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  • Whisky History Part 3

    • 06/17/2016
    • ADB
    • 0 Comments

    In our final Mea Culpa for missing World Whisky Day, we bring our dear readers up to the present.

     

    So, where is whisky today? In Ireland, from the hundreds of distilleries once licensed, there are now just four. Brands such as Tullamore DEW, Jameson and Bushmills still enjoy international acclaim, but the Fates, on the whole, have not been kind to Irish ‘whiskey’, which continues to come in a poor second to Guinness in the Irish national psyche. There are some stirrings of revival, suggestions that a handful of smaller boutique distilleries may soon open up. But there is a lot of work to be done.

    Over in the States, meanwhile, there are no such problems. A small core of larger distilleries has now been joined by a growing number of micro distilleries, and the longstanding success of bourbon has now been joined by the revival of rye whisky, while American blends also continue to sell well. Across the world, too, whisky distilleries have opened up over recent decades. Japanese whisky is long established, but perhaps less well known are the distilleries in Sweden, Wales, England, Germany, Australia, India and Brazil. These days everybody wants to distill a dram.

    But if there is one winner in the world whisky boom, it must surely be Scotch. Scotch, perhaps more than any other drink, has become the global symbol for refinement, arguably trumping even champagne in the status symbol stakes. Even James Bond reaches for a 50-year-old bottle of Macallan in Skyfall.

    Between 2010 and 2011, exports of Scotch whisky totaled an astonishing £4.23 billion. It was the seventh year-on-year increase for the industry, and a 62% increase in exports over four years. In 2011 there were even reports that a surge in demand among a new, image-conscious, affluent middle class in the far east could lead to a global shortage. Meanwhile, the Scotch Whisky Association, the body which promotes the Scotch industry, has claimed that the industry earns £125 a second for the UK economy.

    All of which seems a far cry from the days of illicit stills hidden in the bracken. But that’s unlikely to be anything that whisky lovers will lose any sleep over.

    Of war and whisky – an American tale featuring George Washington

    Across the Atlantic a new nation was born as the 18th century waned. A brave new world beckoned. And you might say it tasted of whisky.

    Whisky wasn’t the first spirit to be distilled in North America – early colonials had first tried their hand at applejack, and before the war, rum had been the thing. But revolution brought more than just political change. “Rum was very cheap and very alcoholic, and that’s primarily what people are looking for. So before the revolution, it was very, very popular,” explains Dr Dennis Pogue, author of Founding Spirits: George Washington and the beginnings of the American whisky industry. “What happened over the course of the war, of course, is that trade with the British Caribbean was interrupted, and then after the war the United States has broken off, so the price of rum that is bought in from the Caribbean increases.” As the price of rum went up, so its popularity went down. But early Americans were nothing if not resourceful. If they didn’t have huge quantities of sugar and molasses, what they did have, suddenly, was access to vast expanses of land – land that was ideal for growing grain, grain that was ideal for making whisky. “Whisky had been made for a long time here, of course – folks are coming from Europe, and they’re bringing with them their skills – but it’s about the economics,” Pogue says. “It’s not until after the Revolution that the economics of whisky really begin to favor it and so it takes off.” By 1810, there were an astonishing 3,500 distilleries in Virginia alone.

    Unfortunately, as in Britain, a booming whisky industry was too great a temptation for the national treasury to ignore. Faced with huge war debts and no obvious way of paying them off, George Washington was persuaded to levy a tax on the most widely produced luxury good in the land – and whisky once again became a standard for rebellion. Tax collectors were literally tarred and feathered. Those who paid had their barns burnt and stills destroyed. Violent resistance was urged. There were whispers of revolution, talk of a split from the United States. Just 15 years after the Declaration of Independence, and for the first and only time in American history, the President called out troops against his compatriots.

    In the event, it was all a bit of an anti-climax. The rebels capitulated before a shot was fired and the so-called ‘Whisky Rebellion’ collapsed bloodlessly. But it was an extraordinary incident in the early history of the United States, and testament to the growing economic importance of whisky.

