Latest / Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries / The History of Whiskey | Boring History for Sleep with Rain Sounds

Transcript

The History of Whiskey | Boring History for Sleep with Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Sleepless History.
0:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad you're here.
0:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Wherever you are tonight, take a moment to settle in.
0:07
[SPEAKER_00]: A while ago, we spent an evening together with the long history of wine.
0:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We walk through ancient vineyards and monastery sellers, and we follow the grape across the centuries.
0:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight's story is a kind of sibling to that one.
0:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the story of what happens when people take a humble grain, like barley, or rye, or corn.
0:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Turn it into something like a rough beer, and then gently heat it until its spirit rises, gathers, and runs clear from the end of a copper pipe.
0:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the story of whiskey.
0:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a story that moves slowly, resting for years in the dark of a warehouse while the
0:52
[SPEAKER_00]: We will begin in the Misty Glends of the Scottish Highlands, where farmers hid their stills in the Heather and played a long game of hide and seek with the tax collectors of the Crown.
1:04
[SPEAKER_00]: We will cross the ocean to the hills of Western Pennsylvania, where a tax on whiskey brought a young American Republic face to face with its first great test.
1:17
[SPEAKER_00]: We will travel down the Ohio River into Kentucky, where corn, limestone water and charred oak barrels came together to create bourbon and where a determined colonel helped persuade the government to guarantee what was inside the bottle.
1:34
[SPEAKER_00]: We will pass through the long dry years of prohibition when whiskey was sold, quite legally by prescription at the pharmacy counter.
1:46
[SPEAKER_00]: We will follow a quiet young chemist from a family of Sarké Brewers, who traveled from Japan to Scotland, fell in love and carried the craft of whiskey halfway around the world.
1:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we begin, if you enjoy these long, gentle journeys through the past.
2:04
[SPEAKER_00]: please consider subscribing to sleepless history.
2:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So the next episode is waiting for you whenever you need it.
2:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you'd like, leave a comment letting me know where you're listening from tonight, or what topic you'd like to drift off to next.
2:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I read them and they help the show find other people who might need a little help falling a sleep.
2:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, before we begin tonight's story, I wanted to say that sleepless history is independent with no network behind it, just careful research and quiet evenings.
2:40
[SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine,
2:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You can support the show on Patreon, linked in the show notes, early access, add free listening, and your favorite episodes with different or no background audio are waiting for you there.
2:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And if that's not for you right now, that's okay.
3:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
3:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you to everyone listening.
3:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate each and every one of you.
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, let's begin.
3:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1.
3:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The water of life and the gorgas of the glens.
3:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Long before anyone in Scotland or Ireland poured a drum of whiskey, people around the Mediterranean had discovered something curious about heat and liquid.
3:33
[SPEAKER_00]: If you warmer mixed gently, some parts of it rise as vapour before others do.
3:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you catch that vapor and cool it, it gathers again as a liquid, often pureer and stronger than what you started with.
3:48
[SPEAKER_00]: This process is called distillation, and for a very long time it had nothing at all to do with drinking.
3:55
[SPEAKER_00]: In the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, in the early centuries of the common era, scholars who studied what we would now call alchemy, worked with a device known as the Alembic.
4:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a vessel for heating a substance.
4:10
[SPEAKER_00]: with a kind of cap or head that caught the rising vapours and a spout that carried them away to cool.
4:17
[SPEAKER_00]: These early alchemists were interested in perfumes, in medicines, and in the deep and mysterious question of how one substance might be transformed into another.
4:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Names that come down to us from this world include Xosimus of Penopolis.
4:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and a figure known as Maria the Jewis, who is sometimes credited with inventing several pieces of laboratory apparatus, where the all of these attributions are accurate is hard to know as the records are thin and often written long after the fact.
4:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the following centuries, scholars in the Islamic world preserved, translated and expanded upon this knowledge.
5:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They refined the Olympic and used it to produce rose water, essential oils and medicines.
5:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Our very word alcohol comes to us through Arabic, from the term al-Qul, which originally referred to a fine powder used as eye cosmetic, and which later came to
5:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Over time, as the word traveled into European languages, it came to mean the essence of wine, the spirit that could be drawn out of it by distillation.
5:34
[SPEAKER_00]: By the 12th and 13th centuries, knowledge of distilling wine had spread into Europe, carried through the universities and medical schools of places like Soleno in southern Italy.
5:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The clear, fiery liquid that came from distilling wine
5:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Aquavitai, which means the water of life.
5:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Physicians and monks regarded it as a medicine.
6:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It was said to warm the body, to preserve youth, to ease pain, and to help with an almost endless list of complaints.
6:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Monasteries with their gardens, libraries, and quiet discipline became natural places for the practice of distilling to be studied and passed on.
6:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But now, in the far north and west of Europe, in Ireland and in Scotland, grapes did not grow well at all.
6:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The climate was cool and damp.
6:32
[SPEAKER_00]: the summer's short.
6:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The skies often grey, but barley grew, and barley could be mulled and brood into a kind of ale.
6:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, at some point, that no one can pin down precisely.
6:46
[SPEAKER_00]: People in these lands began to distill, not wine.
6:51
[SPEAKER_00]: but a fermented brew of grain.
6:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The water of life, Aquavita, was translated into the Gaelic language as Uris Gai Beyatha, which is spoken something like Ushka Beyha.
7:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the centuries, English speakers who heard this phrase shortened and reshaped it.
7:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It became usk-ball, and then usk-y, and finally, whisky.
7:18
[SPEAKER_00]: A small note about spelling, which you may have noticed in bottles on a shelf somewhere.
7:23
[SPEAKER_00]: In Scotland and in Canada and Japan, the word is generally spelled without an E, as whisky.
7:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In Ireland and in the United States, it is more often spelled with an E, as whisky.
7:37
[SPEAKER_00]: There are exceptions on both sides, and there is no deep rule behind it.
7:42
[SPEAKER_00]: only habit and tradition.
7:44
[SPEAKER_00]: When we are in Scotland or Japan tonight, you can imagine the word without the E. And when we are in Ireland or America, you can imagine it with one.
7:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It will not matter much to your dreams either way.
7:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The earliest written records of whiskey in these lands are brief.
8:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In Ireland,
8:05
[SPEAKER_00]: A chronicle known as the Annals of Clon McNoise records that in the year 1405, a chief in named Richard Magranel, died at Christmas after taking a surface of Aquavite.
8:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a rather sad entry, and a reminder that even the water of life had its dangers.
8:25
[SPEAKER_00]: In Scotland, the first known written record appears in the Exchequer roles in the year 1494 during the reign of King James IV.
8:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It notes a delivery of eight bowls of malt to a certain fryer John Corn, so that he might make acqua vittes.
8:44
[SPEAKER_00]: a bowl was an old Scottish measure of grain and eight bowls was a considerable amount enough to make a good deal of spirit.
8:53
[SPEAKER_00]: King James IV was a curious and learned monarch interested in medicine, science and alchemy.
9:02
[SPEAKER_00]: and it seems he had a fondness for this new water of life.
9:07
[SPEAKER_00]: A few years later, in 1505, the Guild of Surgeon Barbers in Edinburgh was granted the exclusive right to make and sell Aquavita in that city.
9:19
[SPEAKER_00]: This tells us that whisky, at least in the eyes of the authorities, still belonged in the realm of medicine.
9:27
[SPEAKER_00]: But out in the countryside, among the farms and crops of the highlands and islands, whiskey was quietly becoming something else.
9:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It was becoming a part of ordinary life.
9:39
[SPEAKER_00]: For a highland farmer, distilling made a great deal of sense.
9:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Barley was grown on small plots of land, and in a good year, there might be more than the family needed for bread and porridge.
9:57
[SPEAKER_00]: over rough mountain paths.
9:59
[SPEAKER_00]: But if it was multid, brewed and distilled, it could be turned into a small quantity of valuable spirit that was easy to carry, did not spoil, and could be sold or traded for other necessities.
10:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The peat that fueled the fires was cut from the moans.
10:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The water came from clear streams running down from the hills.
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And the knowledge of how to do it was passed from parents to children, from neighbor to neighbor, like the knowledge of when to plant and when to harvest.
10:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Whisky was offered to guests as a gesture of welcome.
10:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It was shared at weddings and at funerals.
10:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It was used to seal agreements.
10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: and to warm travellers coming in from the cold.
10:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It was in many Highland households, simply part of the rhythm of the year.
10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And wherever something becomes part of the rhythm of ordinary life, sooner or later, a government will notice it, and wonder how it might be taxed.
11:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The first tax on spirits in Scotland was imposed by the Scottish Parliament in 1644 during a time of civil war and great expense.
11:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The rate was modest and in the remote highlands, it was difficult to collect in any case.
11:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But this was the beginning of a very long relationship between whiskey and the tax collector, a relationship that would shape the drink, the landscape,
11:34
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1707, the active union joined the kingdoms of Scotland and England into a single kingdom of Great Britain.
11:42
[SPEAKER_00]: With union came the extension of English tax laws into Scotland and these were far more ambitious.
11:50
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1725, a tax on mould was applied in Scotland.
11:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and it provoked riots in Glasgow, crowds attacked the house of a member of parliament who had supported the tax and soldiers were called in.
12:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an early sign of how deeply scots felt about anyone interfering with their grain and their drink.
12:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of the 1700s, the taxes and the regulations grew more complicated and more burdensome.
12:21
[SPEAKER_00]: License distillers in the lowlands near the larger towns often operated on a large scale and produced spirit quickly and cheaply sometimes of rather poor quality to satisfy the tax system and the market in England.
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: In the highlands meanwhile, small farmers kept distilling as they always had in small potstills, slowly and carefully
12:50
[SPEAKER_00]: and without paying any tax at all.
12:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1781, private distilling, even for one's own household use, was banned outright.
