Whiskey and the US: A new drink for a new nation

Whiskey and the US: A new drink for a new nation

The history of whiskey in the US can be obscure. We look at the story of the liquid in the country, and discover how it defeated rum as the drink of choice, started uprisings, was used to raise taxes, and had the presidential seal of approval

 

Image [by Maggie Kimberl]: Head distiller Steve Bashore at George Washington's Mount Vernon Distillery

History | 22 Oct 2024 | By Harry Brennan

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In 18th-century Scotland and Ireland, whisky was produced in small quantities for local consumption. In England, gin was taking off, its popularity boosted by the accession of jenever-drinking Dutchman William III. However, Scotch whisky was still making its way to the American colonies in this early form.

 

Cadwallader Colden was a prominent landowner, writer, and jurist, who moved from Scotland to New York. In 1722, William Keith wrote to Colden from his hometown of Kelso, Scotland: “I send you a square bottle of Usquebaugh just for a taste or prooff and desire your judgement of its Quality. Our stills are not yet set up, for the hard weather does not suffer our People to work…”

 

Colden was receiving ‘square bottles’ of whisky from his Scottish home, where colonial trade (largely via Clydeside) was already setting the scene for Glasgow’s imperial prosperity, and the later Scotch whisky boom.

 

Around this time, one Scotsman had a strong but largely unwitting effect on the growth of Scotch whisky. Daniel ‘Great’ Campbell (so named for his imposing height) was a powerful figure, whose career started with a mixture of legal trading and smuggling between Scotland and the American colonies. A supporter of the union with England, Campbell ended up a wealthy MP with a mansion (Shawfield) in up-and-coming Glasgow.

 

Despite this success, Campbell was blamed for the new Malt Tax in 1725. Its introduction made all brewing and distilling in Scotland more expensive, and an angry Glaswegian mob looted Campbell’s Shawfield mansion in response. The Malt Tax riots were only suppressed by General Wade’s intervention — the same Wade who would later suppress the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion.

The Glasgow Distillery's Malt Riot blended whisky

Glasgow Distillery has recently drawn on Campbell’s story, naming its blended malt expression Malt Riot. Its own summary of this history highlights the irony of Campbell’s legacy. Following the riots, Campbell bought an island (you know, for self-care). However, this wasn’t any old island — it was Islay. Campbell made the first proper maps of Islay, built roads, and helped farmers shift from growing bere to barley. In short, Campbell turned Islay into a place where modern distilling was feasible. His grandson (also called Daniel) rounded off these achievements by founding the island’s oldest distillery, Bowmore, in 1779. Campbell therefore ended up (unwittingly) supporting the development of Scotch whisky as we know it today (just in time for the American Revolution).

 

By the late 18th century, Scottish distilling was well-established at a local, homespun level, and many Scots had brought this knowledge with them to the American colonies. However, whiskey didn’t just take over the early United States all by itself — it actively took the place of rum. Rum was the New World drink. Like tobacco and cotton, rum was a product of slave labour and the ‘triangular trade’. Four sugar houses and rum distilleries were already established in Glasgow by 1701. By 1770, the average British colonist in continental America consumed three pints of rum per week: an amount roughly equivalent to the modern US’s consumption, despite then having only 1 per cent of today's population.

 

Rum had flaws. It was seen as inferior to more ‘refined’ drinks like brandy. There is a reason we associate rum with pirates such as Edward Teach (Blackbeard), who saw their heyday in the 1710s. Virginian planter William Byrd II (who founded the city of Richmond) dismissed rum as “low liquor”. Wealthy landowners and enslavers like Byrd did not want to be associated with poor rum drinkers, yet he made hefty profits selling rum to indigenous peoples, and taking advantage of them.

 

Beyond this kind of colonial violence, rum was also associated with slavery via its production. This link can also be seen in a letter Byrd wrote during the founding of Georgia. Envisioned as a new model colony, Georgia was supposed to be both slavery- and rum-free. Yet in 1736, Byrd wrote to John Perceval (one of the state’s founding trustees) claiming that excluding “rum & Negroes is cert[ain]ly very just… your colony of Georgia will be very happy.”

 

Despite such ideals, Georgia did not stay rum-free (or slavery-free) for long. Distilleries in the British colonies were producing nearly five million gallons of rum per year. However, the American Revolution changed everything: rum began to fall by the wayside. British sugar refiners stopped supplying the newly independent United States. By 1790, rum consumption per capita had fallen by a quarter; by 1800, domestic rum distilling was down by 50 per cent. Rum’s raw materials were being squeezed, all while slavery abolition gathered political momentum.

