Button, Button, Who's Got the Button?
by Julian P Van Winkle
I see by the papers that a brand new full-scale industrial revolution is about to bust in our face.
It goes by the name of "Automation" - a word so new it isn't yet in my dictionary.
Before Automation, it took a machinist several days to bore a new engine block.
He now punches a button. In a matter of minutes a machine with "built-in brain" carries the rough casting through hundreds of continuoud and automatic operations.
In some industries they are even inventing buttons to push buttons!
How about my specialty - old fashioned Kentucky Bourbon? When will we make our first "push-button" Old Fitzgerald?
Never, absolutely never! On that you can depend!
No machine conceived will ever replace the educated rule-of-thumb of our Master Distiller.
This is because Nature, and Nature alone, through an automation all her own, produces a bourbon no built-in brain can match.
In our family still-house you will see no machines, in fact few people.
For here Mother Nature is "on hire," changing starches to fermentable sugars in our mash tubs, working through the yeast in our fermenters, aging the whiskey in our warehouses, all silently and unseen.
Where is there "automation" as ingenious as hers?
I feel certain the friends of Old Fitzgerald would not have it otherwise.
For there is originality and depth of natural flavor in our old fashioned bourbon that brings assurance to those of us who hold that modern push button methods are not for all endeavors alike - that in the enjoyment of fine whiskey at least, the ways of our forebears are gentle enough.