The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff' & Beer and Prohibtion.

Always exploring the history of things, including social and material history, our eye was caught recently by a couple of items which relate 20th Century history, specifically the history of alcohol and Prohibition.  For example, there's this item:

NPR's "Salt" broadcast ran this recent item:  The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff' : The Salt : NPR

I'm not really a whiskey fan, but at least locally whiskey has been in the news a lot recently, and here we have this NPR example.  All in all, I think I've read that whiskey consumption is overall on the decline nationally, but given the news content, you'd not know that.

As noted, I'm not really a big whiskey fan.  Right now, we actually have, however, four bottles of different types of whiskey upstairs in the cupboard, probably a personal all time record.  We don't have a liquor cabinet, and don't need one, so the cupboard suffices, even if that oddly places the whiskey right next to the breakfast cereal.  We have so much because of Christmas, and we're likely to have the present four bottles for a really long time.  We have, respectively, Wyoming Whiskey, a bottle of Pendleton and a bottle of single malt Irish whiskey, so not only do we have a record amount, we actually have a record variety as well.  You can probably fairly easily tell by the novelty of this that we're not exactly living the "Mad Men" life around here.

In spite of not liking it much, I know something about it, and that's probably because of law school.  It isn't like we were living out the Pogues "Streams of Whiskey" there, but there was a single malt Scotch whiskey revival going on at the time, so we became exposed to it a bit then, and being inquisitive, I learned something about the makeup of whiskey at the time.*  It's sort of an interesting topic.

The big American whiskey is bourbon.  The reason for this is found in the history of transportation, oddly enough.  Bourbon is a corn based whiskey and it was distilled on the eastern Frontier early on.  While beer was really a staple during colonial times, hardy Frontiersmen distilled a lot of whiskey. Why?  Because it keeps better than corn on the cob does.  And it's relatively easy to transport in barrels, and there's always a market.  It wasn't, therefore, that frontier farmers were making thousands of gallons of "corn likker" to get sloshed, although there was some sloshing going on, but rather because it's easier to keep it in the barn than it is to keep a pile of corn. It doesn't attract mice either.  

Like with all things which people make, a simple necessity became an art, and bourbon was born.  It's been the American whiskey for probably around three centuries.

Frankly, I can't stand it as a rule.  Even the best bourbons generally taste like something that ought to be fueling a jet to me, but it's been what Americans mean by "whiskey" for a very long time.  And it's been in the news here recently as Wyoming now has its own distillery, which makes "Wyoming Whiskey".

A bottle of Wyoming Whiskey.

Wyoming Whiskey is a new brand of whiskey that's distilled in the tiny Hot Springs County town of Kirby.  It came about, according to what I've read, as the Meads purchased farm ground in the area in order to have a steady supply of corn for their cattle operation, and then hit upon the idea of distilling whiskey in the county.  Hot Springs County is otherwise famous for, well, hots springs, and is of course the location of Thermopolis, which features the same.

When Wyoming Whiskey was released, the first batch (there have been only two to date) was big news. To my huge surprise, my wife actually signed us up for two bottles. She doesn't even drink whiskey except on extraordinarily rare occasions, so it was quite a surprise.  But we ended up with two of the very first bottles.

I like it, to my surprise. But the public reaction has been interesting.  Whiskey Magazine rated it as first rate, which is interesting in part because up until I read that in the Casper paper, I didn't know that there was a Whiskey Magazine.  Who subscribes to that. . . and why?  Anyhow, their reviewer thought it great.  Amongst people I generally run into, however, it seems a lot of people hate it.

Why is that?  I don't know for sure, but I have my theories.  In part, Wyomingites are a hard sell on anything, and that may be a lot of it.  But I have also noticed, in talking to people, that the people who don't like it generally like bourbon, and people who do, like me, don't drink it much.  My suspicion is, therefore, that those people acclimated to bourbon, and who enjoy it, like the jet fuel nature of the taste. As I don't like bourbon, that's probably why I think Wyoming Whiskey is okay.  But if they have to rely on people like me to buy it, they're in big trouble, as the chances of me buying enough of it to be felt economically are nonexistent.  Anyhow, put another way, I think that bourbon drinkers expect bourbon to taste like bourbon, rather than the lower proof, milder, and softly minerally taste that this has.

