Bourbon Empire (22 page)

Basics in place, Heaven Hill cast about for its heritage. The Shapiras knew that you can’t have a “brand new” whiskey company. Bourbon drinkers always crave tradition—they want their whiskey brands to at least
seem
like they’ve been around for a long time. Heaven Hill needed some sort of history, even if it was manufactured anew. This the brothers found with William Heavenhill, a long-dead farmer-distiller who a century earlier had worked the land where the new distillery had just been built. Heavenhill’s backstory fit the bill: he was born in 1783 in the middle of a surprise Indian attack. His mother had escaped into the woods and hid behind a waterfall, where she gave birth to him. Heavenhill also had the right look: his beard was a brambly thicket, untamed and wild as if a flock of birds lived within its tangles. The distillery called itself Heavenhill after the man, but shortly after it opened the name was separated into two words. Company lore claims the reason was because the typist filling out the company’s first distilling permit misspelled it. Heaven Hill couldn’t afford to reapply with the correct name. In a move of frontier practicality that would have made William Heavenhill proud, the distillery decided to just roll with it.

Heaven Hill had proved once again—just as James Pepper had done a half century earlier—that in the whiskey business, the appearance of
authenticity and heritage is often more important than the real thing. In the process of creating such a fantastic backstory, the distillery had also upped the ante, raising a bar that later generations of companies would be forced to outdo. Bulleit was created in the 1990s, but would present itself as something dating to the 1860s. Templeton Rye was created in Iowa in the early twenty-first century, but would tell customers it was the same whiskey that Al Capone drank (the whiskey was in fact sourced from MGPI). The Michter’s brand on store shelves today started in the 1990s, giving itself a patina of age by sourcing old stocks of whiskey from outside suppliers and printing the year 1753 on its labels. The truth about Michter’s, however, is that its brand name didn’t exist until the 1950s, when liquor executive Lou Forman invented it by combining the names of his sons, Michael and Peter. The Michter’s plant that Forman owned—unrelated to the modern brand—was located on land that was owned in 1753 by a Pennsylvania farmer-distiller named Johann Shenk. Like most farmers of his era, Shenk owned a little pot still to convert his excess grain into spirits, and historians speculate that he might have sold some of his spirits to George Washington’s army. So, by purchasing rights to the lapsed trademark of a brand that was completely unrelated to Shenk but was briefly located on the site of his old farm, Michter’s today suggests that it once sold whiskey to George Washington during the American Revolution (the modern Michter’s isn’t even headquartered in the same state). Regardless, stories like these have helped many brands build their considerable success.

Even though many brands get their start by sourcing whiskey from outsiders, Heaven Hill in the 1930s started by making its own product. Like any new distillery, the company was forced initially to rely on sales of extremely young whiskey. It created a temporary brand called Bourbon Falls, aged for a scant two years, that enabled the company to keep the lights on. Bourbon Falls was eventually phased out as the distillery’s namesake brand, a four-year-old bourbon, came on the market by the early 1940s. Heaven Hill also sold bulk whiskey and created custom brands for liquor stores and bars.

In 1943, Heaven Hill was on more solid footing and its initial investors outside of the brothers decided to sell their interests. The family acquired their shares and kept on expanding. During the following decades, Heaven Hill adopted a strategy of purchasing brands that other companies no longer wanted and of building new brands named after old icons. Heaven Hill introduced Evan Williams in 1957 and eventually started or purchased the brands Elijah Craig, Henry McKenna, J.T.S. Brown, and Mattingly & Moore. Today it’s also responsible for Fighting Cock, Old Fitzgerald, Larceny, Rittenhouse Rye, Pikesville Rye, Mellow Corn, and owns dozens of rum, vodka, gin, tequila, and other whiskey brands. It also makes whiskey for many other non-distiller producers who bottle it under their own labels and sell it as their own. In 2000, the distillery honored Isaac Wolfe Bernheim, the whiskey icon who didn’t think his Jewish name would market well, by naming its wheat whiskey after him. And by 2014, Heaven Hill would remain family-owned—the biggest distillery in the country to claim that honor—and the second biggest owner of aged whiskey stocks in the United States. Members of the Beam family were still its master distillers.

