by cowdery » Sun Feb 25, 2007 5:48 am
I blame the English.
For hundreds of years, the Scots and Irish made whiskey, and only they drank it. They didn’t market it to themselves, they didn’t have to, they were born drinking it.
Then, in about the middle of the 19th century, London merchants—some of whom were Scottish, some English, some even Italian—decided to soften the traditional Irish and Scottish pot still malt whiskey by mixing it with a lighter, almost flavorless grain whiskey made in a new invention, the column still. Blended scotch was born, and with it international scotch drinking and international scotch marketing.
This new whiskey—a brand new invention—was more palatable than the straight stuff and a lot less expensive to make. It was marketed to people who drank, but didn’t drink whiskey. Maybe they knew a little bit about it, or about other aged spirits such as brandy, or old wine. Most people know about aging, they know that the older something is, the better it is.
Barrel aging was positioned as the expensive, sophisticated and therefore better way to flavor spirits with plant material. The cheap way was gin, a neutral spirit infused with plant material like juniper berries, orange peels and tree bark. That could be done overnight. Whiskey (this new whiskey, that is, blended scotch) was better than gin because it was aged in barrels, and that took a long time.
So, the London blenders trying to sell this new kind of whiskey didn’t talk about the high efficiency of their new Coffey stills. They talked about oldness, timeless craftsmanship. They talked how old the whiskey was, and how old the distillery was that made it—or some of it, anyway, the malt part. Or they told a story about long ago, in a land far away, a story of heroes and villains, that had nothing to with their brand but conveyed oldness.
Their companies, like their products, were brand new, so they looked for anything old to talk about, the older the better. Mainly what they talked about were the distilleries that made the malt component of the new blends.
Bragging about the age of your whiskey is pretty straightforward. You talk about how old it is, how much older it is than somebody else’s whiskey, how much less expensive it is than somebody else’s younger whiskey or whiskey the same age. And 20 is better than 15 is better than 10.
With the “heritage” angle, older is better because it means the company has more experience, is closer to origins, has whiskey in its DNA. So 1066 is better than 1250 is better than 1415 is better than 1648. You get the picture.
Aged spirits are supposed to be old liquor from old companies, with even older cultural associations, the older the better in every case. That’s what makes all aged spirits better than un-aged spirits, such as gin or rum, and makes some aged spirits better than others. Oldness is Lord. We prostrate ourselves before thee.
The European-American conquerors of North America began to make liquor here as soon as they could. They adapted European methods to new conditions. They found a new grain to incorporate, Indian corn, later called maize or simply corn. It distilled up sweet and mild, but full-bodied.
They also found plentiful supplies of a terrific wood for barrels, American white oak, so plentiful and so rich it gave the whiskey a dark red color and creamy, nutty, caramel yummy-ness.
The Americans made wood much more of a flavoring agent than it had ever been in the Scottish or Irish tradition, more like it was in the Cognac tradition. Oak, vanilla, caramel; dark fruits; those are fortified wine and brandy flavors, especially present in Cognac, which ages in Limousin oak barrels that are sometimes placed in attics of homes and businesses to expose them to wildly fluctuating temperature extremes, like the hilltop rackhouses of the Bluegrass.
But one thing both traditions had in common was, older-is-better. For scotch whiskey, Irish whiskey, and Cognac brandy, older is always better.
But American whiskey isn’t built that way. At first, it wasn’t aged at all, though it might be sweetened before drinking with a little sugar or fruit juice. When it was aged, they aged it fast. They put it into new charred barrels and aged it in steamy Kentucky. Doing it that way, the whiskey tasted pretty good in three years and really good in six.
But like most things, it didn’t keep getting better indefinitely. It seemed to peak at about 8, maybe 10 years. After that, it started to get too woody and too sooty. It tasted like a campfire. It didn’t taste good.
Like their United Kingdom counterparts, American whiskey merchants talked about oldness, they even talked about age, but most of the whiskey they sold was four to six years old. It tasted good enough. No one complained.
Oldness was in the names—Old Fullerbrush—and in the stories about the brand’s founder meeting Daniel Boone at the ye olde pot still inn, but the whiskey was four to six years old, regardless of what the label said in those days before truth-in-advertising laws.
Then came Prohibition, which officially lasted 13 years but disrupted the American whiskey industry for much longer than that. Some of the whiskey sold during Prohibition as medicinal whiskey was very old for American whiskey, between 13 and 18 years old, some of it. Much of it was truly awful, over-aged, dead, oxidized, disgusting. However, this whiskey was from barrels that may have been moved several times and probably didn’t receive the TLC that barrels of aging whiskey usually got from their owner. Whiskey that old didn’t necessarily have to taste that bad.
In the post-Prohibition era, it took time to build back whiskey stocks, so even four- to six-year-old whiskey was scarce for many years. Then came World War II, which set everyone back all over again.
Some distilleries sold older whiskey. We know Stitzel-Weller (S-W) produced ten year old and twelve year old bourbons in the late 1950s. The S-W products were so self-consciously rare they even said “Collector’s Item” on the label.
The Old Charter bourbons rather famously came in a range of stated ages, up to twelve years. Wild Turkey came into being as an 8-year-old, Evan Williams came in as a 7-year-old. Old Taylor’s label claimed six years. Old Crow had ten-year-old limited editions.
That was the range. Rot-gut whiskey was less than four years old. Good, standard bourbon was four to six years old. Premium bourbon was six to eight years old. Then there was a specialty category of whiskey from eight to twelve years old. At least 80 percent of the industry’s volume was in whiskey less than six years old. Nearly zero percent was in whiskey more than 12 years old.