       Tax collectors were tarred and feathered. Those who paid had their barns burnt and stills destroyed. Violent resistance was urged

     

    The popularity of whisky continued to rise over the course of the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic. In The Book of Bourbon, Gaz and Mardee Haidin Regan explain some of the factors behind its success in the US. Yes, 19 Century technology made liquor sales soar. The renown of Kentucky Bourbon was rising, the railways offered an easy means of transportation, and telegraph enabled saloons to order in new barrels quickly and easily to meet demand. The Civil War also had an impact. On the one hand, it tore apart the whisky-producing states of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Maryland, disrupting the industry and ultimately leading to the closure of many distilleries. On the other, whisky and war went hand in hand. Years earlier, George Washington had advocated the creation of national distilleries to keep the army supplied with essential rations of whisky, and now the Civil War saw army-issue whisky administered to soldiers on both sides, introducing a whole new generation to the liquor. Whisky was also often the only anesthetic and antiseptic available for treating the severed limbs and gunshot wounds of the battlefield. To ensure it was able to buy up whisky reserves, Regan and Regan explain, the Confederacy even introduced a temporary prohibition in many states. The result was a surge in the value of whisky – from around 25 cents a gallon in late 1860 to around $35 in 1863. As in Scotland and Ireland, it was an illicit distiller’s market.

    With his ruthless quashing of the ‘Whisky Rebellion’, George Washington has occasionally been portrayed as a bastion against the demon drink. It may come as a surprise to some, then, to learn that, at the time of his death, Washington himself was quite possibly America’s largest distiller of whisky.

    In 2010, Dr Dennis Pogue supervised an excavation at the Mount Vernon estate, where Washington lived out his retirement, which revealed the foundations of a distillery. That in itself was not unusual – it has long been known that Washington had distilled. What was surprising was the size of the operation. “It wasn’t until we started doing our research and looking at the context that we determined that it was one of the largest whisky distilleries at the time in the country,” Pogue says. By 1799, the year of his death, Washington was producing around 11,000 gallons of whisky a year. And yes, he was paying due taxes on it all.

    The project was the brainchild of James Anderson, Washington’s Scottish plantation manager, and began late in Washington’s career. Typically of American whisky, Washington’s spirit was distilled predominantly from rye, with smaller amounts of corn and malted barley. And typically for most 18th-century whisky, it was un-aged. Thanks to the discovery of recipes from the distillery, Pogue and his colleagues have been able to recreate Washington’s clear whisky. “You get the natural flavors from the grain coming through, and so it’s very distinctive. It’s kind of spicy, but it’s got a very floral nose to it,” Pogue says. “Some of the distillers we worked with actually characterized it as tasting like brand new tequila.”

    Now, for a final word, we return to the Irish…

    The history of Irish whisky is, according to Heidi Donelon, a story “punctuated with heartbreak, disasters, poor decision-making and a lot of bad luck.”

    It all started well enough. With a strong monastic tradition, Ireland was a centre of culture and learning in the medieval Christian world and it is now widely believed that the first whiskies were distilled there. As a major trading port, Dublin also had a history of dealing in the wine and spirit trade. Yet, Donelon argues, the early whisky industry was hampered by high excises, which frequently ran distilleries out of business. The industry recovered in the 19th century, only for Aeneas Coffey’s continuous still to catapult Scotch into the stratosphere. In 1838, teetotalism crept across Ireland as the charismatic monk Father Mathew converted around five million of his compatriots to a life of sobriety. Shortly after came the potato blight, bringing with it mass starvation and emigration. In 1916, the push for Irish independence began in earnest, leading to the partition of the country, and Donelon says, economic collapse. 1919 then saw the introduction of Prohibition, closing off the US export market. And when that came to an end in 1932, a trade war between Britain and Ireland broke out, resulting in high tariffs on all Irish exports to the Commonwealth. “Everything just happened within a very short time for the Irish,” Donelon says. Internal political divisions didn’t help much either. Many of the great Irish distilling families were Protestant. “They found themselves in financial difficulties, because of Prohibition and everything that had gone on, and they got no help whatsoever from the Irish government to see them through the difficult times. There was no political will to help these distilling families that were regarded as having been on the wrong side of the divide.”