13:00
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1784, the government drew a line across the map of Scotland, known as the Highland Line.
13:07
[SPEAKER_00]: and applied different rules to distillers on either side of it.
13:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The Highland distillers were restricted to small stills and were not allowed to sell their spirits south of the line.
13:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The intention was, in part, to make allowance for the poorer Highland regions.
13:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But in practice, the laws were confusing.
13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They changed frequently.
13:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And they often seem designed to favor large commercial interests over small farmers.
13:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, across the Highlands, distilling moved into the shadows.
13:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Picture a narrow Glen, high in the hills, far from any road.
13:48
[SPEAKER_00]: A small stream runs down between banks of Heather and Bracken.
13:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Tucked into a fold of the hillside.
13:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps half hidden beneath an overhanging rock.
13:58
[SPEAKER_00]: or dug partly into the earth and roofed with turf.
14:01
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a little stone hut called a bothi.
14:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside, there is a small copper still.
14:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's round belly, sitting over a fire of glowing peat.
14:12
[SPEAKER_00]: A coiled copper pipe called the worm runs out of the still and through a barrel or trough of cold water from the stream.
14:20
[SPEAKER_00]: At the end of the worm, drop by drop, clear spirit gathers in a wooden vessel.
14:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The location was chosen with great care.
14:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It needed running water, both for the brewing and for cooling the worm.
14:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It needed to be hidden from view.
14:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And ideally, it needed to be somewhere that the smoke from the fire could drift away without drawing attention, perhaps mingling with the mist or disappearing among the rocks.
14:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Some illicit distillers are said to have built their stills in caves, or even beneath the floors of their homes.
14:59
[SPEAKER_00]: With the smoke channeled away through clever flows, so that it emerged somewhere far from the fire.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The men who came looking for these hidden stills were officers of the excise.
15:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They were known by many names, they were excisemen, or revenue men, or very often in Scotland gauges.
15:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The name came from the fact that part of their work was to gauge or measure the contents of casks and stills in order to calculate the tax that was owed.
15:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The life of a gojo was not an easy one.
15:35
[SPEAKER_00]: He was frequently an outsider, sometimes from the lowlands or from England, working in a community that regarded him with suspicion
15:44
[SPEAKER_00]: or outright hostility.
15:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He had to travel over rough country, often on foot or on horseback, in all kinds of weather, searching for stills that entire villages were working to keep hidden.
15:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The Gager was rewarded for his seizures, which gave him an incentive to be diligent, but it also made him deeply unpopular.
16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The smugglers and illicit distillers for their part developed
16:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Look out, watch the paths into the glends.
16:17
[SPEAKER_00]: When a goager was spotted, Word might be passed along by a waving cloth, by a particular pattern of washing hung on a line, or by a child running swiftly over the hillside.
16:29
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time the excisement arrived, the still might have been dismantled and hidden in a peat bog, the fire scattered, and the whole family innocently at work in the fields.
16:44
[SPEAKER_00]: had to be carried to market.
16:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Smugglers traveled in groups, sometimes with strings of ponies carrying small casks strapped to their sides.
16:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They moved by night, along old drove roads and secret paths through the hills, down toward the towns and cities of the lowlands where Highland Whiskey was prized.
17:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It had a reputation for being far better than the rough spirit from the big license distilleries.
17:11
[SPEAKER_00]: travellers and gentlemen, and even judges and magistrates were known to enjoy it, though it was entirely illegal.
17:19
[SPEAKER_00]: There are many tales of clever smugglers outwitting the gauges.
17:23
[SPEAKER_00]: There are stories of castes hidden in coffins during mock funerals of women carrying whiskey beneath their skirts in tin containers shaped to fit, and of the same illicit still being reported to the authorities for the reward, and then rebuilt with the reward money.
17:42
[SPEAKER_00]: How many of these stories are entirely true is difficult to say.
17:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Like many stories of smuggling, they grew more colourful with each telling, and they were told by fire sides for generations.
17:55
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most famous excisement in Scottish history was not at first glance, a likely candidate for the job.
18:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1789, the poet Robert Burns, already celebrated for his verse, took up a position as an excise officer in Dumfrieshire in the southwest of Scotland.
18:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He needed the steady income for his growing family, as farming had brought him little but hardship.
18:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Burns rode many miles each week in the course of his duties, and by most accounts he carried them out conscientiously.
18:32
[SPEAKER_00]: though not without sympathy for the ordinary people whose goods he was inspecting.
18:37
[SPEAKER_00]: He even wrote a lively song about the devil dancing away with the exciseman, which was a little joke at his own expense.
18:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Burns was a man of the people who became, for a time, an officer of the crown, and he seems to have felt the tension of that position quite keenly.
18:56
[SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1800s, the situation in the Highlands
19:00
[SPEAKER_00]: had become almost absurd.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Illicit distilling was so widespread that, by some accounts, more whiskey was being made illegally than legally.
19:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In the region around the River Livet, a tributary of the River Spay, there are said to have been around 200 illicit stills operating in the glens.
19:21
[SPEAKER_00]: By some accounts, in the year 1823 alone,
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: More than 14,000 illicit stills were detected across Scotland, and it was assumed that many more were never found at all.
19:34
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a charming story that in 1822, when King George IV made a celebrated visit to Edinburgh, the first visit to Scotland by a reigning monarch in nearly 200 years.
19:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He asked specifically for whiskey from Glenlivered.
19:51
[SPEAKER_00]: This whiskey, of course, was illegal.
19:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It was made in hidden stills in the glands, and no license to stillary produced it at all.
20:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet here was the king himself, asking for it by name.
20:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The story may have been embellished over the years, but it captures the situation perfectly.
20:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The law said one thing, and everyone, all the way to the top, knew that reality said another.
20:19
[SPEAKER_00]: something had to change.
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the people who pushed for that change was a Highland landowner, Alexander Gordon, the fourth Duke of Gordon, who held vast estates in the northeast of Scotland, including lands around Glenlivered.
20:36
[SPEAKER_00]: In the house of Lords, he argued that the Highlanders were going to distill whiskey, no matter what the law said, and that it would be far better to give them a reasonable way to do
20:49
[SPEAKER_00]: If the government lowered the duty and offered affordable licenses, he suggested.
20:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Landowners like himself would do their best to encourage their tenants to go legitimate.
21:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The result was the XI Act of 1823.
21:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It set a license fee of £10 for a still of a certain size, and it lowered the duty on each gallon of spirit considerably.
21:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It also removed many of the restrictions that had made legal Highland Distilling so difficult.
21:22
[SPEAKER_00]: For the first time in generations, a small Highland Distiller had a genuine, practical path to operating within the law.
21:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The first man to take out a license under the New Act in 1824 was a farmer and distiller in Glenlibit named George Smith,
21:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a brave decision to his neighbours, many of whom were still distilling illegally, it looked like a betrayal, they worried, quite reasonably, that a license to stiller in the Glen would draw the attention of the authorities to everyone around him.
22:02
[SPEAKER_00]: There were threats against Smith.
22:04
[SPEAKER_00]: and even threats that his distillery would be burned down, the story goes that the lead of Abbalah gave him a pair of hair trigger pistols for his protection and that Smith carried them with him for years afterward as he went about his business.
22:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But George Smith persevered and his distillery endured.
22:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the following decade, the numbers began to shift.
22:29
[SPEAKER_00]: more and more Highland distillers took out licenses.
22:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The illicit stills in the Glen's gradually felt quiet, their bothies left to crumble back into the hillside, and many of the famous distillery names that you might recognize today trace their origins to this period when former smugglers stepped into the light.
22:51
[SPEAKER_00]: There is one more figure worth mentioning before we
22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: His name was a nears coffee, and for many years he worked as an ex-size officer in Ireland, eventually rising to the position of Inspector General of Ex-Is.
23:08
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew stills intimately, both legal and illegal.
23:12
[SPEAKER_00]: After leaving the exercise service, he went into business himself, and in 1830, he patented and improved design for a continuous still, based on earlier work by a Scottish distiller named Robert Stein.
23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The traditional pot still worked in batches.
23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You filled it, heated it, drew off the spirit, emptied it, and began again.
23:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The coffee still, also called the column still, or patent still, was different.
23:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It consisted of tall columns through which the fermented wash flow downward, while steam rose upward, stripping away the alcohol continuously.
23:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It could run for long periods without stopping.
23:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It produced a lighter, pure spirit, and it could use cheaper grains like corn or unmalted wheat.
24:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The big distillers of Dublin, proud of their heavy, flavorful, pot-still whiskey, were largely uninterested in coffee's invention.
24:12
[SPEAKER_00]: But in Scotland, it was embraced, especially in the lowlands.
24:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It produced what became known as grain whiskey.
24:20
[SPEAKER_00]: which was light and gentle in flavour.
24:23
[SPEAKER_00]: In the middle of the 1800s, merchants in Edinburgh and elsewhere began to experiment with blending, a merchant named Andrew Asher.
24:34
[SPEAKER_00]: is often credited as one of the pioneers, combining the rich, characterful malt whiskies of the highlands with the lighter grain whisky from the patent stills.
24:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The result was smoother and more consistent than many single whiskeys.
24:50
[SPEAKER_00]: and much more appealing to drinkers in England and beyond, who found pure highland malt, a little too fierce.
24:59
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1860, a new law made it easier to blend whiskeys while they were still held in bond, before duty was paid, and the age of the great scotch blends had begun.
25:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, as if by a strange twist of fate, the world of wine came to whiskeys
25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1860s, a tiny insect called filoxera, which feeds on the roots of great vines, arrived in France.
25:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the following decades, it devastated the vineyards of France and much of Europe.
25:33
[SPEAKER_00]: If you listen to our episode on wine, you may remember this terrible blight.
25:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Among the casualties was the supply of cognac and brandy, which had been the favoured spirit of fashionable society in Britain.
