cowdery wrote:Frontier producers don't have any reason to name a style. They're making whiskey and, where they are, it's the only whiskey there is, so they call it "whiskey" and leave it at that. A "type" name (e.g., Monongahela) only emerges when the product enters commerce in markets away from its point of origin, where the merchants and consumers need to distinguish one product from another.
Absolutely! That seems like such a simple and obvious concept, but it's amazing how often it gets overlooked. That's one reason why I've always held that the original distillers of what became known as "Monongahela" had no idea that it had turned red/brown and wood-flavored by the time it was served up in Baltimore taverns. Nor did the
distillers of the corn whiskey that would become Kentucky bourbon. The
merchants, with their Louisville warehouses, knew, because they'd already dumped all that "farmers' whiskey" into barrels, along with the rye whiskey that came down the river from Pittsburgh (maybe one barrel of rye for every four of corn, perhaps?) and let it sit in the warehouse for a season or two before sending it down to N'awluns.
cowdery wrote:I also believe that at this time it described a place of origin and not a "style" as such, in that someone was not making a "Monongahela-style whiskey" in Indiana or, for that matter, in Pennsylvania... ..It meant "whiskey from the Monongahela region" but that doesn't mean it wasn't stylistically distinctive.
I don't understand what would make you believe that, though. Gary's original post for this thread concerned an 1825 Richmond, Indiana advertisement referring to "Monongahela whisky", along with two other kinds, all identified by type, not place of origin (unless you equate "place of rectification" as "origin"). Also, note that this was apparently before people in Indiana were familiar with whiskey called "Bourbon".
Another telling point is that there wasn't any Monongahela coal, or Monongahela woolens, (or Bourbon tobacco, or Bourbon leather, either, for that matter). Any reference to Monongahela, or Bourbon, is known to mean only the spirit and nothing else, despite the fact that many products were associated with and shipped from those areas.
afisher wrote:I think in addition to meaning "whiskey from the Monongahela region" it probably specifically meant it was stylistically distinctive; otherwise who cares? Why bother specifying?
Absolutely. That's why the term also included whiskey from the many distilleries along the Allegheny river valley, too. The often-quoted reference in The Whale (Moby Dick) is owed entirely to the descriptive value of its distinctive type; of what possible value would its place of origin have been to Melville's story? After all, the Ishmael character was not from western Pennsylvania; he was native to New Bedford, Massachusetts. Where we was apparently familiar with Monongahela.
cowdery wrote:"Rectified" meant "corrected," which typically involved redistillation or filtering through charcoal or bone dust, which was done to eliminate more of the undesirable congeners, but it would be going too far to equate that with neutral spirit or with what we would consider blended whiskey today.
Since this was before the introduction of the column still, there probably were issues of whiskey straight from the distillery often being too low in alcohol content and what the rectifier was "fixing" through redistillation was bringing the whiskey up to proof (i.e., 50% ABV).
Here's another place where I agree completely with you, and I wish others could see it our way. Rectification got its bad connotations from what I call the "whiskey wars" that began in the 1870s and lasted (sort of) until the Taft decree of 1909. I say "sort of" because about that time the Temperence movement shifted into high gear and went on the attack against all forms of beverage spirits, rectified, straight, or whatever.
cowdery wrote:I am convinced that Monongahela was made primarily from rye and thus, even aged, had a stronger and rougher flavor than corn whiskey. I also suspect that some of the first corn whiskey, or bourbon, in commerce, where it would have been compared to Monongahela and other spirits, was either 100% corn or made with corn and barley malt only, and thus had very little flavor. Modern bourbon evolved when people discovered that a little rye went a long way in a corn spirit, in terms of giving it a pleasing flavor that was not as overpowering as the Monongahela.
I think that says it pretty well. Let me recall what I wrote a couple of paragraphs ago about what might have been discovered in mixing (i.e., rectifying) rye whiskey which had been acquired from ships (especially steamboats by the 1840s or so) that chose not to continue past the Falls of the Ohio and corn whiskey purchased locally. A fair estimate might be one barrel of rye whiskey to four of corn whiskey. Why, that would be about 20%, wouldn't it? Sound like a familiar proportion to you?