 

In this period of change and crisis, whiskey emerged as the new drink for a new nation. It was made from cereal crops grown in the US. No British merchants were required, no slavery was needed — just some domestic agricultural surplus.

Martha Washington' shopping list, paid with whiskey. Image courtesy of Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

This is why corn became prominent in early American whiskey, a trend that persists to this day in bourbon production. Thanks to centuries of indigenous cultivation and careful stewardship of the land, corn was abundant in early Ohio and Kentucky. In the older colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland, rye was more common for whiskey distilling. Meanwhile, Europeans saw corn as animal feed or peasant food: they did not make whisky with it.

 

Distilling was not a full-time industrial operation as it is today. Whiskey was made seasonally by farmers, and in small amounts. Whiskey took bulky, perishable grains and reduced them to a smaller volume of something shelf-stable (and popular). Even in the newly colonised landscape of 1780s Kentucky, without modern roads, canals, or railways, you could easily transport 50 gallons of whisky on horseback.

 

Whiskey’s mobility and reliability meant that it became the Appalachian frontier’s unofficial currency. In 1787, the Kentucky Gazette’s first editor told readers that whiskey would be accepted for subscription payments. This growing value of whiskey did not go unnoticed by the fledgling federal government. The drink became the target of one of the US’s first taxes, acts of government, and even military operations.

 

In 1791, the Whiskey Tax was introduced, representing the American government’s first serious attempt to pay off its US$45 million  of war debts (the equivalent of more than US$1.5bn today). Whiskey was going to pay for the country’s newfound independence.

 

Alexander Hamilton devised the tax, as alluded to in his eponymous musical: “Imagine what gon’ happen when you try to tax our whiskey.” He misunderstood whiskey’s role in the frontier economy, setting the tax too high, and demanding farmers pay in hard currency: 7c/gallon was too high, and whiskey effectively was the local currency. Hamilton’s levy on a luxury item now appeared as a steep income tax.

George Washington's Mount Vernon distillery was reopened in 2007. Photo by Maggie Kimberl

Worse still, larger distillers could simply pay a flat fee that did not scale with their higher level of production. Most notable among these larger producers was then-president George Washington. Despite calling drinking "the ruin of half the workmen in this Country", Washington’s distillery was the country’s largest when he died in 1799. Producing 11,000 gallons of whiskey per year, Washington’s distillery included six enslaved people in its workforce. Designed by Scotsman James Anderson, the facility produced double-distilled spirit using mashbills of approximately 60 per cent rye, 35 per cent corn, and 5 per cent malted barley. When 7,000 militiamen emerged from the mountains in 1794, demanding the Whiskey Tax be revoked, Hamilton and Washington crushed them with 13,000 federal troops. However, the rebels had their way in the end, as the tax was repealed within a decade. Ultimately, the nation’s first president died as its foremost distiller.

 

Little clear information survives from the small-scale distilling of this period, but we can make deductions about how the whiskey was matured. Wooden casks were the norm for all storage and transport, with dozens of sizes circulating the Atlantic, and giving us a bizarre mix of cask names still used today: barrique, puncheon, firkin, hogshead, and pipe.

 

Most whiskey produced in the early US was envisioned as a white spirit, not something to be deliberately aged. Washington collected his whiskey in 120-gallon (450L) oak barrels, but immediately sent it out for sale in uncharred 30-gallon casks. However, it follows that any whiskey not sold quickly was thus cask-aged by default. Also, ageing wines in casks was well understood, so distillers knew that oak would affect a whiskey’s flavour.

 

There were certainly port and madeira casks around. While Scottish farmers made whiskey on the American frontier, wealthy Scottish merchants traded wines. Port became incredibly popular between 1750 and 1780: in other words, just in time for the revolution. Madeira was even more popular, and Washington’s favourite for entertaining his guests. A third of foreign merchants trading on the island of Madeira were Scots, including half of the island’s largest exporters. These imported wine casks would have all been European oak, though how much specific port, madeira, sherry, or claret barrels were deliberately chosen for reuse is unclear.

 

Thanks to its early pioneers, American whiskey was here to stay, defined by local corn growing and Scottish distilling expertise.

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