25:45
[SPEAKER_00]: As brandy grew scarce and expensive, the drinkers of London and beyond looked north, and they found blended Scotch whisky waiting for them.
25:56
[SPEAKER_00]: By the end of the 1800s,
25:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The drink that had once been hidden in the glands, and carried by night over the hills, was being poured in the finest clubs of London, and shipped across the British Empire.
26:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The gauges still did their work, measuring and recording, but now they did it in the orderly warehouses of licensed distilleries, rather than in the Misty Hills.
26:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The spirit of the Highlands had come in from the cold.
26:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2, Rai, Rebellion and the Hills of Western Pennsylvania.
26:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Throughout the 1700s, people from Scotland and from the North of Ireland crossed the Atlantic Ocean in great numbers.
26:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them were the descendants of Scottish Presbyterians who had settled in Ulster in the North of Ireland a century or so before.
26:52
[SPEAKER_00]: In America, they came to be known as the Scott's Irish, or sometimes the Scotch Irish.
26:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They arrived in the ports of Philadelphia and other colonial cities, and then, finding the best land near the coast already claimed, they moved westward into the hills and valleys of the back country.
27:14
[SPEAKER_00]: they carried with them, their language, their faith, their music, and their knowledge of distilling.
27:21
[SPEAKER_00]: In the American colonies, the most popular spirit had long been rum, distilled from molasses that came from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.
27:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Rum was deeply woven into the trade of the Atlantic world, including it must be said, the
27:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But out on the frontier, far from the ports, Malacis was expensive and hard to obtain.
27:49
[SPEAKER_00]: What the frontier had in abundance was grain.
27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In the valleys of Western Pennsylvania, around the monogahela river, the settlers grew right.
27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Rai is a hardy grain, well suited to cool climates and poor soils, and it produces a whiskey with a spicy, robust character.
28:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Monongahila Rai Whiskey, as it came to be called, became one of the first distinctly American spirits, and for a time it was among the most celebrated in the young country.
28:20
[SPEAKER_00]: For the farmers of the frontier, Whiskey was not simply a drink, it was an economic necessity,
28:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Western Pennsylvania was separated from the markets of the eastern seaboard by the long ridges of the Allegheny mountains.
28:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The roads over these mountains were rough and slow, little more than widened trails in many places.
28:44
[SPEAKER_00]: A pack horse could carry only a few bushels of grain and the cost of hauling grain across the mountains was often greater than the grain was worth by the time it arrived.
28:55
[SPEAKER_00]: There was another route to market, and that was down the rivers.
28:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The Manongahila and the Allegheny rivers meet at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio, which flows westward and eventually joins the Mississippi, which flows south to New Orleans.
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the 1780s and early 1790s, New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi were controlled by Spain and access for American traders was restricted and uncertain.
29:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So the frontier farmers did what the Highland Farmers of Scotland had done.
29:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They turned their grain into whiskey.
29:33
[SPEAKER_00]: A horse that could carry perhaps four bushels of rye could carry the whisky made from many more bushels in a form that would not rot, would not attract mice and was worth a great deal more for its weight.
29:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Whisky could be carried over the mountains and sold in the east, and in the cash poor economy of the frontier where hard coins were scarce.
29:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Whiskey itself became a kind of currency.
30:01
[SPEAKER_00]: People paid for goods and services with jugs of it.
30:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Wages might be paid in it.
30:07
[SPEAKER_00]: A small still was among the most valuable things of frontier family could own.
30:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Now let us turn to Philadelphia, which in the early 1790s was the capital of the United States.
30:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The American Revolution had been won.
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: and the Constitution had been ratified.
30:26
[SPEAKER_00]: George Washington was serving as the first president, and the young nation had a serious problem.
30:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It was deeply in debt.
30:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The war of independence had been expensive and both the national government and the individual states had borrowed heavily to pay for it.
30:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton,
30:49
[SPEAKER_00]: believed that the new national government should take on the war debts of the states and that it must pay its debts reliably in order to establish the credit and the dignity of the United States among the nations of the world.
31:05
[SPEAKER_00]: To do this, the government needed revenue.
31:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Much of that revenue came from tariffs on imported goods, but Hamilton wanted another source.
31:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 1791, at his urging, Congress passed an exercise tax on distilled spirits produced within the United States.
31:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the first tax levied by the new national government on a domestic product.
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: To the farmers of Western Pennsylvania, this tax seemed profoundly unfair.
31:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It fell hardest on them because whiskey was so central to their economy and the structure of the tax made things worse.
31:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Distillers could choose either to pay a tax on each gallon they produced or to pay a flat annual fee based on the capacity of their still.
31:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Large distillers who ran their stills constantly throughout the year could pay the flat fee and end up with a much lower rate per gallon by some estimates around six cents.
32:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Small frontier distillers who might only distill for part of the year after the harvest,
32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: generally paid by the gallon at a higher rate of around 9 cents.
32:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The tax also had to be paid in cash, which was precisely the thing the frontier did not have.
32:29
[SPEAKER_00]: There was something else too, something older and harder to put into numbers.
32:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of these settlers, or their parents and grandparents, had come from places where the excisemen was a figure of resentment, a symbol of a distant government reaching into the lives of ordinary people.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: They had fought to revolution, in part, over the principle of taxation by a faraway authority.
32:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, it seemed to them a new government in a faraway eastern city was doing the very same thing.
33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Resistance began almost immediately.
33:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Meetings were held in the Western counties, and petitions were drawn up protesting the tax.
33:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the protesters were moderate, and hoped to persuade Congress to repeal or revise the law.
33:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Others were not so patient.
33:25
[SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1791, a tax collector named Robert Johnson was riding through the Western country when he was set upon by a group of men disguised in women's clothing.
33:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They cut off his hair, stripped him, covered him in hot tar and feathers, and took his horse, leaving him in the woods.
33:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a cruel and humiliating punishment, and a clear warning to anyone else who might think of collecting the whiskey tax.
33:54
[SPEAKER_00]: For the next few years, resistance simmered, tax collectors were threatened and harassed.
34:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Distillers who paid the tax sometimes found their stills damaged, riddled with bullet holes by night.
34:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Those who cooperated with the government were intimidated.
34:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Congress made some adjustments to the law, lowering the rate somewhat, but the essential grievance remained.
34:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, in the summer of 1794, the simmering resistance came to a boil.
34:27
[SPEAKER_00]: In July of that year, a United States martial named David Lennox, arrived in Western Pennsylvania to serve legal papers known as Ritz, on distillers who had not registered their stills.
34:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ritz required them to appear in federal court in Philadelphia, which, for a frontier farmer,
34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: meant a journey of some 300 miles at harvest time with all the expense and loss that would entail.
34:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Lennox was accompanied by General John Neville, who was the regional inspector for the exercise.
35:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Neville was a veteran of the Revolution and a wealthy landowner and he had once opposed the whiskey tax himself before accepting the post of Inspector to many of his neighbours
35:18
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 15th of July, the two men rode out to the farm of a man named William Miller to serve him a writ.
35:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Word had spread, and a group of armed men gathered.
35:30
[SPEAKER_00]: A shot was fired, though it seems no one was hurt, and Lenox and Neville withdrew.
35:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The next morning, a group of men came to Bauer Hill, the elegant home of General Neville, and demanded that he surrender.
35:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Neville refused and fired upon them, and one of the attackers was mortally wounded.
35:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The following day, a much larger force returned, several hundred men in all.
35:56
[SPEAKER_00]: By this time, a small detachment of soldiers from the Garrison at Pittsburgh had come to help defend the house.
36:04
[SPEAKER_00]: During a pause in the fighting, the leader of the rebels, a revolutionary war veteran named James McFarlane, stepped out from cover, perhaps believing that a truce had been called.
36:17
[SPEAKER_00]: He was shot and killed.
36:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The enraged rebels set fire to the outbuildings, and eventually the house itself and the soldiers inside surrendered.
36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Bauer Hill burned to the ground.
36:32
[SPEAKER_00]: General Neville himself had slipped away before the final attack.
36:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Events now moved quickly.
36:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The rebels intercepted the mail and read letters that revealed who among them was cooperating with the government.
36:48
[SPEAKER_00]: A lawyer and rebel leader named David Bradford called for the militia of the Western counties to assemble.
36:56
[SPEAKER_00]: On the first of August 1794, an enormous crowd gathered at a place called Braddock's field, the site of a famous battle during the French and Indian war, not far from Pittsburgh.
37:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Estimates of the crowd vary, but many accounts put it at around 7,000 people.
37:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a tense day, some in the crowd spoke of marching on Pittsburgh, which they viewed as a stronghold of government supporters and wealthy easterners.
37:25
[SPEAKER_00]: There was talk of burning the town.
37:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There was even talk among the most radical of the western counties breaking away from the United States altogether, and perhaps seeking an alliance with Britain or Spain.
37:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It felt a cooler heads to calm the situation.
37:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The people of Pittsburgh wisely sent a delegation to welcome the rebels, and they offered food and whiskey rather than resistance.
37:52
[SPEAKER_00]: A lawyer and writer named Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who had some sympathy with the grievances of the frontier but wanted to avoid bloodshed, worked to steer the crowd toward moderation.
38:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The rebels marched through Pittsburgh peacefully and a few buildings belonging to unpopular officials were burned, but the town was spared.
38:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in Philadelphia, President Washington was deeply troubled.
38:20
[SPEAKER_00]: To him and to Hamilton, the uprising was not simply a quarrel over attacks.
38:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a direct challenge to the authority of the new national government and to the very
38:36
[SPEAKER_00]: If the government could not enforce its laws in Western Pennsylvania, how could it enforce them anywhere?
38:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Washington did not act rashly.
38:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent commissioners to the West to negotiate with the rebels and to offer amnesty to those who would pledge to obey the law.
