The Men Who Made American Bourbon: Bourbon Barons, Volume I is the history of the five men who invented Kentucky bourbon as a commercial and philosophical proposition - and a systematic correction of what the secondary literature has gotten wrong about them.
Elijah Craig did not invent the charred barrel. The evidence has never supported the claim, and the book says so directly. James Crow's methods - the saccharometer, the sour mash process applied systematically, the careful record-keeping that made his whiskey the most celebrated in antebellum America - were never written down in a way that survived him, which is why the brand that carries his name has nothing to do with what he actually built. George Garvin Brown arrived in Louisville after the Civil War with no capital and no connections, went to work selling things, and arrived at the conviction that the most durable commercial promise a whiskey producer could make was a sealed bottle with his name on it. He introduced that bottle in 1870. William LaRue Weller built a wholesale bourbon operation that the 1893 congressional investigation into the Whisky Trust found in its distributor lists - a discovery that complicates the straightforward hero narrative, and that this book does not paper over. Isaac Wolfe Bernheim arrived at Castle Garden in April 1867 with twenty francs in gold, equal to about four dollars in American money. The secondary literature says seventeen dollars. The primary source is Bernheim's own account.
The book also corrects the standard account of the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897. E.H. Taylor Jr. does not appear in the Congressional Record for the 54th Congress, 2nd Session - the session in which the Act passed. The bill was introduced by Congressman Walter Evans of Kentucky's Fifth District. The four-year aging minimum that became the Act's most recognized standard was established not in the legislation itself but in the implementing regulations promulgated by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. These are not minor footnotes. They are the difference between the story the bourbon industry tells about itself and what the primary sources actually establish.
The Men Who Made American Bourbon is a narrative history grounded in primary sources including the Congressional Record, the 1893 House investigation into the Whisky Trust, Bernheim's privately printed family history, Harvey Wiley's autobiography, and the Bottled-in-Bond Act statute itself. It is written for serious bourbon enthusiasts who want the history behind the names on the bottles - the real history, not the one assembled after the fact when a name with age on it was worth more than the facts behind it.
Published by Barrel Proof Publishing Co. Bourbon Barons, Volume I.
