Mike's message was not particularly private, and I felt the questions (and our replies, of course) might be of interest to others here. So I asked him if he minded my copying it to the public discussion areas and answering there so that we can share with the other members. He said that would be fine, so here it is.
Mike Maguire wrote:From: Mike Maguire
To: EllenJ
Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:28 pm
...something coming soon on Maryland Pure Rye. I'd be real interested on seeing whatever you have since my grandfather was a distiller with them. I'm not sure whether it was before or after Prohibition, but he did work in Baltimore before it, then moved to Pekin, IL to run a yeast plant around 1920 until it apparently failed. After Repeal he went back to distilling only to die in Baltimore in 1936. We know no details about the company itself.
Maryland Pure Rye isn't the earliest known brand of Maryland rye whiskey. That honor is currently given to Monumental Rye (1860) and Patapsco Rye (1867), both distilled by Charles H. Ross & Co at the Monumental Distillery. That was the OLD Monumental, located on O'Donnell Street in the area of Baltimore later occupied by the National Brewing Company and now being developed into a trendy mall site. There are a couple of small photos on our webpage about the OTHER, newer Monumental (later called Majestic), but I've attached a couple more here.
Most people who have more than a passing interest in the story of American whiskey are familiar with the great abyss that was National Prohibition. Certainly, that period represents a near-total break in the continuity of the alcohol beverage industry, as well as so many issues peripheral to it. But there is a tendency to forget that it was not the only one. For example, whiskey, with the exception of straight whiskey, vanished in America in the early part of the 20th century, years before Prohibition. Many of the whiskeys that existed at the time Prohibition went into effect in 1920 shared only their name with the brands that existed a decade earler.
In 1906, a long-anticipated event occurred that brought to an end many of Baltimore's most respectable producers of fine rye whiskey. That was passage of the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act which, among other things, required products labeled "Whiskey" to actually contain whiskey. It also set forth an extremely narrow legal definition of just what constituted "whiskey". So narrow, in fact, that many otherwise fine products found themselves in violation of its limits.
According to James Bready, beginning in the 1870s Monumental was also producing Maryland Pure Rye, but Robert Snyder's database doesn't list that as one of the Charles H. Ross brands. It's possible that it was distilled under contract at Monumental for another company. That wasn't uncommon for Maryland rye distillers (nor for those of Pennsylvania or Kentucky, for that matter). The idea of retail whiskey being the product of a distiller, rather than a wholesale liquor dealer is relatively modern. They are, in fact, two completely different kinds of enterprise. One ferments grain mash and produces alcohol, as a value-added material. The other bottles whiskey from a barrel, or contracts to have it bottled, and identifies it with a brand name which he owns. Each is separately licensed and taxed, and even today only the liquor dealer is allowed to sell the whiskey, and then only in bottles. That's one reason why you can't buy a full barrel from the distillery without having it bottled for retail sale. In the American whiskey industry (but not in other beverage alcohol industries) these two enterprises a usually operated by the same business entity. The retail customer makes no distinction between them, calling both "the distiller". It's not completely universal; Julian Van Winkle and Drew Kulsveen are notable exceptions with award-winning brands which are made with whiskey they do not themselves distill.
One reason for the exception is that both are also rectifiers (another separately licensed and taxed business entity). Until the vitriolic rhetoric that accompanied the PF&D hearings, "rectification" wasn't considered equivalent to "adulteration". In the beverage alcohol use of the word, rectification is the necessary and proper act of rendering raw distillate into a pleasant, drinkable finished product. Technically, simply aging whiskey in a wooden barrel is a form of rectification, but the term most commonly refers to more active modifications like mixing it with other whiskey or neutral spirits, adding flavors, colors, and so forth, even possibly re-distilling it. Most beverage alcohol products are made that way, including most whiskey except for single-malt whiskies from Scotland and other countries. Kulsveen and Van Winkle produce only straight whiskey, so they are rectifiers only in that they are creating their product using previously distilled and aged whiskey they've purchased from distillers.
Notice that I used the plural, "distillers". Of course, I couldn't guess where Julian and Drew actually select from, but from a brand owner's point of view, the source(s) of his raw material is no more relevant to his whiskey than would be which particular dairies provided the cream used to make Land'O'Lakes butter. The quality of either finished product results from the skill of the merchant, and one common way to ensure product consistency is to vat together cream (or whiskey, but FOR GAWDSAKE NOT BOTH!!) from a variety of sources and adjusting proportions as needed. The reputation attained by the rye whiskeys of Maryland by the late 1800s is an indication of how highly skilled they generally were.
But this method of making whiskey was among the practices the legislation banned (for whiskey, but interestingly not for dairy products). There were even more impossible limitations, to the point that, in 1909, President William H. Taft, citing the restrictions as "a perversion of the Pure Food Act", intervened to overrule those provisions. However, by that time most of America's favorite whiskeys had been removed from the market for three years or longer.
Unable to continue manufacturing, rectifying, and blending the product with which their customers were familiar, the companies had no choice but to salvage what they could from their products' reputation and sell the brand names to outfits large enough to be able to produce or purchase whiskey which fit the regulations. Not that such whiskey was necessarily better, you understand; In many cases the whiskey a customer now found in his bottle, although legally "pure", was a pale, flavorless substitute for the fine spirit that had once proudly worn that brand. There were (and remain) many suspicions concerning the motives of the Department of Agriculture's chief chemist (and primary PF&D lobbiest) Harvey W. Wiley and his personal connections with the Women's Christian Temperance Crusade, who supported any reduction in the number of alcohol products, as well as with the powerful straight whiskey producers who appreciated the monopoly granted them by law and were generous in their support of the law's sponsors and administrators.
The Monumental Distillery produced Maryland Pure Rye and others, at least some of which would have qualified to be labeled "whiskey" under the 1906 Act. They may have produced others that didn't. And they probably depended on sales made to merchants and rectifiers who had been driven out of business. According to Bready, Monumental was bought out by the Julius Kessler Company of Chicago, a huge outfit, controlling over 45 distilleries nationwide. They closed out most or all of the brands they had been producing and then used the brand Maryland Pure Rye Whiskey for all of their product.
Snyder confirms that there was a Kessler's Maryland Pure Rye. There was also a Monarch's Maryland Pure Rye
made in Owensboro, Kentucky, My Maryland Pure Rye, made by Sherbook in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Royal Crown Maryland Pure Rye, U.S. Patent registered in 1903 by Quirin & Duhaime, but I have no idea who they are. I could find no other references to just Maryland Pure Rye without a qualifier.
As far as I know, the brand did not survive Prohibition. It might have been re-created in the '30s by Schenley, Seagram's, or Frankfort Distillers, all of whom began spewing pre-pro-sounding brands out like crazy right after Repeal, although the word "Pure" would indicate it's a pre-Prohibition brand. Another big player in the early '30s was the American Distilling Company, which was based in Pekin. I don't know offhand whether they owned any Baltimore brands, or if they did business with any, but if your grandfather moved from Pekin to take a distilling job in Baltimore it might have been in connection with that.
Also, ever heard of a bourbon named OLD RIPPY, probably in either Baltimore or Long Island areas?
(see OLD RIPPY in the Bourbon Lore Discussion area)