38:53
[SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, he called up the militia, under the authority of a recent law passed by Congress, from the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia.
39:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Nearly 13,000 men were gathered, a force comparable in size to the army that Washington had commanded during much of the revolution.
39:14
[SPEAKER_00]: In the autumn of 1794, President Washington did something remarkable.
39:23
[SPEAKER_00]: traveling to Carlisle and then onward to Bedford in Pennsylvania.
39:28
[SPEAKER_00]: He remains the only sitting president of the United States to lead troops in the field in this way.
39:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Having seen the army organized and on its way, he returned to Philadelphia, leaving command to Henry Lee, the governor of Virginia.
39:45
[SPEAKER_00]: a celebrated cavalry officer of the Revolution known as Light Horse Harry Lee, Alexander Hamilton himself rode along with the army.
39:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The great force marched westward over the mountains through the chilly autumn weather, along the same rough roads that made it so difficult for frontier farmers to carry their grain to market, and by the time it arrived in the western counties, the rebellion had largely melted away.
40:12
[SPEAKER_00]: faced with an army of 13,000 men, the rebels had neither the numbers nor the will to fight.
40:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of the leaders, including David Bradford, fled westward down the Ohio River, the army made arrests, rounding up suspects, sometimes roughly in the cold of November.
40:32
[SPEAKER_00]: In the end, around 20 men were marched back to Philadelphia to stand trial.
40:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Only two were convicted of treason, and both were sentenced to hang.
40:44
[SPEAKER_00]: But President Washington pardoned them both.
40:48
[SPEAKER_00]: One was said to be simple-minded, and the other insane, and Washington seems to have felt that the point had been made, and that mercy would serve the country better than execution.
41:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The whisky rebellion, as it came to be called, was over.
41:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been a small uprising with very few deaths, but its significance was considerable.
41:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It demonstrated that the new federal government had both the will and the means to enforce its laws.
41:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It also deepened a political divide that was already forming in the young nation between those who favored a strong central government, like Hamilton, and those who were suspicious of it, like Thomas Jefferson.
41:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The Jeffersonian's had long opposed the excise tax, and when Jefferson became president, one of the early acts of his administration in 1802 was to repeal it.
41:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The hated whiskey tax was gone.
41:48
[SPEAKER_00]: There is an epilogue to this story, and it concerns George Washington himself.
41:54
[SPEAKER_00]: After leaving the presidency in 1797,
42:00
[SPEAKER_00]: his estate on the Potomac River in Virginia.
42:03
[SPEAKER_00]: His farm manager there was a Scotsman named James Anderson, who had experience with this dilling, and who suggested that Washington build a distillery using the grain from his own fields and the power of his grist mill.
42:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Washington, ever the practical businessman, agreed.
42:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The distillery was built in 1797, and it grew quickly.
42:29
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1799, the year of Washington's death, it produced around 11,000 gallons of whiskey, making it one of the largest distilleries in America at the time.
42:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The whiskey was made mostly from rye with some corn, and much of it was sold unaged as was common in that era.
42:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The daily labor of the distillery was carried out by six enslaved men, who's skill and work made the enterprise possible, and who's part in this story deserves to be remembered.
43:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So the man who led an army to put down a rebellion over whiskey ended his life as one of the country's more successful whiskey producers.
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the kind of turn that history seems to enjoy.
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: In the decades that followed, American whiskey continued to move westward with the settlers.
43:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Across the mountains, in the lands that were becoming the state of Kentucky, another grain was growing tall in the fields.
43:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It was corn, and in the limestone country beside the rivers, a new kind of whiskey was quietly taking shape.
43:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3.
43:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Corn, limestone and the Colonel's guarantee.
43:47
[SPEAKER_00]: When settlers first began moving through the gaps in the Appalachian Mountains into the land that would become Kentucky, it was still part of the state of Virginia.
43:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a country of rolling hills, dense forests, grassy meadows, and clear rivers.
44:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was the homeland and hunting ground of native American nations, including the Shawnee and the Cherokee, who resisted the flood of newcomers for many years.
44:14
[SPEAKER_00]: To encourage settlement, the Virginia government in 1776 offered land to those who would build a cabin and raise a crop of corn.
44:25
[SPEAKER_00]: This was sometimes called the corn patch and cabin-right system, a settler who planted corn could lay claim to a substantial tract of land.
44:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
44:36
[SPEAKER_00]: across the Kentucky country, Corn went into the ground.
44:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Corn grew wonderfully well in Kentucky.
44:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It yielded far more per acre than wheat or rye, and it thrived in the warm summers.
44:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Farmers soon found themselves with far more corn than they could eat or sell locally.
44:57
[SPEAKER_00]: and just as in the highlands of Scotland and the hills of Western Pennsylvania, the solution was to turn that surplus into whiskey.
45:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of the settlers, after all, were the same Scott's Irish families, or their neighbours, who had brought the knowledge of distilling across the ocean and over the mountains.
45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Some had come from Pennsylvania and Maryland.
45:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Some were German, with their own long traditions of distilling.
45:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Kentucky had another gift to offer the distiller, and it lay beneath the ground.
45:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Much of central Kentucky sits on a great shelf of limestone.
45:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The springs and streams that rise through this rock carry water that is rich in calcium and magnesium and nearly free of iron.
45:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Iron is the enemy of good whiskey, giving it a dark color and an unpleasant taste.
45:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The calcium in limestone water, on the other hand, is thought to help the yeast during fermentation.
46:01
[SPEAKER_00]: This same limestone water, it is often said.
46:05
[SPEAKER_00]: is what makes Kentucky's bluegrass so good for raising strong race horses.
46:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1785, the Virginia legislature created a new county in the northeastern part of the Kentucky country.
46:20
[SPEAKER_00]: In gratitude for the help that France had given during the American Revolution, it was named Bourbon County, after the French Royal House of Bourbon.
46:31
[SPEAKER_00]: At the time, Bourbon County was enormous, covering a large portion of what is now north-eastern Kentucky, and over the years it was divided again and again into many smaller counties.
46:44
[SPEAKER_00]: How exactly the name of this county came to be attached to a style of whiskey is one of those questions that historians still discuss.
46:53
[SPEAKER_00]: For many years,
46:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The popular explanation was that whiskey shipped from the river ports of Old Bourbon County was stamped with the county's name on the barrels, and that buyers down river came to associate the name with a particular kind of corn whiskey.
47:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Some more recent historians have suggested another possibility that the name took hold in
47:23
[SPEAKER_00]: and where the French heritage of the city, and a well-known street named for the Bourbon family, made the name a natural choice for merchant selling it.
47:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The truth may involve a little of both or neither.
47:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and it may never be known for certain.
47:40
[SPEAKER_00]: What we do know is that by the middle of the 1800s, the word bourbon was in regular use to describe whiskey from Kentucky made mostly from corn.
47:52
[SPEAKER_00]: In those early days, most whiskey was sold young and clear, straight from the still, or after only a short time in a barrel.
48:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It was harsh.
48:03
[SPEAKER_00]: fiery stuff.
48:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But gradually, distillers and merchants noticed something.
48:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Whiskey that had spent a long time in a wooden barrel, perhaps during a long slow journey down the rivers, or while waiting in a warehouse, came out different.
48:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It had taken on a warm amber colour.
48:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Its harshness had softened.
48:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It had picked up flavours of vanilla, caramel, and toasted wood.
48:30
[SPEAKER_00]: and if the inside of the barrel had been charred by fire before it was filled, these effects were even stronger.
48:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Who first thought to char the inside of a whiskey barrel is another mystery wrapped in legend.
48:44
[SPEAKER_00]: One popular tale credits a Baptist minister named Elijah Craig, who operated a distillery in Kentucky in the late 1700s.
48:54
[SPEAKER_00]: According to the story, a fire accidentally scorched some barrels, and the thrifty reverend used them anyway, discovering the magic of charred oak.
49:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a pleasant story, but historians have found no evidence from Craig's own time to support it, and it seems to have been attached to his name much later.
49:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Other possible explanations,
49:18
[SPEAKER_00]: are more practical.
49:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Barrels were often reused, having previously held things like fish, pickles, or salted meat, and charring the inside would have been a sensible way to clean them and remove old flavours.
49:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Coopers also used fire to help bend the staves when building barrels.
49:38
[SPEAKER_00]: it may be that the practice simply grew up gradually, among many coopers and distillers, without any single moment of discovery at all.
49:47
[SPEAKER_00]: As the 1800s went on, distilling in Kentucky became more careful and more scientific.
49:55
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most important figures in this story was a Scottish born physician and chemist named James Crowe,
50:06
[SPEAKER_00]: and he arrived in Kentucky in the early 1820s.
50:11
[SPEAKER_00]: He went to work as a distiller and for many years from the 1830s into the 1850s, he worked at a distillery in Woodford County, owned by the Pepper family.
50:24
[SPEAKER_00]: What made James Crow unusual was his approach.
50:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Whisky making at the time was often a matter of tradition, instinct, and luck.
50:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Results varied from batch to batch, and sometimes a batch would go sour or spoil entirely.
50:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Crow brought the methods of a scientist to the distillery.
50:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He used instruments like the thermometer and the saccharometer, which measures the sugar content of a liquid.
50:52
[SPEAKER_00]: He paid close attention to cleanliness and to the acidity of his mash.
50:57
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept careful records, he is closely associated with refining the sour mash process.
51:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In this method, a portion of the leftover liquid from a previous distillation, which is somewhat acidic, is added to the new batch of mash before fermentation.
51:16
[SPEAKER_00]: This helps to create the right conditions for the yeast.
51:19
[SPEAKER_00]: discourages unwanted bacteria, and keeps the character of the whiskey consistent from one batch to the next.
51:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Crow did not invent the idea entirely by himself, but he helped to standardise it and to understand why it worked.
