Bourbon: “We’ve been getting it wrong”

Bourbon experts in Kentucky are questioning whether long-held beliefs on what the drink is and how it has developed are actually correct.

And they are pointing to a growing stack of evidence and concluding: “We’ve been getting our bourbon story wrong.”

Among the leading exponents of these views is Chris Morris, master distiller at Woodford Reserve, who takes a keen interest in the history of bourbon. He says new evidence overwhelmingly supports the view that many of the assumptions about bourbon are inaccurate.

“These documents have come to light because people have been clearing out their attics and selling archive material on eBay without realising its value and we’ve been able to get hold of it,” he says. “And it seems that we’ve just been getting it wrong.”

Even the origin of the bourbon name itself is being questioned – a highly contentious and sensitive issue in the state of Kentucky, where most bourbon distilleries are based and from where the name has long been thought to originate.

It’s long been assumed the drink got its name because although no whiskey has ever been made in Bourbon County, Kentucky, whiskey was sent down the the Kentucky, Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the South having been loaded on to boats at Limestone port in Bourbon County.

The long held view is that the word ‘Bourbon’ was stamped on the cask to mark the port of departure, and that the name Bourbon whiskey stuck.

“But documents say otherwise,” says Morris. “There were lots of ports and anyway, when the boats reached Louisville the barrels had to be carried off and rolled by land because of the falls at that point of the river.

“They were reloaded in another port, so it’s just as likely that they would have been stamped with the world ‘Louisville whiskey’ or after one of the counties way down the river.

“They were taken down to New Orleans by French boats where they were sold as brandy made with corn. From there the whiskey was transported by sea to cities in the North, and by that time had become a red-coloured whiskey rather than the clear whiskey which was originally was sent out.

“It’s very possible that the name came therefore not from Bourbon County but Bourbon Street in New Orleans.”

Morris says there are big question marks over the origins of charring new oak casks for whiskey making. Various stories exist of casks being ‘fired’ to remove the remains of what the cask used to contain, or of the likes of Elijah Craig frugally making use of casks damaged but not destroyed by fire. Documents show that these theories are off mark, too.

“If you take a stave of American oak, dry it and then try to shape it for making a barrel then you’d have to be Hercules to bend it, and even if you managed it, it would snap,” says Morris.

“So heat was used to make the wood more pliable and that would be done over fires. If some of the wood got burnt in the process, well, who cares? Charcoal didn’t affect taste or do any harm. They never even thought about it very much and it was only when they got asked for red whiskey that it started getting shipped out as such in 1830.”

Such claims are highly controversial and have been rejected by some, but Morris has a track record of successfully challenging long-held views that are inaccurate.

He was one of the first to challenge the widely held view that Oscar Pepper and James Crow invented modern bourbon and the sour mash process on the site where Woodford Reserve now has its distillery, or that oak used for bourbon barrels must be American, and that limestone water must be used in the production process.