Over time, Heaven Hill moved the story of William Heavenhill to the margins. The story of the Shapira brothers is what the distillery emphasizes today, featuring a photo of them that has finally accumulated the weathered look that whiskey companies covet. In the image, the brothers all stand around a barrel, their suit jackets casually tossed aside so the men don’t seem too formal, and their neatly combed hairstyles presenting a stark contrast to William Heavenhill’s brambly beard. A caption below the image reads, “Now the Shapira brothers were officially whiskey men.”

 • • • 

As whiskey companies resurrected—or simply just invented—themselves, the industry began cultivating new parts of its image. Much of this involved downplaying parts of the past—attempts to form monopolies, the association whiskey had with domestic abuse and other social
problems—that had gotten the industry into trouble with Prohibitionists in the first place.

Early efforts to make over bourbon’s image began with an increased focus on luxury. Walter Greenlee, an executive at Schenley, told his industry counterparts that they needed “increased accent upon the
quality appeal
in liquor merchandising.” He told them to be careful about window displays and to avoid “cheap and flashy containers.” Millard Bennett, from the Hunter Gwynbrook Distillery, ordered his sales force to sell its brands “as a luxury item wherever we can convince the distributor that whiskey is not bought or consumed like soup.”

In 1935, one association of distillers from Kentucky published a mea culpa
in
Spirits
magazine, an industry trade publication, apologizing for its various past attempts to establish monopolies to combat Joseph Greenhut’s Whiskey Trust. The cartels had all been well-intentioned efforts to bring order to a mercurial industry, they told customers, but their implementation by the industry’s forebears “did not work exactly as they had figured out on paper,” the distillers explained in their attempt to make amends to the public.

With the apologies out of the way, the distillers turned to convincing the public they were in fact a bunch of choirboys. “The Kentucky distiller is not, nor ever was, merely a manufacturer of whiskey,” another industry trade group told the nation in a public letter. “Nor was there ever a more honorable set of businessmen. And, in the main, there was never a more honorable group in any industry than that found among the rank and file in the Kentucky distilling business.” Another paid advertisement read, “Genuine, old-fashioned, hand-made, sour-mash Kentucky Bourbon” could only be made “by a trained, native Kentucky distiller, as only a trained native Kentucky distiller knows how to make Bourbon Whiskey.”

They were laying it on thick, coaxing America back into bed after the long estrangement. In order to get the new message out, the five largest Kentucky distilleries invested more in advertising during the three years after Repeal than the entire state had invested before
Prohibition, according to one industry estimate. Just as Kentucky had done during the days of Daniel Boone, it was demonstrating its unparalleled ability to use rhetoric to enhance its mystique. The whiskey makers were becoming masters of modern marketing.

 • • • 

Amid all the rebuilding and reinventing, the whiskey industry was well aware of the kind of havoc that changes to old recipes might wreak. One of a bourbon brand’s key assets is the sense of heritage and history that it conveys to consumers, and no smart distiller or marketer disrupts that. In 1935, a trade association of Kentucky distilling interests addressed customer fears about disrupted heritage by publishing another open letter that would put minds at ease. The “old-timers may have operated, for the most part, by the rule of thumb,” they admitted in a rare acknowledgment that the old ways, while easily romanticized, were sometimes a little slapdash and inconsistent. But drinkers, the distilleries assured, shouldn’t fret. “The only change which might be mentioned in the methods of manufacture is, if anything, for the best,” the group calmly reassured customers. After that, the changes were hardly ever mentioned again.

The A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery, which had barely survived under the medicinal whiskey clause, took particular note of the changed whiskey landscape and decided to evolve. It would pay lip service to tradition, but it would also steer bourbon in creatively novel directions that remain popular today. After Repeal, the company merged with W.L. Weller and Sons, an NDP it had partnered with during Prohibition. Among the company’s new leadership was a marketing salesman named Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle, who had started in the whiskey business in 1893 working for the Weller side. Van Winkle wasn’t from a family line of whiskey people, but fell into the profession as a marketer because “I wanted a job,” he later explained after the new company he helped establish, which was called Stitzel-Weller, became a tastemaking legend.