51:36
[SPEAKER_00]: His whiskey
51:37
[SPEAKER_00]: known as Old Crow became one of the most famous whiskeys in America, and it was said to be favored by statesmen, generals, and writers alike.
51:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, even as the best distillers were making fine whisky, there was a growing problem in the marketplace.
51:54
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1800s, most whisky was not sold in sealed bottles, bearing the name of the distillery.
52:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It was sold in barrels to wholesalers, merchants and saloon keepers, who then poured it into jugs,
52:10
[SPEAKER_00]: decanters and glasses for their customs.
52:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And between the distillery and the customer, all sorts of things could happen to it.
52:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Some merchants, known as rectifiers, took raw, neutral spirit and doctored it to make it look and taste like aged whiskey.
52:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They added coloring, such as burnt sugar or caramel.
52:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They added flavorings and sometimes things far worse.
52:38
[SPEAKER_00]: accounts from the period described whiskey that was stretched with water and then given a false bite with pepper or other substances or coloured with tobacco or iodine.
52:50
[SPEAKER_00]: A customer who asked for good Kentucky bourbon might receive something that had never been near Kentucky at all.
52:57
[SPEAKER_00]: One distiller who took an early step against this.
53:01
[SPEAKER_00]: was a pharmaceutical salesman turned whiskey merchant in Louisville named George Garvin Brown.
53:09
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1870, he began selling his whiskey in sealed glass bottles, so that customers and especially doctors who prescribed whiskey to their patients could be sure of what they were getting.
53:21
[SPEAKER_00]: That whiskey became known as old forester, and its sealed bottle was a promise of consistency.
53:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the federal government had once again discovered whiskey as a source of revenue.
53:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Congress reintroduced an excised tax on spirits to help pay for the enormous costs of the war.
53:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The rate climbed rapidly over the next few years.
53:50
[SPEAKER_00]: reaching $2 per gallon by 1865.
53:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Many times the value of the whiskey itself, just as in the highlands of Scotland long before, a high tax encouraged both evasion and corruption.
54:05
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1870s, during the administration of President Ulysses Grant,
54:10
[SPEAKER_00]: a scandal came to light that became known as the Whiskey Ring, a network of distillers, tax officials and politicians, centered in St. Louis, but reaching into other cities as well had been conspiring to avoid paying the Whiskey Tax, diverting millions of dollars in revenue.
54:32
[SPEAKER_00]: the Secretary of the Treasury, Benjamin Bristo, organized a secret investigation, and in 1875, federal agents made a series of raids.
54:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of people were indicted, and the scandal reached very close to the president himself, touching his private secretary, Orville Babcock.
54:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Though Babcock was ultimately acquitted, it was a reminder once again.
54:59
[SPEAKER_00]: that wherever whiskey and money met, trouble tended to follow.
55:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we come to one of the most colourful figures in the whole history of American whiskey.
55:11
[SPEAKER_00]: A man named Edmund Haynes Taylor Jr., who was known throughout Kentucky and far beyond it, simply as the Colonel.
55:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Colonel Taylor was born in 1830 in Kentucky and he was related to two American presidents, James Madison and Zachary Taylor.
55:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a banker by training and a man of great ambition, charm, and style.
55:38
[SPEAKER_00]: He came to the whiskey business in the 1860s.
55:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And over the following decades, he owned or operated several distilleries around Frankfurt, the Kentucky State Capital.
55:51
[SPEAKER_00]: He also served as mayor of Frankfurt, and as a member of the Kentucky Legislature.
55:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Colonel Taylor had grand ideas about what a distillery could be.
56:01
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1887, he built a new distillery in Woodford County that looked less like a factory and more like a medieval castle with a limestone tower, turrets and battlements, set among gardens, with a sunken spring house and a purgola.
56:20
[SPEAKER_00]: He invited visitors to come and see how fine whiskey was made.
56:26
[SPEAKER_00]: In a sense, he was one of the first people to understand that whiskey could be not just a product, but a place and an experience.
56:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of all, Colonel Taylor believed in quality.
56:40
[SPEAKER_00]: and he was deeply frustrated by the rectifiers and the adulterated whiskey that undermined the reputation of honest distillers.
56:49
[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted a way for the customer to know with certainty that what was in the bottle was the real thing.
56:56
[SPEAKER_00]: His ally in this course was a fellow Kentucky named John Griffin Carlisle, who served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Grover Cleveland
57:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Together, Taylor and Carlisle, along with other distillers who shared their concerns, pushed for a new law.
57:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 1897, Congress passed the bottled in bond act.
57:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The law was, in its way, an elegant solution.
57:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not ban anything.
57:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, it created a special category of whiskey, with a government guarantee attached.
57:33
[SPEAKER_00]: For a whiskey to be labelled as bottled in bond, it had to meet certain requirements.
57:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It had to be the product of one distillery, made during one distilling season.
57:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It had to be aged for at least four years in a federally bonded warehouse under the supervision of government officials.
57:53
[SPEAKER_00]: and it had to be bottled at exactly 100 proof, which is to say 50% alcohol by volume.
58:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The label also had to identify the distillery where it was made.
58:05
[SPEAKER_00]: In return for meeting these standards,
58:08
[SPEAKER_00]: the distiller received a green tax stamp on the bottle, a kind of seal from the federal government.
58:16
[SPEAKER_00]: That green stamp told the customer that this whiskey had not been stretched with water colored with caramel or blended with neutral spirit.
58:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It was whiskey made in one place in one season, and left to rest for years under the watchful eye of the government.
58:34
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a practical benefit for distillers too.
58:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The law allowed them to delay paying the exercise tax until the whiskey was removed from the bonded warehouse and bottled, rather than paying it up front on whiskey that would sit aging for years.
58:51
[SPEAKER_00]: This made
58:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The bottled in bond act is often described as one of the earliest consumer protection laws in American history.
59:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It came nearly a decade before the more famous pure food and drug act of 1906, which addressed the adulteration of food and medicine more broadly.
59:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But the question of what, exactly, could be called whiskey, was not yet fully settled.
59:20
[SPEAKER_00]: After the pure food and drug act, there was a fierce debate between straight whisky distillers, like Colonel Taylor and his allies, and the rectifiers and blenders, who argued that their products were whisky too.
59:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The government's chief chemist, a crusading scientist, named Harvey Washington Wiley, took the view that only straight whisky deserved the name, the argument
59:49
[SPEAKER_00]: through the courts and the government for several years until it landed on the desk of President William Howard Taft.
59:58
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1909, President Taft issued what became known as the Taft decision.
1:00:04
[SPEAKER_00]: He ruled that blended whiskeys made with neutral spirit could still be called whisky,
1:00:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Straight whiskey would be straight whiskey, blended whiskey would be blended whiskey, and imitation whiskey would have to say so.
1:00:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a compromise as so many things are.
1:00:29
[SPEAKER_00]: But it established the principle that the customer had a right to know what kind of whiskey he or she was buying.
1:00:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Colonel Taylor lived until 1923, and he had spent much of his long life fighting for honest whiskey, but in the last years of his life, he witnessed something that he and nearly everyone else in the industry had once thought impossible, the entire country went dry.
1:01:07
[SPEAKER_00]: To understand how the United States came to ban alcohol entirely, we have to step back a little into the 1800s and consider what drinking looked like in America at that time.
1:01:19
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early years of the Republic, Americans drank a remarkable amount of alcohol.
1:01:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Far more on average than they do today.
1:01:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Whiskey was cheap and plentiful, and it was consumed at breakfast, at work, at meals, and in the evening.
1:01:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Water in many places was unsafe to drink and milk could carry disease, so spirits, cider and beer were part of daily life for many people.
1:01:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Heavy drinking was common and so were its consequences.
1:01:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Families were impoverished when wages were spent in saloons.
1:01:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Accidents, illness and violence followed drink through many communities.
1:02:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It was in response to this
1:02:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It began in the early 1800s with churches and reform societies encouraging people to moderate their drinking or to give it up altogether.
1:02:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Over time, the movement grew larger, more organised and more determined.
1:02:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It was woven together with other great reform causes of the age, including the abolition of slavery and later.
1:02:32
[SPEAKER_00]: the right of women to vote.
1:02:34
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1874, in Cleveland, Ohio, a group of women founded the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
1:02:42
[SPEAKER_00]: For many of its members, the Saloon was a direct threat to the home.
1:02:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the place where husbands and fathers spent the family's money, and from which they sometimes came home drunk and violent.
1:02:56
[SPEAKER_00]: At a time when women had few legal rights and little ability to protect themselves or their children, the fight against alcohol was also a fight for the safety and dignity of the family.
1:03:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The union became one of the largest women's organizations in the country, and it trained a generation of women in the arts of public speaking, organizing and political persuasion.
1:03:24
[SPEAKER_00]: some temperance activists were quiet and patient.
1:03:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Others were not.
1:03:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The most famous of these was a tall, stern woman from Kansas named Cari Nation.
1:03:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Kansas had banned alcohol in its state constitution, but saloons continued to operate openly, ignoring the law.
1:03:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Around the year 1900,
1:03:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Harry nation began to walk into these illegal saloons and smash them up, first with rocks and bricks, and then with a hatchet.
1:03:59
[SPEAKER_00]: She broke bottles, mirrors, and bar fixtures while singing hymns and praying.
1:04:05
[SPEAKER_00]: She was arrested many times and she paid her fines in part by selling small souvenir hatchets.
1:04:12
[SPEAKER_00]: She became a national celebrity, admired by some and mocked by others, but she brought enormous attention to the cause.
1:04:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The real political power of the prohibition movement, however, came from a different organization.
1:04:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The anti-Solun League was founded in 1893 in Ohio.
1:04:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It was disciplined, practical, and single-minded.
1:04:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not concern itself with other issues, and it did not attach itself to anyone political party.