    Today, the Irish whisky industry is a fraction of the size of that of Scotland, but Donelon says it continues to punch above its weight, describing it as “one of the few truly performing industries in Ireland” and she implores the Irish government and media to do more to promote the industry. Her Ireland Whiskey Trail, a tourism initiative which aims to celebrate the history and raise the profile of Irish whisky is a start, having received backing from three major Irish distillers – the first time, she says, that there has been cross-industry cooperation between distilleries. “The idea is to get Irish people themselves – never mind all the tourists – interested in this heritage that we have. Because I find an awful lot of Irish people know more about wine than they do about Irish whiskey, and that’s a terrible shame.”

    To find out more about Ireland’s whisky heritage, visit www.irelandwhiskeytrail.com.

    Exchanging pedantries

    You say pot-ay-to, I say pot-ah-to. You write whiskey, I write whisky. It seems there are few things as divisive and guaranteed to agitate as a minor and wholly trivial difference in spelling convention. Refer to Scotch whiskey or American whisky in an online forum and you can be sure you will be informed of your ‘mistake’. However, while it is the convention to refer to Scotch, Canadian whisky and ‘others’ without an ‘e’ and to Irish and American variants with an ‘e’, the distinction is fairly recent and entirely artificial. In fact the ‘e’ variant spelling of Irish ‘whiskey’ was, according to Heidi Donelon, first introduced in the second half of the 19th century by the big Dublin distillers to differentiate their product not from Scotch, but from rural Irish competitors. The Cork Distilleries Company, which produced the ‘Paddy’ brand among others, only added the ‘e’ in the early 1960s.

    Oh my, that was nearly 2 thousand words today alone. Better sit and have a drink.

    Until tomorrow…

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Whisky History Part 3

In our final Mea Culpa for missing World Whisky Day, we bring our dear readers up to the present.

 

So, where is whisky today? In Ireland, from the hundreds of distilleries once licensed, there are now just four. Brands such as Tullamore DEW, Jameson and Bushmills still enjoy international acclaim, but the Fates, on the whole, have not been kind to Irish ‘whiskey’, which continues to come in a poor second to Guinness in the Irish national psyche. There are some stirrings of revival, suggestions that a handful of smaller boutique distilleries may soon open up. But there is a lot of work to be done.

Over in the States, meanwhile, there are no such problems. A small core of larger distilleries has now been joined by a growing number of micro distilleries, and the longstanding success of bourbon has now been joined by the revival of rye whisky, while American blends also continue to sell well. Across the world, too, whisky distilleries have opened up over recent decades. Japanese whisky is long established, but perhaps less well known are the distilleries in Sweden, Wales, England, Germany, Australia, India and Brazil. These days everybody wants to distill a dram.

But if there is one winner in the world whisky boom, it must surely be Scotch. Scotch, perhaps more than any other drink, has become the global symbol for refinement, arguably trumping even champagne in the status symbol stakes. Even James Bond reaches for a 50-year-old bottle of Macallan in Skyfall.

Between 2010 and 2011, exports of Scotch whisky totaled an astonishing £4.23 billion. It was the seventh year-on-year increase for the industry, and a 62% increase in exports over four years. In 2011 there were even reports that a surge in demand among a new, image-conscious, affluent middle class in the far east could lead to a global shortage. Meanwhile, the Scotch Whisky Association, the body which promotes the Scotch industry, has claimed that the industry earns £125 a second for the UK economy.

All of which seems a far cry from the days of illicit stills hidden in the bracken. But that’s unlikely to be anything that whisky lovers will lose any sleep over.