Some brands never said how old they were. One of them, Jack Daniel’s, did nothing but grow in popularity despite that omission.
And so it was until the 1980s. A few things had happened by then. First, so much American straight whiskey wasn’t being sold that it was piling up in the warehouses, getting older than anybody thought it should, because nobody had anything else to do with it. Second, some of the people who weren’t drinking American whiskey were now drinking scotch whiskey, with numbers on the labels, and the numbers were starting at 12 and going up from there.
Meanwhile, half a world away, a new generation of Japanese men was reaching adulthood. Whiskey drinking is an almost ritualized part of Japanese business culture, but the new generation was thirsty for something unlike what their elders drank, which was scotch, or scotch-like Japanese-made whiskey like Suntory. The new generation discovered bourbon and bourbon began to boom in Japan. But because of the numbers on the scotch labels, the Japanese thought maybe bourbon labels should have numbers on them too. And not 4 or 6. They wanted 12 and up, just like the scotch bottles. The American producers thought about it for about 5 seconds and said, sure, we can do that.
Thus were born the double-digit bourbons. In 1991, a bar owner in Chicago told me that he couldn’t get Very Very Old Fitzgerald (12-years-old) anymore because the Japanese bought it all. Twelve years, once the ceiling, was now the floor. The Japanese were buying 15-year-old bourbon, 18-year-old bourbon, 20-year-old bourbon, even 23-year-old bourbon.
American distillers had decided a long time ago that American whiskey was a dicey proposition after about 12 years, so they hadn’t exactly experimented with longer aging. Why bother? The 12- to 23-year-old whiskeys that arrived in the 1980s were an accident, victims of circumstances, the unwanted children of parents in freefall, but they hadn’t been nearly as abused as the Prohibition-era whiskeys. They had received reasonable care. It made a difference.
If the double-digit bourbons had all stayed in Japan, none of this would have happened, but they didn’t. Some found their way back here and Americans started to taste double-digit American whiskey.
Some of it was, well, not great, but some was a revelation. Who knew bourbon could taste like that? Still, most of the best were less than 20 years old. The sweet spot was still about twelve, maybe 15. Above 20 years was just about as risky as ever. Even to people accustomed to a lot of wood there was still a bridge too far, and 20 years was about where they built it. Very few people who had tasted American whiskey at a variety of ages would pick 20+ as their favorite.
That was what people who drank a lot of American whiskey knew. The best American whiskeys are not 20+ years old. Maybe a couple are, but most aren’t, and most 20+ year old bourbons aren’t in the world-beater class. But many people just coming to American whiskey don’t know all that. The cult of oldness is what they knew. When the cult of oldness joined the church of the best, it was really on. The older-the-better competition had come back to bourbon and rye. From Japan it spread to the United States and Europe. (It doesn’t seem much in evidence in bourbon’s other big market, “down under” in Australia and New Zealand.)
When there is a market for whiskey based solely on a number on the label, whiskey that should not be will be put into bottles and sold. In many cases, the independent bottlers of these products are the end of the line for barrels unwanted by their makers and by now maybe on their third or fourth owner. No criticism of these producers is intended here. They are giving the customer an honest product, an authentic 21-year-old bourbon if that’s what the label says. They are giving the customer what he wants, what he asked for. Matching willing buyers with willing sellers, that’s what it’s all about. Caveat Emptor.
But subjectively, in my opinion, some of the whiskey in those bottles you wouldn’t enjoy drinking. Some of it is just okay, and a little bit of it is outstanding. It is all expensive, so the risk that you’ll waste your money is always high.
Heaven Hill and Buffalo Trace both sell double-digit whiskey and, as distillers, they can ensure continuity of supply year after year, even if as the producer always fondly hopes, the product grows more popular each passing day. If you like one of their very old whiskeys, you can buy a bottle every now and then and know what you are going to get. An independent bottler can’t always ensure continuity of supply, so one batch might taste very different from another. As distillers keep more old whiskey for their own brands, it is becoming much harder for independent bottlers to supply their brands, especially with very old whiskey. Some have lowered their stated ages or gone NAS (“no age statement”).
The cult of oldness mourns their passing. It doesn’t really mind the higher prices for the fetish objects that remain. Oldness is worth it.
I disagree. Somebody has to say “enough!” For the good of American whiskey, the cult of oldness must be suppressed.
The cult of oldness must be suppressed because it too often gives inexperienced bourbon or rye drinkers a distorted impression of American straight whiskey and its normal taste profile. After spending a lot of money on what he or she thinks is the best because it is the oldest and most expensive bottle in town, the novice expects something transcendent and gets a mouthful of chimney instead. “If that’s the best bourbon there is, then bourbon is not for me,” they decide, never knowing what they have missed.
That 21-year-old stuff, even when it’s really good, is on the fringes of the normal bourbon drinking experience. It’s not for beginners. The not-so-great 21-year-old stuff will send Junior back to his Budweiser in less time than it took to remove the thick wax seal from the “rare” whiskey bottle.
It’s not good for the American whiskey industry if someone is out there drinking products that turn them off about American whiskey.
The cult of oldness is to real whiskey appreciation what pornography is to real sex. It distorts the experience for many and spoils it completely for some. Better awareness is the best way to prevent the cult of oldness from claiming any more innocent victims.
Only you can prevent oldnessness.