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September
is National Bourbon Heritage Month, a celebration of America’s “native
spirit.” I celebrate bourbon pretty much year-round, but it’s nice to
have everyone else join in for a little while. If you’re not too
familiar with the all-American whiskey, here’s a few things to catch you
up to speed.
1. First things first: Where’d the name
come from? The usual explanation is that the hooch is named for the
original Bourbon County, Kentucky, which covered a far larger area than
the modern county (which has no distilleries today) and came to be
called “Old Bourbon.” As the corn whiskey made by area distillers was
shipped around the country, the barrels were stamped with the county’s
name, and people started calling the Kentucky whiskeys bourbon to
differentiate them from other regional styles. Bourbon County, in turn,
was named for the royal House of Bourbon, which produced monarchs that
ruled over France, Spain, Sicily, Naples, Spain and elsewhere.
There’s also an alternate explanation of the name that
credits it to the whiskey’s popularity in New Orleans and curious
drinkers seeking out the whiskey sold on Bourbon Street, or “that
Bourbon whiskey.”
2. While bourbon was born in Kentucky and much of it is still made there today, bourbon doesn’t have to come from Bourbon County or the Bluegrass State. What makes bourbon bourbon, according to the Federal Standards of Identity of Distilled Spirits, is this:
- It’s made in the U.S.
- It’s distilled from a grain mix that is at least 51 percent corn.
- It’s aged in new, oak barrels that have been charred.
- It’s distilled to no more than 160 proof (more on that in a minute), put into the barrel for aging at 125 proof or below and bottled at 80 proof or higher.
Bourbon that meets those standards, and has been aged for at least two years can be labeled straight bourbon.
3. The “proof” of a bourbon or other
spirit is a measure of its alcoholic strength, defined in the U.S. as
twice the percentage of alcohol by volume. So, for example, the bourbon
that goes into the barrels at 125 proof is 62.5 percent alcohol. The
term comes from 18th century Britain, where sailors “proved” their rum
rations were not watered down by splashing gunpowder with the spirit and
then igniting it. If the powder burned, the rum was legit.
4. Last year, Kentucky’s distilleries
filled 1,007,703 barrels with delicious bourbon. They hadn’t hit the
million-barrel milestone since 1973, and the busy year brought their
total inventory to 4.9 millions barrels. Kentucky now has more barrels
of aging whiskey than it does people (the population is 4.3 million).
The 2012 tax-assessed value of all that bourbon was $1.7 billion.
5. Bourbon’s origins aren’t well
documented, but popular legend credits the first batch to Baptist
preacher Elijah Craig. Ever thrifty, Craig supposedly re-used an old
barrel to age some home-made corn hooch and sanitized it by
charring—giving it a unique color and flavor. More likely, bourbon has
no one creator. Corn whiskey was distilled in Kentucky before Craig
arrived from Virginia, and aging in charred barrels is also documented
decades earlier as a means of dealing with “sap blisters” in the wood
that could alter the whiskey’s flavor.
6. You’ll sometimes see bottles labeled sour mash bourbon. This doesn’t describe the flavor, but means that the whiskey was made using the “sour mash process,” where the mash—the mixture of grain, malt,
and water that the spirit is distilled from—contains some material from
a previously fermented and used mash. This helps maintain the chemical
balance of the new mash, discourages growth of foreign bacteria, and
maintains consistency and quality from batch to batch.
7. Another term you might see on a bottle is Bottled-in-Bond or Bonded.
This means the bourbon was made at a single distillery, by one
distiller in one distillation season, aged for at least four years in a
federally bonded and supervised warehouse, and bottled at 100 proof.
Bonded bourbons came about in the late 1800s, when some
distilleries were to turning a quick buck on harsher, unaged bourbons
and adding anything from fruit syrups to tobacco to improve the color
and flavor. As American Whiskey Reviews explains,
the distilleries that churned out these “rectified whiskies” had a leg
up on more proper bourbon makers in terms of production time and
costs, allowing them to control much of the whiskey market. To protect
themselves, distillers lobbied Congress to lay down the above standards
in the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897, giving their products a mark of
government-guaranteed quality assurance and a fighting chance in the
market.
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