As a relative newbie to the American whiskey scene, I am truly fascinated by the heritage of the brands, distilleries and those old pre-prohibition whiskey men (and women). I have a penchant for all things Americana and I love collecting artifacts that shaped who we are now as a nation. My original collecting sin was (and still is to a degree) vintage baseball cards for which I have deep admiration. My affection is not just for the cards but...
Being a marketing guy by trade, I really admire these old advertisements from National Distillers (circa July 1934). Create sense of urgency. Check. Weave a tale of romantic scarcity. Check. Create F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). Check. The only gaff by today’s standards is the typical wail of the modern ad agency client: “There’s way too much text. Nobody’s ever going to read all that.” Thanks, Internet....
Circa 1950, these Old Fiddles have been in the family for a while and I’m the current caretaker. Known for their “fiddle” shape, they were inspired by the song “My Old Kentucky Home” written by Stephen Foster. Bourbon doesn’t get any more Kentucky than this. Old Fiddle was a product of Bardstown Distillery out of, you guessed it, Bardstown, Kentucky. I don’t know much about this brand but I look forward...
After doing some of my typical Internet hunting I bring back to my whiskey tribe a beast of an article. Tom Eblen, from the Lexington Herald-Ledger, writes about cracking open his Old Barbee Whiskey and sharing it with longtime Wild Turkey master distiller Jimmy Russell. As it turns out, the bourbon came from the author, whose wife’s great-grandfather Herman Volkerding was president of the now long-gone Kentucky distillery that made it....
I thought I would go north of the border with this post and share my Lincoln Inn Old Rye Whiskey bottles. One is a full pint and the other is a 1/10th pint. The pint bottle has never been opened while the mini was consumed years ago. Either way, these are very neat bottles that came from the Distillers Corporation Limited, Montreal, Canada. The pint bottle shows up a lot on ebay because of the incredible embossing on the front and back. People...
This magazine ad from October 1934 sheds light on the fact that there was a lot of prohibition era whiskey left over after Repeal. Since we basically had to start from scratch aging American whiskey via the relatively few distilleries that survived, the only “good old stuff” was bottled before 1920 (aka pre-prohibition). What is interesting is a lot of the pre-prohibition whiskey was way over-aged and tasted like a burnt leather...
You know, it really doesn’t dawn on you that people could easily get whiskey during prohibition until you see the medicinal whiskey prescriptions and logs that were used during the time period. Meticulous records were required by the Treasury Department’s U.S. Prohibition Service similar to the FDA today. Just as some of the bottles of whiskey from this era survived, so did the actual prescriptions. At the Rose Melnick Medical...