Stitzel-Weller approached the challenge of adapting with aplomb and creativity, setting out to bypass shortages by producing a bourbon
that tasted better at a younger age—something that held up well in the five- to seven-year range, when most bourbon is just starting to really earn your attention. Using a recipe devised by Stitzel, the distillery replaced rye from the classic bourbon recipe in favor of winter wheat, which he assessed might take a little less time to age, and thus built a foundation for a style of bourbon that has since grown much more popular.

Wheat had certainly been used to make whiskey before, but the grain was far from popular. During the early nineteenth century, distillers praised wheat’s flavor, but advised against using it because the alcohol yields weren’t as high as corn or rye and because it was relatively expensive. But despite those economic disadvantages, wheat carries an appealing and delicate flavor; sweet and redolent of tropical fruits and coconut, as opposed to the heavier spice notes of rye. Wheat is as sophisticated and complex as rye, but its flavor is just a bit lighter on the palate. In the same way that the marriage between rye and corn creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts, wheat is also often at its best when combined with the other grain.

In the mid-1940s Stitzel-Weller came under the control of the marketing impresario Van Winkle, who focused the company’s efforts almost exclusively on making the wheated bourbons it had developed. The standout was Old Fitzgerald, which came in four-, six-, and eight-year-old varieties and was bottled at 100 proof. The company also made Cabin Still (four years old and 90 proof), W.L. Weller Special Reserve (seven years old and 90 proof), Weller Antique (seven years old and between 107 and 114 proof), and Rebel Yell.
*

Stitzel-Weller’s bourbon stood out for the care and consideration given to its production. The corn wasn’t ground quite as fine as many distilleries typically grind it, a step that helps create a richer flavor but is expensive for distillers because it doesn’t yield as much alcohol per bushel of grain. The oak staves used for the distillery’s barrels were also a little thicker than average, which produced a heavier oak flavor that
helped balance out the wheat’s sweet lightness. Barrel entry proofs were also relatively low—another expensive measure that doesn’t allow the alcohol to be stretched as far but preserves flavor and dissolves compounds out of the wood a little more gently. Stitzel-Weller also used pot stills and proclaimed in advertisements that its bourbons were made “the old-fashioned way.” Nevertheless, in many ways the company’s whiskey was refreshingly new.

Stitzel-Weller had been forced to adapt, but it still maintained a commitment to quality production standards. Beam and Heaven Hill would also insist on making their single brands as full-bodied, straight whiskies, although they would generally continue to use rye as the flavor grain. National and Schenley also prioritized the production of straight, full-bodied whiskey, but not across the board for all the brands they owned. Old Crow, Old Grand-Dad, Old Taylor, James E. Pepper, and Ancient Age were all geared back up as straight whiskies, but many less popular old straight whiskey brands were now offered as blended products, made by stretching a small amount of straight whiskey with grain neutral spirits. As for the scores of other smaller brands the industry giants had acquired during Prohibition, many were retired to reduce competition for the headliner brands they would now push harder on a national level. In 1934, 85 percent of the American whiskey inventory was less than one year old, and the move to lightening the whiskies was considered a temporary holdover. What the companies didn’t realize was that this decision would ripple throughout the market for decades, as many consumers acquired a taste for the lighter products.

Everyone found ways to adapt, but the demands of instant gratification forced some distilleries to use aging shortcuts. The Publicker Commercial Alcohol distillery in Philadelphia was able to produce ninety thousand gallons of spirits per day and claimed in advertisements that it could “make seventeen-year-old whiskey in twenty-four hours.” Publicker’s president, Simon “Si” Neuman, and its chief chemist, Dr. Carl Haner, claimed their process of “artificial aging” could be done through a process of shaking the barrels and applying them with direct heat in order to speed up the aging process. The company hinted
at other methods it used to quickly extract wood flavors—probably measures like wood chips and pressure cooking—but refused to provide the public with any more details.