Bourbon Empire (16 page)

When Pepper built his distillery in Lexington, the era’s engineers were impressed, noting the high quality of the remarkable volumes it produced. The plant earned him enough money that he could afford to spend much of his time living in New York City’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, traveling between Manhattan and Lexington in a private railcar. In December 1895, Pepper was invited to join America’s most famous business leaders for a banquet at Delmonico’s in New York to celebrate the centennial of the Jay Treaty, which had prevented another war with England shortly after the American Revolution. Each man took turns at the lectern to speak about his respective industry, Pepper discussing whiskey alongside John Jacob Astor (real estate), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Cornelius Vanderbilt (shipping), Charles Pillsbury (baking), Frederick Pabst (brewing), Charles Tiffany (jewelry), William Steinway (pianos), Francis du Pont (gunpowder), Levi Morton (banking), Pierre Lorillard (tobacco), Thomas Eckert (Western Union), and Philip Armour (meatpacking).

Some of Pepper’s racehorses were as well known as his whiskey, and many had names like The Bourbon and Pure Rye. The African American jockey Isaac Burns Murphy, a three-time Kentucky Derby winner and arguably one of the greatest jockeys of all time, rode his horse Mirage in one Derby race, and the society pages of the
New York Times
detailed Pepper’s many successes at the track. The paper also recorded his considerable losses—he was good at making whiskey and money, but he wasn’t very good at managing the latter. Bankruptcy had prompted the sale of his family’s distillery years earlier but Pepper always found a way to recover from such financial disasters, often by relying on the family fortune of his wife, Ella Offut Kean. He probably should have worked her into the business—during one financial low point that forced him to sell off a stable full of prize horses, Ella bought the horses cheap, restored their reputations by running and winning them, then sold them for a tidy profit.

Even after Pepper died in 1906, after taking a bad fall, his brand’s promotional flair lived on. In 1910, James E. Pepper Whisky was the backdrop of one of the twentieth century’s greatest sporting events. On July 4 of that year the boxer Jack Johnson fought Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevada, in a match famously known as the “Fight of the Century.” Johnson was the heavyweight champion of the world, the most famous athlete in the country, and highly controversial. He flaunted the era’s prejudices by bragging of his many relationships with white women (he married and divorced seven of them), and for a brief period he even had a white midget in his entourage.

When Johnson fought the formerly undefeated heavyweight champion Jeffries, the entire nation watched, at the peak of the Jim Crow era, as this African American battled a man whom many were calling the “Great White Hope.” James E. Pepper Whisky helped sponsor the fight, and old photos show “Born with the Republic” banners all over Reno.
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Perhaps sensing a promotional flair that rivaled its own, the Pepper brand backed the controversial Johnson, and in one advertisement, Johnson sits in a suit while surrounded by fans. He’s grinning broadly, with a bottle of James E. Pepper sitting next to him, raising his glass toward the photographer right before he went out to win the match and make history.

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The prominence of white men on bourbon bottles speaks to patriarchy. It’s not that women or minorities didn’t contribute to the history, they just don’t get the credit they deserve. Old photos of distilleries often show women and African Americans working on the bottling lines and stirring the mash tubs—they were the people actually
making
the whiskey, though rarely the ones who held the capital backing it. When their images did make it onto bottles, it was rarely flattering.

Sex sells, and the level of finesse with which it was employed in liquor advertising ran the gamut. Gin was still widely associated with the gutter life of the urban poor, and brands like Black Cock Vigor Gin, distributed by Lee Levy & Co., out of St. Louis, didn’t help the spirit’s image. A bottle of it cost only fifty cents, marked up from the twenty-seven cents it cost to make. The label featured a mostly nude white woman and one magazine described the flavor as having a “brief wave of heat as from a match, then a flash of sweetish, pungent, bitter vapor, which seemed to leave all the membranes of the throat covered with a lingering, nauseating mustiness.”

Today, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS, the whiskey industry’s main lobbying organ) organizes an industry code of responsible practices that liquor companies can voluntarily follow. Black Cock Vigor Gin almost certainly wouldn’t pass muster. When a company breaks the code today, it is scolded by its own, helping the industry police itself and avoid marketing missteps that erode its image, and therefore everybody’s bottom line.