1:04:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It simply supported candidates who would vote for prohibition, and it opposed those who would not, regardless of anything else about them.
1:04:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Under the leadership of a shrewd lawyer named Wayne Wheeler, it became one of the most effective pressure groups in American history.
1:05:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The phrase pressure politics, in fact, is often associated with Wheeler and his methods.
1:05:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the first two decades of the 1900s, state after state went dry.
1:05:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the first World War gave the movement its final push.
1:05:20
[SPEAKER_00]: grain was needed for food, not for liquor.
1:05:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And many of the largest breweries in America were owned by families of German heritage, which, at a time of war with Germany, made them a target of suspicion.
1:05:36
[SPEAKER_00]: In December of 1917, Congress passed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors within the United States.
1:05:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It was sent to the States for ratification.
1:05:53
[SPEAKER_00]: and on the 16th of January, 1919, the necessary number of states approved it.
1:06:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It was to take effect one year later.
1:06:03
[SPEAKER_00]: To enforce the new amendment, Congress passed a law known as the National Prohibition Act, more commonly called the Volstead Act.
1:06:11
[SPEAKER_00]: After Andrew Volstead, the congressman from Minnesota, who guided it through.
1:06:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Silloon League.
1:06:19
[SPEAKER_00]: is believed to have had a large hand in drafting it.
1:06:22
[SPEAKER_00]: President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the act, but Congress overwrote his veto in October of 1919.
1:06:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The Volstead Act defined intoxicating liquor very strictly, as anything containing more than one half of one percent alcohol, which meant that not only whiskey, but also beer and wine were banned.
1:06:42
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 17th of January, 1920,
1:06:46
[SPEAKER_00]: prohibition came into force across the entire United States.
1:06:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The whisky industry, which had grown so large and so proud, was brought almost to a standstill.
1:07:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Distilleries closed their doors, workers lost their jobs.
1:07:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Warehouses full of aging whisky, sat silent under guard.
1:07:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Many distilleries were dismantled.
1:07:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Their copper stills sold for scrap, and their buildings left to decay or turn to other uses.
1:07:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the old names would never return, but the Volstet Act contained a number of exceptions, and one of them was very important to our story.
1:07:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Alcohol could still be used for religious purposes, such as sacramental wine.
1:07:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be used in industry and in science.
1:07:40
[SPEAKER_00]: and it could be used as medicine.
1:07:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember that for centuries, whiskey and other spirits had been regarded as medicines.
1:07:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The water of life had begun its career in the hands of physicians and monks.
1:07:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1800s and early 1900s, doctors routinely prescribed whiskey for all sorts of ailments, from colds and coughs to fatigue, digestive troubles and heart complaints.
1:08:07
[SPEAKER_00]: many people still believed firmly in its healing powers, and so even under prohibition, a doctor could legally prescribe whiskey to a patient, and a pharmacist could legally fill that prescription.
1:08:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The system was carefully regulated, at least on paper, doctors had to obtain a special permit, and they wrote their prescriptions on official government forms,
1:08:35
[SPEAKER_00]: under the rules that were put in place.
1:08:37
[SPEAKER_00]: A patient could receive no more than one pint of spirits every ten days.
1:08:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Doctors were limited in how many of these prescriptions they could write in a given period.
1:08:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The patient would take the prescription to a licensed pharmacy, where the pharmacist would hand over a small bottle, often a pint, labelled as being for medicinal purposes only.
1:08:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Only a handful of companies receive permission from the government to bottle and sell this medicinal whiskey.
1:09:07
[SPEAKER_00]: There were six of them, and several of their names remain familiar in the world of whiskey today, including the company founded by George Garvin Brown, who had put his whiskey in sealed bottles back in 1870.
1:09:22
[SPEAKER_00]: These companies took over the stocks of whisky, sitting in bonded warehouses around the country and consolidating them into a smaller number of locations and bottled them for the pharmacy trade.
1:09:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of these firms bought up the brand names of distilleries that had closed, and so many famous old labels survived the long dry years, only as names on medicinal pint bottles.
1:09:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It should not surprise you to learn that the medicinal whiskey system was widely abused.
1:09:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Some doctors wrote prescriptions for almost anyone who asked for a small fee.
1:09:58
[SPEAKER_00]: some patients visited several doctors.
1:10:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Some pharmacies did a remarkably brisk trade.
1:10:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It has often been suggested that the rapid growth of some drugstore chains during the 1920s owed something to the sale of medicinal whiskey, alongside the sodas, milkshakes and lunch counters that also drew customers in.
1:10:21
[SPEAKER_00]: though how much credit whiskey deserves is difficult to measure.
1:10:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The medical profession itself was divided.
1:10:29
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1917, the American Medical Association had passed a resolution stating that alcohol had no real therapeutic value and that its use as a medicine should be discouraged, but many individual doctors disagreed and some argued
1:10:47
[SPEAKER_00]: that the government had no business telling physicians what they could and could not prescribe.
1:10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: a number of doctors challenged the restrictions in court.
1:10:57
[SPEAKER_00]: For many ordinary physicians, prescribing whiskey was simply part of practicing medicine as they had been taught.
1:11:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the years of prohibition, the stocks of legal medicinal whiskey slowly dwindled.
1:11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: By the late 1920s, there was concern that the supply would run out altogether.
1:11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So the government permitted a limited amount of new whisky to be distilled to replenish the medicinal supply.
1:11:26
[SPEAKER_00]: This brief period of legal production, sometimes called the Distilling Holiday, allowed a few distilleries to light their stills again and fill new barrels, which would be ready years later.
1:11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, of course, a great deal of whiskey was being consumed that had nothing to do with doctors or pharmacies.
1:11:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Prohibition created an enormous and extremely profitable black market.
1:11:52
[SPEAKER_00]: In the cities, illegal bars, known as speakeases, appeared by the thousands hidden behind unmarked doors in basements and in the back rooms of seemingly ordinary businesses.
1:12:05
[SPEAKER_00]: In the countryside, the old tradition of the moonshine still never really gone, returned in force.
1:12:12
[SPEAKER_00]: In the hills of Appalachia, the descendants of the Scotch Irish settlers, who had once resisted Hamilton's whiskey tags, found themselves once again distilling by night, in hidden hollows, and keeping a watchful eye out for revenue agents.
1:12:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, in a sense, the Highland Glens all over again, on the other side of the ocean.
1:12:36
[SPEAKER_00]: A great deal of the whiskey that Americans drank during prohibition came from outside the country.
1:12:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Scotch whisky was shipped across the Atlantic to islands in the Caribbean, and to the French islands of St. Pierre and Mikolong, just off the coast of Canada.
1:12:51
[SPEAKER_00]: From there, it was carried to ships that anchored just outside American territorial waters, off the coasts of New York, New Jersey and other states.
1:13:02
[SPEAKER_00]: This line of anchored ships came to be called Rum Road, small fast boats were dashed out under cover of darkness, load up with cases of liquor and race back to shore, trying to evade the coast guard.
1:13:17
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the best known of these smugglers was a sea captain named Bill McCoy, who was said to be unusually honest for a man in his line of work.
1:13:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not water down his liquor or mix it with anything harmful.
1:13:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It is often said that the expression, the real McCoy, meaning the genuine article, comes from him.
1:13:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a lovely story, though language historians point out that the phrase seems to have been in use before his time, and its true origin remains uncertain.
1:13:48
[SPEAKER_00]: From Scotland, there is another charming tale of prohibition.
1:13:52
[SPEAKER_00]: On the island of Isla, which is pronounced Isla, off the west coast of Scotland, there is a distillery called Lafroy, which is pronounced Lafroy.
1:14:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Its whiskey is intensely smoky, with a strong medicinal aroma.
1:14:09
[SPEAKER_00]: that some people compare to iodine or sea spray.
1:14:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The story goes that during prohibition, Lafroy continued to be sold legally in the United States.
1:14:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Because its distinctive character persuaded the authorities that it must surely be a medicine as with so many whiskey stories, it is hard to confirm the details.
1:14:31
[SPEAKER_00]: but it has been told fondly for many years.
1:14:35
[SPEAKER_00]: To the north, Canada, too, played its part.
1:14:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Canadian distillers could legally produce whiskey and much of it found its way across the border by road, by rail, by boat, and in winter across frozen rivers and lakes.
1:14:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The narrow stretch of the Detroit River between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan.
1:14:59
[SPEAKER_00]: became one of the busiest smuggling routes in the country.
1:15:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Canadian distilleries such as Hiram Walker in Windsor and the business built by the Bronfman family sold enormous quantities of whisky to exporters and what happened to it after it left Canada was officially not their concern as the 1920s went on.
1:15:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Prohibition became more and more difficult to defend.
1:15:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It had not ended drinking.
1:15:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It had driven it underground, where it was controlled by criminal organisations that grew wealthy and powerful from the trade.
1:15:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Violence between rival gangs became a regular feature of the news.
1:15:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Corruption spread through police departments, courts, and city governments.
1:15:48
[SPEAKER_00]: poisonous, poorly made liquor caused blindness and death, and the government was losing a vast amount of tax revenue that the legal liquor trade had once provided.
1:16:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.
1:16:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Millions of people lost their jobs.
1:16:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The government badly needed revenue and the country badly needed work.
1:16:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The argument that a legal whiskey industry could provide both became very difficult to resist.
1:16:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Even some of prohibitions former supporters came to believe that it had failed.
1:16:30
[SPEAKER_00]: In February of 1933, Congress proposed the 21st Amendment.
1:16:36
[SPEAKER_00]: which would repeal the 18th.
1:16:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the only amendment in American history to be ratified by special state conventions rather than by state legislatures.
1:16:49
[SPEAKER_00]: One by one, the state's voted and on the 5th of December 1933, Utah became the 36th state to ratify, providing the final vote needed.
1:17:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Prohibition was over.
