aged in new oak?

That's not a requirement for American whiskey. Unless you mean Bourbon, which I do not know when the law was changed, I somehow believed when bourbon was created as a style that was considered a defining characteristic of the style.

America does have more styles of whiskey than just bourbon, and I believe most of them do not require that only new oak barrels are used. In fact I can think of at least one Distillery that produces both Bourbon, and what they call Kentucky Whiskey, the latter being in my understanding very similar to the first but is aged at least in part in refilled barrels. (That distillery is Early Times).

[whiskgeek]

I believe that Bourbon and Tennessee Whiskey are the two forms of American whiskey that have a list of strict regulations. They both require aging in new, charred barrels, and have for quite some time, as far as I know.