But no such holds were barred at the intersection of the free-for-all Gilded Age and the dawn of modern advertising. Union Distilling Company’s Tippecanoe Kentucky Whiskey brand featured a voluptuous bare-breasted Indian maiden in a canoe. Another of the most popular advertisements of the 1890s came courtesy of Cincinnati’s Mayer Brothers & Co. Distillery. It featured a naked woman in a Middle Eastern harem, robed men hovering and panting in the background,
sharking their eyes in her direction.
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Mayer’s other handouts included a snuff box for its Hudson Whiskey brand, featuring the slogan “take a pinch.” Inside the box was another harem girl in an “odalisque” setting, with the tagline “beats ’em all for high balls.” This sets the tone for the wave of racy matchbooks, playing cards, and other giveaways that flooded bar counters.

The quality of the liquor often matched the tone of the advertising, but that didn’t mean top-shelf brands weren’t immune to general trends. Soon after James Pepper sold Old Crow to the New York financiers, Old Crow playing cards turned up in saloons, featuring two lingerie-clad hookers, smoking and giggling. An advertisement for I.W. Harper features a man on a couch playfully wrestling with a woman to get a bottle of whiskey she is holding just out of reach. The caption reads, “He won’t be happy ’till he gets it.” Another Harper ad shows a gown-wearing society woman above the poetic caption “Pull off my gown, and see the whiskey of greatest renown.” The flip side of the ad featured the nearly nude woman holding a bottle of I.W. Harper.

Whiskey advertising also saw a flourishing of “Belle” brands: Belle of Nelson, Belle of Lincoln, Belle of Anderson. The word’s French origins denote a combination of intelligence and beauty, and advertising for the Belle brands was much less risqué. Women wore typical Victorian garb: wide-brimmed hats, sashes, and long dresses with leg-o’-mutton sleeves. Occasionally, however, ankles would peek out from beneath the fabric, causing excitement. But even though women may have been drinking these brands, the advertising certainly wasn’t directed toward them. It simply made drinking a little more respectable for men, toning down the racy advertisements of other brands while keeping an appealingly sexual vibe. Alcohol-related violence was one of the many driving forces behind the temperance movement, and a few savvy advertisers
realized that slumming might be good for short-term profits, but it wasn’t a good long-term strategy.

African Americans fared no better than women in Gilded Age whiskey advertisements. They were often featured with the cartoonishly huge lips and exaggerated features of minstrel show performers. One Old Crow ad features a black man with the body of a monkey tap-dancing on top of a bottle. Another ad for rye whiskey shows a black man in the middle of a dirt road, a stolen chicken tucked under one arm and a watermelon under the other. He stares fretfully at a bottle of whiskey lying on the ground, unsure of which of his stolen wares he should drop in order to pick it up. The caption reads, “I’se in a perdickermunt.” Louisville’s Paul Jones Distillery—founded by a Kentucky Confederate family that lost its fortune in the Civil War—advertised its whiskey with a painting titled
The Temptation of St. Anthony
. It’s a picture of southern poverty, a small black boy sitting confused between his parents. His mother holds a giant watermelon and his father holds a bottle of Paul Jones. He doesn’t know which one to choose.

As blacks increasingly migrated north, abandoning jobs as poor farm laborers and taking roles as waiters, porters, and bellhops, advertising shifted to reflect the change. In 1911, Cream of Kentucky Bourbon began depicting blacks in service roles rather than as poor farm labor. Nevertheless, they’re still serving whites. In 1940, the brand commissioned Norman Rockwell, America’s beloved illustrator, to do one ad casting a white man and a black servant awkwardly aping the
Amos ’n’ Andy
show.

Other minorities were also typecast according to stereotypes. Chinese Americans were depicted with tiny slits for eyes and portrayed as the cheap labor used to build the railroads connecting the coasts and opening up the frontier.
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Chicago’s A. Bauer & Co. Distillery in the
1880s ran a popular advertisement set in the Wild West, featuring an Indian, a Chinese man, and a cowboy playing poker on a blanket. The Chinese man has won the pot with four aces just as the Indian lunges at him and the cowboy levels a six-shooter at his head. “Sam Toughnut’s Saloon” sits in the background, advertising four of Bauer’s rectified whiskies in the window. These are the brands that truly won the West.

Of course, by the time Bauer & Co. ran this ad, the frontier made famous by American lore was coming to a close, although it would continue to inspire whiskey advertising for ages to come. Mark Twain took notice of this fact when he spoofed a painting by Emanuel Leutze titled
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way
that today hangs in the U.S. Capitol.
It’s a portrait of pioneers facing a sunny western horizon illuminated by the Golden Gate into San Francisco Bay. In
Life on the Mississippi,
Twain, famous for always having a fun go at American self-importance, appropriated the painting’s title into “Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way.” He wrote, “The earliest pioneer of civilization is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary—but always whiskey!” Following the spirit’s path were poor immigrants, then the traders, gamblers, desperadoes, and highwaymen. Trailing that group came the lawyers and undertakers.