Of war and whisky – an American tale featuring George Washington

Across the Atlantic a new nation was born as the 18th century waned. A brave new world beckoned. And you might say it tasted of whisky.

Whisky wasn’t the first spirit to be distilled in North America – early colonials had first tried their hand at applejack, and before the war, rum had been the thing. But revolution brought more than just political change. “Rum was very cheap and very alcoholic, and that’s primarily what people are looking for. So before the revolution, it was very, very popular,” explains Dr Dennis Pogue, author of Founding Spirits: George Washington and the beginnings of the American whisky industry. “What happened over the course of the war, of course, is that trade with the British Caribbean was interrupted, and then after the war the United States has broken off, so the price of rum that is bought in from the Caribbean increases.” As the price of rum went up, so its popularity went down. But early Americans were nothing if not resourceful. If they didn’t have huge quantities of sugar and molasses, what they did have, suddenly, was access to vast expanses of land – land that was ideal for growing grain, grain that was ideal for making whisky. “Whisky had been made for a long time here, of course – folks are coming from Europe, and they’re bringing with them their skills – but it’s about the economics,” Pogue says. “It’s not until after the Revolution that the economics of whisky really begin to favor it and so it takes off.” By 1810, there were an astonishing 3,500 distilleries in Virginia alone.

Unfortunately, as in Britain, a booming whisky industry was too great a temptation for the national treasury to ignore. Faced with huge war debts and no obvious way of paying them off, George Washington was persuaded to levy a tax on the most widely produced luxury good in the land – and whisky once again became a standard for rebellion. Tax collectors were literally tarred and feathered. Those who paid had their barns burnt and stills destroyed. Violent resistance was urged. There were whispers of revolution, talk of a split from the United States. Just 15 years after the Declaration of Independence, and for the first and only time in American history, the President called out troops against his compatriots.

In the event, it was all a bit of an anti-climax. The rebels capitulated before a shot was fired and the so-called ‘Whisky Rebellion’ collapsed bloodlessly. But it was an extraordinary incident in the early history of the United States, and testament to the growing economic importance of whisky.

   Tax collectors were tarred and feathered. Those who paid had their barns burnt and stills destroyed. Violent resistance was urged

 

The popularity of whisky continued to rise over the course of the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic. In The Book of Bourbon, Gaz and Mardee Haidin Regan explain some of the factors behind its success in the US. Yes, 19 Century technology made liquor sales soar. The renown of Kentucky Bourbon was rising, the railways offered an easy means of transportation, and telegraph enabled saloons to order in new barrels quickly and easily to meet demand. The Civil War also had an impact. On the one hand, it tore apart the whisky-producing states of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Maryland, disrupting the industry and ultimately leading to the closure of many distilleries. On the other, whisky and war went hand in hand. Years earlier, George Washington had advocated the creation of national distilleries to keep the army supplied with essential rations of whisky, and now the Civil War saw army-issue whisky administered to soldiers on both sides, introducing a whole new generation to the liquor. Whisky was also often the only anesthetic and antiseptic available for treating the severed limbs and gunshot wounds of the battlefield. To ensure it was able to buy up whisky reserves, Regan and Regan explain, the Confederacy even introduced a temporary prohibition in many states. The result was a surge in the value of whisky – from around 25 cents a gallon in late 1860 to around $35 in 1863. As in Scotland and Ireland, it was an illicit distiller’s market.

With his ruthless quashing of the ‘Whisky Rebellion’, George Washington has occasionally been portrayed as a bastion against the demon drink. It may come as a surprise to some, then, to learn that, at the time of his death, Washington himself was quite possibly America’s largest distiller of whisky.

In 2010, Dr Dennis Pogue supervised an excavation at the Mount Vernon estate, where Washington lived out his retirement, which revealed the foundations of a distillery. That in itself was not unusual – it has long been known that Washington had distilled. What was surprising was the size of the operation. “It wasn’t until we started doing our research and looking at the context that we determined that it was one of the largest whisky distilleries at the time in the country,” Pogue says. By 1799, the year of his death, Washington was producing around 11,000 gallons of whisky a year. And yes, he was paying due taxes on it all.