1:17:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It had lasted nearly 14 years.
1:17:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But the whiskey industry that emerged from prohibition was a much smaller and much changed industry.
1:17:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the old distilleries were gone.
1:17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The skilled workers had scattered and there was very little aged whiskey available because whiskey takes years to mature and nobody had been making it in any quantity for well over a decade.
1:17:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In the first years after repeal, much of what was sold was young, or blended, or imported.
1:17:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It took years for the American distillers to rebuild their stocks and their reputations.
1:17:45
[SPEAKER_00]: In the years that followed, the government set out new rules for how American whiskey should be made and labeled.
1:17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Among these,
1:17:54
[SPEAKER_00]: was the requirement that Bourbon be aged in new, charred, oak containers, a rule that continues to shape the flavor of Bourbon today, and which also means that there is a steady supply of used Bourbon barrels, many of which travel across the ocean.
1:18:13
[SPEAKER_00]: to be used for aging Scotch whisky and other spirits around the world.
1:18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So the barrels themselves carry the conversation between these whisky traditions back and forth across the sea and much later in 1964.
1:18:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Congress passed a resolution declaring bourbon to be a distinctive product of the United States.
1:18:40
[SPEAKER_00]: had become something like a national emblem.
1:18:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But while America was going through its long dry years, something else was happening on the far side of the world.
1:18:51
[SPEAKER_00]: A young man from Japan had traveled to Scotland to learn the secrets of whiskey, and by the time Prohibition ended, he was about to begin building something entirely new.
1:19:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5, the chemist from Takahara and the road to Yauichi.
1:19:12
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 20th of June, in the year 1894, a baby boy was born in the town of Takahara, in Hiroshima prefecture, on the shores of the Setto inland sea in Western Japan.
1:19:35
[SPEAKER_00]: and they had been for a very long time.
1:19:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Their brewery had been making sarke since the early 1700s.
1:19:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Sarke, as you may know, is brood from rice, water, yeast, and a special mold called Koji.
1:19:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And making it well requires patience, cleanliness, careful attention to temperature, and a deep understanding of fermentation.
1:20:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The young mass attacker grew up among the steam, the cedar tubs, and the gentle rhythms of the brewing season.
1:20:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It was expected that he would one day take over the family business.
1:20:15
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a bright and curious student, and his interest in fermentation led him to study applied chemistry at the Osaka Higher Technical School, one of the leading technical colleges
1:20:29
[SPEAKER_00]: which later became part of Osaka University.
1:20:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It was there studying the science of brewing and fermentation that he became interested in Western spirits and in particular in whisky.
1:20:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Japan at this time was changing rapidly since the late 1800s
1:20:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The country had been opening to the wider world, adopting new technologies, new industries, and new tastes from Europe and America.
1:20:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Western-style drinks were becoming fashionable in the cities, but the so-called whisky being sold in Japan was usually nothing of the kind.
1:21:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It was often neutral alcohol mixed with flavorings, sugar and colouring to imitate the
1:21:18
[SPEAKER_00]: rather like the doctored spirits of the American rectifiers.
1:21:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Genuine Scotch Whiskey was imported, but it was rare and expensive.
1:21:28
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1916, after finishing his studies, Takede Suru went to work for a company in Osaka, called Setsu Shuso, which produced these imitation western spirits.
1:21:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The President of the Company,
1:21:42
[SPEAKER_00]: A man named Kihei Abe had an ambitious idea.
1:21:46
[SPEAKER_00]: What if a Japanese company could make real whiskey in Japan?
1:21:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The way it was made in Scotland?
1:21:54
[SPEAKER_00]: To do that, someone would have to go to Scotland and learn how it was done.
1:21:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Arbe chose the Young Tackets Suru.
1:22:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, in the summer of 1918, when he was 24 years old, Mass Attacker Tackets Suru set out on a long journey.
1:22:13
[SPEAKER_00]: it was an extraordinary thing to do at the time.
1:22:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The first World War was still being fought in Europe.
1:22:19
[SPEAKER_00]: He travelled across the Pacific Ocean by way of the United States and then across the Atlantic, arriving in Scotland near the end of that year as the war drew to a close.
1:22:30
[SPEAKER_00]: He came to the city of Glasgow, grey and industrious with its shipyards along the river Clyde and its streets full of
1:22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: in a country whose language he spoke carefully, whose food was entirely unfamiliar and whose winters were long and dark.
1:22:50
[SPEAKER_00]: In Glasgow, he enrolled in classes in chemistry at the university and at the Royal Technical College.
1:22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He studied diligently and read everything he could find about the making of whiskey, but he knew that books alone would not be enough.
1:23:07
[SPEAKER_00]: He needed to see the work being done to stand beside the stills and learn from the men who ran them.
1:23:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not easy for a young man from Japan to gain entry to Scottish distilleries.
1:23:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The distillers were cautious about sharing their methods and he was very much an outsider, but he was persistent, polite and plainly serious.
1:23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And eventually he found people willing to teach him.
1:23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: He spent time at the long-horned distillery in space-side, in the very heart of the old whiskey country, not far from the glens where the illicit stills had once smoked in the heather.
1:23:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He learned about grain whiskey at a distillery in the town of bonus, on the 4th of 4th, where the continuous stills descended from a nearest coffee's design were at work.
1:23:59
[SPEAKER_00]: and he spent several months at a distillery called Hazelburn in Campbelltown, a small town on the long, kind, higher peninsula, which was at that time one of the great whisky centres of Scotland, throughout it all to Ketsuru took notes.
1:24:18
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote everything down in careful detail.
1:24:21
[SPEAKER_00]: He recorded the shape of the stills and the arrangement of the equipment.
1:24:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He noted the way the barley was molded and dried.
1:24:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The way the peat smoke was used.
1:24:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The timings of fermentation, the cuts of the distillation, went to collect the heart of the spirit and went to set aside the rest.
1:24:41
[SPEAKER_00]: and the way the whiskey was laid down in casks to mature.
1:24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He drew diagrams.
1:24:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He asked questions.
1:24:50
[SPEAKER_00]: These notebooks, which would later become known as the Taketsuru notes, were to become the foundation of Japanese whiskey.
1:24:59
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a story told with a smile, that many years later, a senior British politician visiting Japan,
1:25:08
[SPEAKER_00]: remarked that a clever young Japanese man had come to Scotland many years before, and with a fountain pen and a notebook had carried off the secrets of the whisky industry.
1:25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether it was said exactly that way or not, the sentiment was one of admiration, but Tacket Suru's time in Scotland was about far more than whisky, for it was there that he met the love of his life.
1:25:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Her name was Jesse Roberta Cowan, but everyone called her Rita.
1:25:40
[SPEAKER_00]: She lived in Kirk and Tillage, a small town just outside Glasgow, where her late father had been a doctor.
1:25:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Taket Suru came to know the Cowan family through one of Rita's younger sisters, and it is said that he gave lessons in judo to Rita's younger brother.
1:25:57
[SPEAKER_00]: He would visit the family home, and the cowans welcome this courteous young man from the other side of the world.
1:26:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Around the fire in the evenings, Rita played the piano, and Masataka sang.
1:26:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The two of them fell in love.
1:26:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a bold and difficult love for its time.
1:26:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Marriages between Japanese and Western people were very rare, and both families had serious concerns.
1:26:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Rita's family worried about her moving so far away to a country and culture she did not know.
1:26:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Taket Suru's family, back in Japan, had expected him to marry a Japanese woman and to take over the family's sake business.
1:26:39
[SPEAKER_00]: but the two of them were determined.
1:26:41
[SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1920, Massataka and Rita were married in a quiet civil ceremony in Glasgow.
1:26:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Later that year, having completed his studies and his apprenticeships.
1:26:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Taket Suru and his new wife set out together for Japan, Rita left behind her family, her home, and everything familiar, and traveled with her husband to a land on the other side of the world.
1:27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: They arrived in Japan near the end of 1920, full of hope.
1:27:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But the world had changed, while tacit suru had been away.
1:27:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The end of the First World War had brought an economic slump, and sets Ushuso, the company that had sent him to Scotland, no longer had the money or the appetite for such an ambitious and uncertain project as real whiskey.
1:27:34
[SPEAKER_00]: the plan was abandoned.
1:27:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Taket Suru, with all his knowledge and his careful notes, found himself with nowhere to use them.
1:27:44
[SPEAKER_00]: He eventually left the company, and for a time he worked as a chemistry teacher at a school in Osaka.
1:27:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Rita, meanwhile
1:27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: towards English and Piano to help support them.
1:27:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It must have been a disappointing time.
1:28:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But fortunately, there was someone else in Japan who shared the dream of Japanese whiskey.
1:28:07
[SPEAKER_00]: His name was Shinjiro Tori.
1:28:10
[SPEAKER_00]: and he was a merchant in Osaka who had built a successful business selling imported wines and spirits and who had created a popular sweet wine for the Japanese market.
1:28:21
[SPEAKER_00]: His company was called Kotobukiya and it would later become known to the world as San Tori.
1:28:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Tori was an energetic and visionary businessman and he too believed that Japan could make its own whisky.
1:28:37
[SPEAKER_00]: He had even sought advice from experts in Scotland.
1:28:40
[SPEAKER_00]: When he learned that there was a young Japanese chemist who had actually studied and worked in Scottish distilleries, he sought him out.
1:28:49
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1923,
1:28:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Tory hired to Ketsu to build and run a whisky distillery.
1:28:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The two men did not always agree.
1:28:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Taketsuru, remembering the cool, damp climate of the Scottish Highlands, felt that the best place for a distillery would be in the north, perhaps on the island of Hokkaido, where the weather most resembled Scotland.
1:29:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Tory, the businessman,
1:29:15
[SPEAKER_00]: preferred a location close to the great cities, where customers could visit, where transport was easy, and where the operation could be supervised.