Bourbon, so adaptable, would likewise adjust its advertising to the shifting horizons of America’s growing empire. After the Spanish-American War erupted in 1898 and spread to fighting in the Philippines, one Cincinnati distillery began selling Dewey’s Old Manila Whiskey, named after navy admiral George Dewey, who was victorious at the battle of Manila Bay. Greenbriar Whiskey advertised that Dewey’s success at Manila wouldn’t have been possible without “Old Greenbriar,” and industry trade magazine
Bonfort’s Wine and Spirit Circular
debated why bourbon should not become the national drink of Cuba when American military forces became involved on that island. A few years later, as America’s presence increased around Panama, Edmund H.
Taylor Jr. suggested that the United States “Fortify the Canal Zone with Old Taylor.”

But in order for men like Taylor or his brands to fortify anything, they would first need to protect themselves against the fraudulent imitators threatening the labels they had so carefully created and emblazoned with their names in the first
place.

W
hen the Old Taylor Distillery was built in 1887, it was the most magnificent plant of its kind in Kentucky. It wasn’t the biggest, but it was an enchanting corollary to the typical factory-like operations of the era. The facility sat near James Crow’s old distillery on Glenns Creek, and was built of limestone to resemble the kind of medieval castle imagined in the pages of
Ivanhoe.
The springhouse was designed like a Roman bath, and Ionic columns held up pergolas that shaded visitors—who were welcomed, unlike at most distilleries—as they wandered sunken gardens and reflection pools. Visitors were all given free tenth pints of Old Taylor.

By the twenty-first century, however, the Old Taylor Distillery would sit in ruins. Engulfed by weeds, the distillery’s outbuildings resembled a lost city in the Amazon. Glass and rubble crunched beneath the feet of visitors willing to crawl through breaks in the barbed wire to wander the property, its likeness to an old castle enhancing the sense of an American industrial age that has gone the way of Carthage.

Dozens of similar ruins lie scattered across Kentucky and the other whiskey states, the casualties of constant and consistent waves of
industry consolidation.
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The legacies of those shuttered distilleries are long forgotten, but Old Taylor is an exception. Almost every single bottle of bourbon you buy today carries the fingerprints of its founder, Colonel Edmund H. Taylor Jr. He combined into one cohesive whole all the different parts of the new bourbon industry: marketing, finance, quality control, and lobbying. It was a battle, and the greatest threat he faced was from rectifiers counterfeiting brands like his that were attempting to build their reputations on quality. Taylor joined with other reformers looking to reverse Gilded Age excesses by establishing many of the labeling rules and consumer protection regulations still in place today. Together, they would all help the better angels prevail in their eternal struggle.

 • • • 

Born in 1830 to parents who had made their living as slave traders, Edmund Taylor was orphaned when they died young. His uncles raised him, including his great-uncle Zachary Taylor (the future U.S. president), and another uncle (also named Edmund) who lived in Lexington, Kentucky. His uncle Edmund was a banker, and Taylor followed him into that career. It’s a testament to bourbon’s nature as a business that two of today’s most exclusive brand lines—Colonel E.H. Taylor, Jr. and George T. Stagg—are named after men who worked primarily as bankers, focused on turning grain into money rather than just booze.

During the 1850s, Taylor traveled the Kentucky countryside opening bank branches for his uncle. There he became acquainted with James Crow and Oscar Pepper, whose Old Crow brand was just beginning to turn heads. It was the dawn of big brands, and growing distilleries struggled with how to finance construction upgrades and expansion projects. As a young man in his twenties looking to make his name, and
with a powerful banker as a surrogate father, Taylor found himself in the right place at the right time.

After Crow died in 1856, Oscar Pepper decided to continue making bourbon just as the doctor had, and still under the Crow name. By 1860, Old Crow couldn’t meet its demand, and Taylor stepped in to organize and finance Gaines, Berry, and Co., Distillers, which made and marketed Old Crow on a larger scale. When Oscar Pepper died in 1867, the firm gained the distillery, its whiskey stocks, and rights to the Old Crow brand name. This was also when Taylor adopted the fourteen-year-old James Pepper. Taylor had started in the whiskey business merely as a financier, but now he was in deeper.