Canadian Whiskey, I should note, is just blended bourbon.  Whiskeys are blended in order to take the harsh taste out of them, and blending is very common with all types of whiskeys.  Canada grows a lot of corn, and at some point, somebody must have hit upon the idea of borrowing American whiskey as a product. They probably did it, tasted the product and said something like "Ack!!!. . Grgemhph!  Eh?  Where's the water?"  So they blended it.

Unlike almost every bourbon, some Canadian Whiskeys I like.  Namely Royal Crown and Pendleton. That's it. The rest make me gag.  Again, it doesn't matter, as I buy so little that they don't care what I think, but those two aren't bad. And Pendleton, which is named after Pendleton Oregon, has a really neat bottle with a Steamboat like rider on it. Presumably the University of Wyoming, which owns that trademark, is making a few bucks off of that.

Royal Crown, by the way, is owned by the alcohol giant Diageo, which also owns Bushmills (Irish Whiskey), Guinness and a zillion other brands.

Bourbon basically got its start on the western slopes of Appalachia, and that's no surprise as that region was first settled by "Scots Irish", i.e., that demographic that immigrated from Ireland, but which were actually Scottish, placed in Ireland as a buffer in Ulster against the native Irish.  The Scots and the Irish both have a very long history of Whiskey distilling, and it's basically a Celtic concoction in the first place. So, they were simply using a process that they were already familiar with.  The word "whiskey" is itself a corruption of the Gaelic term uisce beatha/uisge beatha"  which means "water of life," sort of an odd description, if you think about it.

Scotch and Irish Whiskeys are very closely related, which is odd as Scotch is, in my view, horrid, while Irish whiskeys can be good, or can be horrid.  I think that this has something to do with the water. Both types are grain whiskeys, and can be made from any of the grass grains or a blend of them, but Scotch is made from bog water, and Irish Whiskey is made form water that flows from limestone sourced springs.  My personal theory is that this makes Scotch taste and smell like diesel fuel, as the water in Scotch peat bogs also has, well, peat in it. And, besides, anyone familiar with bogs knows that cows love bogs, and we all know, or should know, what cows love to do in bogs.  It explains a lot.

One of the grains that can be in Irish Whiskey or Scotch Whiskey is rye.  I did an item here on rye bread awhile back, which I really like, but I've never had Rye Whiskey.  An odd thing about Rye Whiskey, which relates to the theme of this blog, is that Rye Whiskey has a pretty bad reputation, but because of a historical event, that event being Prohibition.

As noted in the item above, Rye was actually a premium whiskey before Prohibition.  During Prohibition, however, bootleggers took up labeling bad whiskey as Rye in order to fraudulently peddle the bad stuff to people who remembered the good stuff. As a result, "Rye" came to be associated with nasty cheap booze, an reputation that came on fairly fast, which stuck up until recently.  Rye was such a shorthand for bad whiskey that Bill Mauldin had his Joe character, in the Up Front cartoon, joke that his "old woman" would be comforted by the fact that he had "give up rye whiskey and .10 cent ceegars", an ironic statement for an infantryman.  Recently, however, Rye has been making a comeback, the quality Rye apparently still being out there.

As I like rye bread I'd be curious if I like Rye Whiskey, but I'm too cheap to buy it, so I"ll have to keep wondering or be fortunate enough to be attending some social event where somebody serves it.  Liking rye bread probably doesn't translate into liking Rye in any event, as I like corn, but hate bourbon.

Related to the Prohibition story and Rye, Prohibition also did in breweries.  And here too there's both an interesting story, and interesting recent developments.

 

 Late 19th Century New York beer I've never heard of.  Apparently the plan in the picture is t drink a bunch of beer and then drive the cart, which is undoubtedly a very bad idea.