The project was the brainchild of James Anderson, Washington’s Scottish plantation manager, and began late in Washington’s career. Typically of American whisky, Washington’s spirit was distilled predominantly from rye, with smaller amounts of corn and malted barley. And typically for most 18th-century whisky, it was un-aged. Thanks to the discovery of recipes from the distillery, Pogue and his colleagues have been able to recreate Washington’s clear whisky. “You get the natural flavors from the grain coming through, and so it’s very distinctive. It’s kind of spicy, but it’s got a very floral nose to it,” Pogue says. “Some of the distillers we worked with actually characterized it as tasting like brand new tequila.”

Now, for a final word, we return to the Irish…

The history of Irish whisky is, according to Heidi Donelon, a story “punctuated with heartbreak, disasters, poor decision-making and a lot of bad luck.”

It all started well enough. With a strong monastic tradition, Ireland was a centre of culture and learning in the medieval Christian world and it is now widely believed that the first whiskies were distilled there. As a major trading port, Dublin also had a history of dealing in the wine and spirit trade. Yet, Donelon argues, the early whisky industry was hampered by high excises, which frequently ran distilleries out of business. The industry recovered in the 19th century, only for Aeneas Coffey’s continuous still to catapult Scotch into the stratosphere. In 1838, teetotalism crept across Ireland as the charismatic monk Father Mathew converted around five million of his compatriots to a life of sobriety. Shortly after came the potato blight, bringing with it mass starvation and emigration. In 1916, the push for Irish independence began in earnest, leading to the partition of the country, and Donelon says, economic collapse. 1919 then saw the introduction of Prohibition, closing off the US export market. And when that came to an end in 1932, a trade war between Britain and Ireland broke out, resulting in high tariffs on all Irish exports to the Commonwealth. “Everything just happened within a very short time for the Irish,” Donelon says. Internal political divisions didn’t help much either. Many of the great Irish distilling families were Protestant. “They found themselves in financial difficulties, because of Prohibition and everything that had gone on, and they got no help whatsoever from the Irish government to see them through the difficult times. There was no political will to help these distilling families that were regarded as having been on the wrong side of the divide.”

Today, the Irish whisky industry is a fraction of the size of that of Scotland, but Donelon says it continues to punch above its weight, describing it as “one of the few truly performing industries in Ireland” and she implores the Irish government and media to do more to promote the industry. Her Ireland Whiskey Trail, a tourism initiative which aims to celebrate the history and raise the profile of Irish whisky is a start, having received backing from three major Irish distillers – the first time, she says, that there has been cross-industry cooperation between distilleries. “The idea is to get Irish people themselves – never mind all the tourists – interested in this heritage that we have. Because I find an awful lot of Irish people know more about wine than they do about Irish whiskey, and that’s a terrible shame.”

To find out more about Ireland’s whisky heritage, visit www.irelandwhiskeytrail.com.

Exchanging pedantries

You say pot-ay-to, I say pot-ah-to. You write whiskey, I write whisky. It seems there are few things as divisive and guaranteed to agitate as a minor and wholly trivial difference in spelling convention. Refer to Scotch whiskey or American whisky in an online forum and you can be sure you will be informed of your ‘mistake’. However, while it is the convention to refer to Scotch, Canadian whisky and ‘others’ without an ‘e’ and to Irish and American variants with an ‘e’, the distinction is fairly recent and entirely artificial. In fact the ‘e’ variant spelling of Irish ‘whiskey’ was, according to Heidi Donelon, first introduced in the second half of the 19th century by the big Dublin distillers to differentiate their product not from Scotch, but from rural Irish competitors. The Cork Distilleries Company, which produced the ‘Paddy’ brand among others, only added the ‘e’ in the early 1960s.

Oh my, that was nearly 2 thousand words today alone. Better sit and have a drink.

Until tomorrow…

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