Taylor’s acquisition of the Pepper distillery created a pattern he would use for the rest of his career, and a template much of the industry would soon follow. In 1870 he sold his interest in Gaines but continued to manage it. Then he helped finance and start an assortment of other distilleries. Taylor’s business portfolio soon became an elaborate network of distilleries he bought into and then sold out of. He’d start a company, define its strategy and tactics, and then contract roles like sales and distribution out to other firms. Partial interest in one place, full interest in another, Taylor’s roster of business partners soon became a complex web.

Taylor quickly found himself trapped in a labyrinth of his own devising. His file cabinet bulged at the seams with leasing agreements, contracts, and other financial pursuits—construction projects, speculative ventures—that all moved according to their own rules. It wasn’t long before one of the distilleries he had founded in Frankfort—known as Old Fire Copper (O.F.C.), located on the site of what is today the Buffalo Trace Distillery—came under the control of a New York firm, which quickly sold its holdings to St. Louis financier George T. Stagg, who had been Taylor’s original partner in the venture.

Stagg probably thought he was doing Taylor a favor by purchasing the holdings. By buying O.F.C., he was bailing Taylor out of a bankruptcy mess linked to Taylor’s financial adventures in the construction
business. Nevertheless, the two were bound to clash over the fact that Stagg now controlled an emerging brand that was marketed with Taylor’s name and signature. Even though the outfit was named E.H. Taylor, Jr., Company, Distillers, Taylor only owned two of the company’s twenty-five hundred stock shares. Stagg basically owned Taylor’s name, and since he was just as much of a wheeler-dealer as his former business partner, he eventually began selling shares of the venture to outside investors in New York. Those investors had their own ideas about how the company should be run, and soon Taylor wanted out. He also wanted to keep the valuable brand representing his legacy.

When Taylor broke away from Stagg, the nineteenth century’s nebulous trademark laws allowed him to continue using his own name with the new operation: the Old Taylor Distillery. This was the distillery resembling a medieval castle, and when Taylor built it, he made sure to incorporate everything he had learned about the whiskey industry thus far, including knowledge from a tour of European distilleries he had taken a decade earlier. He used corrugated rollers instead of millstones to grind his grain, ensuring more consistent fermentation; he swapped out wooden mash tubs for copper vats because they were easier to clean; and he made his own barrels. He even briefly experimented with different barrel sizes, as small as forty gallons, although these he eventually abandoned for larger ones.

To age his whiskey, Taylor used a new kind of rackhouse with a tiered storage system that would eventually become an industry standard (it is the most widely used system today). Up to that point, barrels were usually stacked directly on top of each other in rows three or four barrels tall. But there were problems arranging barrels this way. The weight of the top barrels caused the lower barrels to leak and the tight arrangement prevented air circulation—mold grew more easily and could cause the whiskey to taste musty. Removing or checking barrels from the bottom layers was labor-intensive, requiring all the barrels to be rearranged.

With the tiered-rack system like the one employed by Taylor,
barnlike warehouses consisting of five or six floors were built. Each floor contained three tiers of barrels, each barrel rolled into place along a wooden set of rails that supported their weight. Narrow hallways ran through the warehouses and floors made of loose planking or meshed steel allowed air to circulate freely.

Each warehouse like this is a separate biosphere full of various microclimates. These different climates determine how the whiskey will taste and are dictated by an assortment of variables that affect temperature and humidity. Is the warehouse made of stone or wood or metal siding? How much sunlight does it get? Is it in a valley that channels cool breezes?

The separate microclimates inside an aging warehouse mean that a barrel’s exact location inside the structure will greatly affect a whiskey’s flavor. Barrels in different parts of the warehouse age differently and take on different characteristics, even though they might have come from the same production batch. Top floors get hotter and experience more drastic temperature swings, causing whiskey to push deeper into the wood and evaporate faster. Whiskey that has aged for more than a decade on a top floor often tastes unbalanced and woody—in fact, more than a decade aging in a hot part of the warehouse can cause most of the barrel to evaporate entirely. Lower floors are cooler and age whiskey more slowly—whenever you find bourbon older than a decade, chances are that it comes from barrels in a cooler section of the warehouse, where the aging was subtler and evaporation rates weren’t as aggressive.