1:29:25
[SPEAKER_00]: In the end,
1:29:26
[SPEAKER_00]: They chose a place called Yamazaki, in a valley on the outskirts of Kyoto, where three rivers come together, where the water was famously pure and where mists often gather in the humid air.
1:29:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The site had been admired for the quality of its water since ancient times, and it was said that a famous tea master had once built a tea house nearby.
1:29:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the first multi-wisky distillery in Japan.
1:29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Under Techett Suru's direction, the copper pot stills were installed.
1:30:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The barley was melted and fermented, and the first spirit ran from the stills, and was laid down in casks to rest.
1:30:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Then came the waiting, as there always is with whiskey.
1:30:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, in 1929, Kota Bukia released its first whiskey called Shiro Fooder, which means White Label.
1:30:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a genuine Scottish style malt whisky made in Japan.
1:30:33
[SPEAKER_00]: and sadly it did not sell very well.
1:30:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Many Japanese drinkers found it too smoky and too heavy, too strongly flavoured with peat.
1:30:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, in a sense, too Scottish for the tastes of the time.
1:30:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Torrey and his company would spend the following years adjusting and refining their approach, and eventually they would find great success with smoother blends, better suited to Japanese tastes.
1:31:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Taket Suru, however, had his own vision.
1:31:05
[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to make whiskey that was true to what he had learned in Scotland in a place that felt like Scotland on his own terms.
1:31:13
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1934, after about 10 years with Kota Bukia, he left the company to strike out on his own.
1:31:21
[SPEAKER_00]: He went north to the island of Hokkaido, the place he had dreamed of all along.
1:31:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There, on the western coast of the island, in a small fishing town called Yoichi, he found what he was looking for.
1:31:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yoichi sat between the sea and the mountains.
1:31:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It had clean water, cool air, and long snowy winters.
1:31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It was damp and misty, much like the highlands.
1:31:50
[SPEAKER_00]: There was
1:31:57
[SPEAKER_00]: He founded a company there with a rather curious name.
1:32:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It was called Die Nippon Kaju, which means the great Japan Jews company.
1:32:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason for this name was very practical.
1:32:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Whiskey takes years to mature, and in the meantime, a new company needs something to sell.
1:32:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Hokkaido was famous for its apples, and so, while the first Whiskey rested in its casks,
1:32:25
[SPEAKER_00]: the company made and sold Apple Juice, as well as Apple Wine and Apple Brandi.
1:32:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The juice was made with great care, but it was expensive, and in the early years the business struggled.
1:32:39
[SPEAKER_00]: At Yoichi, Takede Suru built pot stills in the traditional way, and he chose to heat them directly with coal fires, as some Scottish distilleries had done in the past.
1:32:52
[SPEAKER_00]: This was difficult and demanding work.
1:32:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The fire had to be tended constantly by hand.
1:32:58
[SPEAKER_00]: and the heat was harder to control than with steam, but he believed that direct firing gave the spirit a richer, heavier, more robust character.
1:33:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Remarkably, the stills at Yoichi are still heated by coal to this day.
1:33:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The stokers shoveling coal into the fires beneath the great copper pots, just as they did nearly a century ago.
1:33:22
[SPEAKER_00]: At the top of each still, a small twist of rice straw rope called Shimonawa is hung, a shinto symbol that marks a sacred space and wards off Miss Fortune.
1:33:35
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1940, the company released its first whiskey.
1:33:43
[SPEAKER_00]: combining the first sounds of Nippon and Kaju.
1:33:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In later years, the company itself would take this name and become Niko Whisky, but the timing was once again difficult.
1:33:57
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1940, Japan was at war in China and it would soon be at war with the United States and Britain.
1:34:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The Imperial Japanese Navy became an important customer for Whisky, which kept the company going,
1:34:13
[SPEAKER_00]: but for Rita, the war years were very hard.
1:34:17
[SPEAKER_00]: She was a Scottish woman in a country at war with Britain.
1:34:21
[SPEAKER_00]: She had lived in Japan for 20 years by then.
1:34:25
[SPEAKER_00]: She wore kimono, spoke Japanese, and had learned to cook Japanese dishes, including it is said, the kind of salted fish and pickled vegetables her husband loved, but none of that protected her from suspicion.
1:34:41
[SPEAKER_00]: She was watched by the authorities.
1:34:44
[SPEAKER_00]: There were rumours that she was a spy.
1:34:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Children threw stones at her.
1:34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It is said that she was followed by police when she went out and that at times she hardly left the house at all.
1:34:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Masa Taka and Rita had not been able to have children of their own.
1:35:00
[SPEAKER_00]: They adopted a daughter, whom they named Rima, and later adopted Masataka's nephew to Keshi, who would eventually become the head of the company, through all the difficulties of those years, through financial struggles, suspicion, and war.
1:35:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The couple remained devoted to each other.
1:35:21
[SPEAKER_00]: After the war, Japan slowly rebuilt.
1:35:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And as the country grew more prosperous in the 1950s and 1960s, whiskey became enormously popular.
1:35:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Office workers stopped at bars after work, and whiskey mixed with water or soda, known as miswari or a highball, became a part of everyday life.
1:35:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Nika grew and prospered.
1:35:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Rita did not live to see all of this.
1:35:52
[SPEAKER_00]: She died on the 17th of January 1961 at the age of 64.
1:35:59
[SPEAKER_00]: In the country that had become her home, her husband was devastated.
1:36:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It is said that he rarely spoke of her afterward and that he threw himself into his work more deeply than ever.
1:36:10
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1969, Tucket Suru opened a second malt distillery in a valley near the city of Sendai in Northern Japan, where two rivers meet among wooded hills.
1:36:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It was called Miyagikyo, where Yoichi produced a bold, smoky, powerful whiskey.
1:36:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Miyagikyo was designed to produce a softer, lighter, fruity spirit, so that the two together could be blended in harmony.
1:36:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Some years before, Nika had also brought over a pair of continuous stills of the old coffee design built in Scotland to make grain whiskey for its blends, and so the invention of the former Irish excisement and theus coffee, which had helped to shape the scotch blends
1:36:59
[SPEAKER_00]: found a new home in Japan.
1:37:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Mass attack attack at Suru died on 29 August 1979 at the age of 85.
1:37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: He was buried at Yoyuchi on a hillside beside his beloved Rita.
1:37:15
[SPEAKER_00]: He is remembered today as the father of Japanese whiskey.
1:37:20
[SPEAKER_00]: His story and Rita's has been told many times in Japan.
1:37:25
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2014,
1:37:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Japan's national broadcaster, aired a popular morning television drama inspired by their lives, and a new generation came to know the young chemist from Takahara, and the Scottish woman who followed him across the world.
1:37:43
[SPEAKER_00]: At Yoichi, visitors can walk through the old stone buildings of the distillery.
1:37:49
[SPEAKER_00]: See the coal fires glowing beneath the stills, and visit the house
1:37:57
[SPEAKER_00]: In the decades after Taketsuru's death, Japanese whiskey continued to grow in reputation.
1:38:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early 2000s, it began to win major international awards, sometimes placing ahead of the finest whiskeys of Scotland, single moths from both Nicar and Santori.
1:38:17
[SPEAKER_00]: the company that grew from Shinjiro Tori's coat of buquia, were named among the best whiskeys in the world, demand grew so quickly that aged Japanese whisky became scarce, and some well-known bottling were discontinued for a time, simply because the patient years in the cask could not be hurried.
1:38:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 1989, in a completion of the circle,
1:38:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Nika purchased a distillery in Scotland itself, the Ben-Nivist distillery, at the foot of the highest mountain in the British Isles, near the town of Fort William in the western Highlands.
1:38:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The craft that Tacketsuru had carried away in his notebooks, from the blends of Scotland to the snowy shores of Hokkaido, had come home again,
1:39:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We began with the alchemists of Alexandria, bent over their Olympics, watching vaporize and gather into something new.
1:39:22
[SPEAKER_00]: We followed the water of life into the monasteries of Europe, and then north to the cool, gray lands where barley grew and grapes did not.
1:39:32
[SPEAKER_00]: We sat for a while in a hidden bothi in a highland Glen, beside a small copper still and a fire of glowing peat, while a lookout watched the path for the goga.
1:39:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We saw George Smith take out his license and Glen live it, with a pair of pistols at his side, and we watched the illicit stills fall quiet one by one.
1:39:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We cross the ocean to the rye fields of western Pennsylvania.
1:39:59
[SPEAKER_00]: where frontier families turn their grain into something they could carry over the mountains and where attacks on whiskey brought 13,000 soldiers marching westward through the autumn.
1:40:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We followed the corn down the rivers into Kentucky.
1:40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: with its limestone springs and its charred oak barrels and we met a careful Scottish physician with his thermometer and a colonel who built a castle and fought for the honest bottle and its green stamp.
1:40:32
[SPEAKER_00]: We passed through the long dry years when whiskey waited in guarded warehouses and a pint could be had with a doctor's note.
1:40:41
[SPEAKER_00]: while boats slipped out to rum-row in the dark.
1:40:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And finally, we traveled with a young sake brewers son from Taikara to the rainy streets of Glasgow, where he filled his notebooks, met Rita, and carried the knowledge of whiskey home to the misty coast of Hokkaido.
1:41:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Through all of it, one thing stayed the same.
1:41:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Whisky has always asked for patience.
1:41:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The grain must grow through the summer.
1:41:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The mash must ferment in its own time.
1:41:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And the spirit, once it runs clear from the still, must rest in the dark year after year, while the wood breathes and the seasons turn outside, slowly becoming something gentler, warmer, and deeper than it was before.
1:41:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this evening with me here on sleepless history.
1:41:35
[SPEAKER_00]: If this episode helped you rest, I hope you'll come back again whenever the night feels long.
1:41:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Good night.