Beer has an even older presence in North America than whiskey because beer was a staple in the British Isles from some point in antiquity up until some point in the 20th Century.  And this was true not just of the British Isles, but an entire belt of countries in northern Europe. Basically north of the Rhine, and in the British Isles, up to the Baltic the average drink was Beer.  Below the Rhine it was wine.  Once you got out into Poland and Russia this was no longer true, and if there was a staple drink, I don't know what it was. Certainly a lot of vodka was being consumed out in those regions, but I don't think it would be as if people sat down to dinner and had a big heaping glass of vodka.  At least I hope not.  Beer was brewed in Europe everywhere, but as a staple its basically associated with these regions, and it's best from these regions.  Likewise, probably ever location in Europe ferments some wine, but it's associated with southern Europe for a reason.

A lot of the reason for that, by the way, is climatic.  So perhaps its not too surprising that the beer brewing also saw the development of some other spirits.  Anyhow, the English brought beer to North America.  Indeed, the Mayflower put in when it did not because that location seemed ideal, but because the ship had run out of beer, a genuine problem.

In the 19th Century there were a vast number of local breweries in the US.  I doubt very much that an accurate idea as to how many there were is known.  Prior to refrigeration for rail cars being worked out, which happened in the second half of the 19th Century, beer could not easily be shipped, so breweries needed to be local, or there was no beer.  Refrigeration in rail cars meant that beer could be shipped by rail for the first time, and shortly thereafter pasteurization of beer, a process of course worked out for milk, not beer, began to be employed which meant that beer could be stored for some time without refrigeration.  Light is the enemy of beer, and the dark bottle that's so familiar to everyone also played a role in beer storage, seeking to create a vessel that could store beer, allow the customer to see it, and also keep out the destroying elements of light.

Rail car refrigeration mean that beer could be transported long distances for the first time, and that gave rise to the first big breweries in the US, the Anhauser-Busch brewery in St. Louis being the first such example.  Nonetheless, all the way up to the Volstead Act in 1919, there were a lot of local breweries.  I don't know how many may have existed in Wyoming, or co-existed together at any one time, but at least Casper and Sheridan did have breweries.  Casper's pre Prohibition brewery was the Hilcreast Brewery, named after the Hilcrest spring which still provides cooler water for Casperites today.  None of the Wyoming breweries survived Prohibition.  Hilcreast's brewery building still stands, just as it did in 1919, being a three story brick building, but its an electronics store now.  When I was a kid, it was a potato chip plant, packaging Cook's Potato Chips, the kind we all bought locally.

 Trade card for Wiedemann Beer. This is a company that I've never heard of, but it turns out, they survived Prohibition, and they're still around.

It's widely claimed that Prohibition did in the quality of American beer and that when breweries re-emerged from Prohibition, the beer wasn't what it once was. There were certainly a lot fewer breweries and that any managed to survive is amazing.  Some did, however, and rapidly went back into brewing.  According to at least Europeans, American beer was pretty bad however, and real beer fans maintained that to also be the case, which made for a small market, up until the late 1970s, for import beers, which were regarded as very exotic.**  The trend toward brewing singularity actually increased after Prohibition ended, which is odd, in that the large commercial brewers began to purchase the smaller one, a trend which continues to this day, although they no longer tend to wipe out the distinctive natures of the individual breweries as they once seemed to.

This is because of the rise of the "micro brews."  Defining what a micro brew is; is difficult.  But some time in the late 1970s very small breweries began to develop with very distinctive beers in reaction to the blandness of American beers.  This started slowly, but after it got rolling, it really got rolling.  When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, around here, the beers that you saw in the summer when men went fishing, etc., were Coors (really a regional beer), Olympia, Hamms and maybe Rainier.  Of course, Budweiser, which was and is the American giant (now owned by Belgian company) was around, but it seemed that at least amongst the men I knew, none of them ever drank it.  There were some other brands, of course, but those are the ones you tended to see.  Starting with Anchor Steam, however, small breweries began to make major inroads into the large brewers' markets, brewing beers with strong distinctive flavors and sometimes brewed with old fashioned, methods.  Anchor Steam, New Belgian, Odell, Sam Adams, and any other number of brewers rose up in this fashion, some becoming pretty big in the process, and there seems to be no end in sight to the revival of small breweries and the multiplicity of beer types.***  Recognizing a declining market when they see it, the big breweries have gotten into the act themselves and have come out with "micro brew" type beers, even though they're from big breweries.