During the aging process, distillers roam the warehouses, periodically tasting samples from the different barrels to check on their progress. Barrels are marked for bottling once they’ve achieved the desirable flavor profile. To achieve flavor consistency for a particular brand, distillers today mix many barrels together in batches so all their slightly different qualities balance each other. Once the whiskey is dumped together in giant vats, it is tasted to ensure that it matches past batches (distilleries keep scores of reference samples for comparison). A few distilleries, such as Maker’s Mark, rotate barrels between floors so they all
age evenly, primarily because the company makes one core brand and needs to keep everything within a tighter flavor range.
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Four Roses uses low, single-story rackhouses, which don’t have as many microclimates, to ensure more even aging between barrels because it also makes relatively fewer brands than most modern big companies.

Occasionally, distillers roaming their warehouses will encounter a “honey barrel,” meaning a barrel that has found a sweet spot within a perfect intersection of the factors that make up the maturing process: time, esterification, oxidation, extraction. Distillers eventually learn what portions of the warehouse are most likely to produce honey barrels—window seats are a good bet, where sun and cool breezes speed up the expansion and contraction cycles. The cooler lower climes can also produce interesting results if you give them enough time. In the past, distillers typically set honey barrels aside for their own personal consumption or to give to close friends.

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As Edmund Taylor settled into business at his new distillery, he spent years bickering with his former business partner Stagg about the use of his name. Trademark law was still in its infancy, and Taylor realized—just as George Garvin Brown and James Pepper were realizing around the same time—that ownership of a powerful brand name, and the loyalty it earns from faithful consumers, is priceless. Taylor and Stagg would shake hands on various rounds of concessions related to the use of the Taylor name, but rarely honored them. At one point, Taylor held a company called E.H. Taylor, Jr. & Sons, while Stagg continued calling his company E.H. Taylor, Jr. Company. Taylor sued and won in court, only to have the decision reversed on appeal—Stagg’s distillery would keep using variations of the Taylor name until 1904.

As the reputation of Taylor’s whiskey grew, others would also attempt to capitalize on his brand, unleashing an avalanche of counterfeits and rectified whiskies with similar names. When “Kentucky Taylor”—
the product of one Louisville rectifier—hit the market, Taylor attacked it in the courts, establishing important legal precedents and protecting his whiskey’s reputation.

As the whiskey industry developed, and as businessmen like Taylor and James Pepper—who also fiercely protected his brand names—filed in and out of courtrooms, a few labeling rules came into play. Brands couldn’t associate themselves with organizations with which they had absolutely no relationship. In one case, the Churchill Downs racetrack successfully prevented one distillery from naming its whiskey “Churchill Downs.” Labels also couldn’t convey what the courts called “false information,” but this restriction’s subjectivity made it largely toothless. Rectifiers skirted the rules, meaning consumers struggled to know with certainty a whiskey’s true origins or how it was made.

Taylor, who had dabbled in local and state politics, responded by teaming up with Kentucky senator Joseph Blackburn to help pass the 1897 Bottled-in-Bond Act. The landmark law made the U.S. government the guarantor of a whiskey’s quality and is still in place today (modern bottles that are still bottled-in-bond include some, though not all, versions of Old Grand-Dad, Very Old Barton, and Evan Williams). In order to get the government’s seal of approval, the whiskey had to be made at a single distillery by one distiller. It had to be made in one season, aged at least four years, and be bottled at 100 proof. Labeling also had to clearly indicate the maker. If a whiskey met the standards, it was affixed with a green stamp bearing the image of John Carlisle, the Kentucky congressman who had lobbied for bonding increases after the Civil War and who by this time had moved into position as Grover Cleveland’s treasury secretary. Counterfeiting the green stamp was a serious federal crime. When bottling became commonplace just a few years later, drinkers learned to look for the stamp.

But even with the Bottled-in-Bond victory, Taylor’s battle to ensure bourbon’s quality on the marketplace was far from over. Shortly after the act’s passage, George Stagg, still happily trading assets and ownership shares of distilleries, entered a business partnership with Walter Duffy of Rochester, New York, who was known for making spirits used
in medicine. His “Duffy’s Famous Malt Whiskey” was pure snake oil. Duffy placed full-page advertisements in leading newspapers such as the
New York Times,
making claims that were outright lies. In one, a supposedly 148-year-old man claimed that Duffy’s was the only thing keeping him alive (in fact, according to Duffy, every American over the age of 100 reached that age because he or she drank Duffy’s). Duffy even bought endorsements from prominent medical professionals—such as renowned bacteriologist Dr. Willard Morse—to shill for his brand and claim its medical virtues.