Probably with that in mind, and returning to the them of our post here, Coors just recently introduced a beer that they claim is "Pre-Prohibition" style lager.  Being unable to pass up something which claims to be an historic exploration, I bought a six pack and then looked it up.  Indeed, it might at least partially answer the question that I had.  According to the information on the beer, the recipe for it was discovered by Coors' employees in Greeley in a part of their brewery they no longer use. That there is such a quarter in their brewery surprises me, but perhaps it shouldn't, as the Greeley brewery has long ago overlapped the walls of its original facility.  Anyhow, in finding  the old recipe, which dates to the immediate Pre-Prohibition era, they determined to make it.  At first they only offered it on tap, but now they're selling it in bottles.

One beer, of course, can't tell us what all beers were prior to the Volstead Act, but this one is revealing.  Coors has long been a major local beer here, and its not bad.  It's a really light beer, and so Coors was well positioned to move into the "light beer" market when it came about, although I've always wondered if that hurt their regular beer sales, which aren't much different.  But it's never been my favorite.  Their Pre-Prohibtion beer, sold as "Batch 19," on the basis that Prohibition came in that year, 1919, is much different.  It's stronger, in terms of alcohol content, and it has a lot more flavor.  I like it, but I suspect that it won't appeal to die hard Coors fans.  It might appeal, however, to micro brew fans.

If Batch 19 indicates what American beer was like prior to Prohibition, what we could take away from that is that at least some American beers were German style lagers but with a stronger taste. Sort of a collision between German lager and British lager.  For beer fans, therefore, the Volstead Act probably was sort of a small beer burning of the library at Alexandria, temporarily.

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*Streams of Whiskey is one of several sodden tunes by the excellent Irish band the Pogues, which sadly no longer exists as a band.  The band celebrated a certain boozy view of things which undoubtedly would have disastrous effects on a person's health if actually followed, for example:

Last night as I slept
I dreamt I met with Behan
I shook him by the hand and we passed the time of day
When questioned on his views
On the crux of life's philosophies
He had but these few clear and simple words to say

I am going, I am going
Any which way the wind may be blowing
I am going, I am going
Where streams of whiskey are flowing

Not content to limit the commentary to whiskey, the song also provides:

Oh the words that he spoke
Seemed the wisest of philosophies
There's nothing ever gained
By a wet thing called a tear
When the world is too dark
And I need the light inside of me
I'll walk into a bar
And drink fifteen pints of beer

I am going, I am going
Any which way the wind may be blowing
I am going, I am going
Where streams of whiskey are flowing

More than one Pogues song was a modern, hard core, hard edge, Irish drinking song and the primary force behind the music, Sean MacGowan acquired a reputation as a hard drinker as a result.  It's interesting to note, therefore, that at least one interview of a close associate of MacGowan's has related that he did not, in this period, actually drink all that much, but that as a result of the music people insisted in buying the band drinks wherever they were.

While the Pogues no longer exist as a band, all the band members are still with us, suggesting that they didn't drink as much as the songs might suggest, and they have independent music careers.

**Having said that, complaints against American beer go all the way back to the colonial period, when British soldiers complained about he bad quality of American beer compared to English beer.

***I wonder if the micro brew explosion is beginning to run its course, however.  When it started, in the 1970s, the goal was "good beer."  Micro breweries still claim that as their goal, but in recent years a weird, and probably bad, trend has been going on where the exploration they're engaged in really is towards making stronger and stronger beers, alcohol content wise, which isn't the same as good beer.

For some reason its often missed that a lot of really excellent beers, particularly those of the British Isles, are very low alcohol content.  This makes sense to me, as the beer was brewed to be consumed in a pub, at a "session."  Beers of that type are called "session beers."  Session beers are very common British Isles beers, and are low alcohol as a rule.  Guinness Stout, for example, which defines "stout," is only a little over 3% alcohol.  It almost qualifies as a "light beer" by American standards.  Even the post Prohibition Coors, widely regarded as a classic American beer in some quarters, was pretty low in alcohol content in the classic "Banquet" variety.

German beers, on the other hand, have always been higher in alcohol content, for reasons that are completely lost to me. Even so, they probably rounded out somewhere in the 5% neighborhood.  Now, however, American microbreweries are rushing to brew what they call "IPAs,", or "Indian Pale Ales."  IPAs were a type of beer originally brewed by British breweries solely for consumption in India, and were shipped incomplete, with high alcohol contents and lots of hops, on the thesis that this would keep it from spoiling on the long, and extremely hot, trip to India.  At one time, however, it had some slight popularity in the UK when some accident required an unfinished batch to be sold on the docks when it couldn't be shipped.  It's become popular with microbreweries however, and so now they're all rushing to brew very bitter, very high alcohol content, and very icky beers.  This has expanded into other offerings, such as stouts, where high alcohol stouts are now offered as well, when historically, stouts are actually low alcohol.  This trend is taking micro-brews out of the "good beer" category into some weird high alcohol arms race, which may mean that they've about run their exploratory course, which was, perhaps, inevitable. That may mean, however, simply a return to the era of the local brewery.

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Epilogue:

This past week the extent to which local brewing has returned to Wyoming became apparent to me when I became aware of a couple of breweries or brewpubs I was previously unaware of.  The first couple were in Gillette, when I drove by one restaurant that advertised it was the home of a brewpub and then later that same day I walked pass a storefront on Gillette Avenue that advertised that it would soon be home to the Gillette Brewing Company.

Today, in the paper, the Wonder Bar, which has been around for decades, is advertising it's bar brewed beer, indicating that it is indeed brewing on the premises.  I knew, as indicated above, that it could, but I wasn't sure that it was.  It is.

Anyhow, quite a change.  Soon, it would appear, every substantially sized town in Wyoming is likely to have a brewpub.

Epilogue II

If this story references another which includes "nostalgia for the good stuff" perhaps some recollection of the bad stuff is also warranted, which is provided this week by a story in the Casper Star Tribune.  The Tribune reports:

Wyoming men who are alcohol-dependent earn about 5 percent less than co-workers who don’t have a problem with alcohol.

They also are somewhat less likely to be in the workplace at all.

These are two of the findings from a report compiled by the University of Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center for the Wyoming Department of Health.

The UW report concluded that alcohol is more of an economic burden on society in Wyoming than tobacco or drug abuse.

The study estimated that elimination of alcohol abuse would save $843 million a year, based on 2010 costs. Costs were for health care, lost productivity, crime and accidents.

Elimination of tobacco would save $689 million per year, and the elimination of illegal drugs $391 million per year. “Illness studies are routinely used by government agencies to justify and prioritize prevention, intervention, and research programs,” the report said.

Nanette Nelson, associated research scientist at the UW center, said she and her colleagues were surprised that alcohol was the most costly. “We thought we would see tobacco to be the front-runner,” she said.

As alcohol is a legal drug, it's easy to forget how much of a burden on society it really is.  It's also easy to forget that those advancing Prohibition, prior to 1919, were not wacky really. They had a valid point.  At that time, in a lot of places, the "saloon trade" was completely unregulated.  To open a bar, you just opened one.  We've never gone back to that.  Indeed, the impact of alcohol has been smaller post Prohibition than it was pre Prohibition, as Prohibition did have a lasting social impact. Still, the burden imposed by alcohol today remains real.

Epilogue III

Examples of local breweries from the regional past:

June 12

1890  The brewery in Laramie sold its first beer.  Up until Prohibition, small local breweries were extremely common in the United States.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

 From Today In Wyoming's History.

Epilogue IV

A NPR article on the explosion of small breweries across the U.S.   This demonstrates the increase in small breweries, but it's considerably below the number I'd expect.  I read awhile back that Denver now has something like 200 brew pubs, which would suggest the number of small breweries is higher than reported here.