Age of the Rectifier

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Age of the Rectifier

Unread postby bunghole » Thu May 26, 2005 1:44 pm

What was life like in post-Civil War Louisville? Were there good rectifiers and bad? Was "Whiskey Row" a kind of free trade zone? Did outright greed lead to the Taft Decision? Discuss.

:arrow: ima :?:
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Unread postby bourbonv » Tue Jan 23, 2007 8:13 pm

Linn,
I sure as hell don't know how I missed your post here over a year and a half ago. This is a good subject to discuss and it never received any reply. I will, if you pardon the pun, rectify the situation for you.

After the Civil War there a lot of rectifiers opening shop in Louisville as well as Covington, Paducah and other river cities. The reason for this was Kentucky was gaining the reputation for making the finest whiskey and they wanted to be able to label their whiskey "Kentucky Bourbon".

Now not all of them were shysters out to make a fast buck on Kentucky's reputation, but a large part of them were doing just that. The whiskey they sold was cheap spirits flavored and colored artificially and often without a drop of alcohol made in Kentucky put in the barrel. I say barrel because most whiskey was still sold by the barrel at this time.

Other rectifiers were of a better quality. Their idea of rectifying whiskey called for lesser amounts of spirits alcohol (I say spirits because at that time it was most often made fron sugar cane or wine, not grain) and lots of real aged whiskey. One of them even decided he would sell his Old Forrester only by the bottle to insure its quality.

The rectifiers and the straight whiskey distillers did have offices on whiskey row in Louisville. They were often side by side on Main street. Tensions between the two branches of whiskey people did start because of greed. The straight people saw that the rectifiers were creating a glut of whiskey in the market driving down the price that they could get for their aged whiskey. They also saw that many of these people were producing products that were not good, threatening the reputation of Kentucky whiskey. This led them to support the bottled in bond act of 1897 and then the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The Taft decision of 1909 was simply the end of the process of seperating the straight whiskey market from the blended whiskey market.

I hope I answered your question Linn. Sorry for the long delay.
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Unread postby bunghole » Tue Jan 23, 2007 8:38 pm

That's OK Mike. Thanks for your reply! I guess my question just had to age for a while. :wink:

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Unread postby bourbonv » Wed Jan 24, 2007 12:27 pm

Evidently I had to let my thoughts ferment for a while before answering. Again my apologies for not answering early.
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Unread postby EllenJ » Wed Jan 24, 2007 11:51 pm

Doesn't matter, guys.
According to the Code of Federal Regulations, Chapter 5, Section 2a (Internet Forum Messages), the age statement on the message thread can be no greater than 51% of the most recent posting included.

Or something like that.
Have another bourbon! :champagne:

Oh, and just to keep this on topic, a point Mike mentioned that I feel needs to be emphasized... President Taft's decision, in 1909, to clarify the Pure Food and Drug Act, was not just the Prez putting a spin on things, the way we'd expect today. I haven't read the entire document, but I do have (thanks, Mike) a copy of the portion that relates to the whiskey industry. It's pretty apparent that the President either knew a LOT about the whiskey business or had certainly taken the time to LEARN a lot before rendering his judgement.

He'd have made a great participant on this forum (if only he weren't quite so dead).

In his writings Taft describes, in detail, the way whiskey (as it was known in 1906) had developed and how it was currently (again, in 1906) being made. He understood the difference between straight whiskey, whiskey such as Early Times or Jack Daniel, cheap imitation whiskey, fine-quality rectified whiskey such as Julian or Drew might produce, and ordinary rectified whiskey such as Seagram's 7 Crown or Four Roses (the real one, not the bourbon with the same name), which was the most familiar type. Taft's decision was to overturn the original PF&D sanctions that forbade the use of the word "whiskey" to describe anything other than the expensive niche product that met the narrow description assigned to straight whiskey.
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Unread postby bourbonv » Thu Jan 25, 2007 1:58 pm

John,
You make some interesting points, as usual, but, and there is always a but, You are a little confused about the taft Decision. The Taft Decision was not to clarify the Pure food and Drug act - it was to clarify the question of "what is whiskey?" as it would be fined by the Pure Food and Drug act. What I copied for you was the Taft decision in its entirity. The Taft Decision was the whiskey decision. The decision did set up precedent as to how other products would be judge, but it was a whiskey decision. Taft basically defined whiskey as we know it today.
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Unread postby cowdery » Thu Jan 25, 2007 4:03 pm

To add to that, the Taft Decision actually overruled and modified a ruling that had already been made by the fledgling Food and Drug Administration, stating that all whiskey other than true straight whiskey had to be labeled "imitation whiskey."
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Unread postby bunghole » Thu Jan 25, 2007 8:34 pm

cowdery wrote:To add to that, the Taft Decision actually overruled and modified a ruling that had already been made by the fledgling Food and Drug Administration, stating that all whiskey other than true straight whiskey had to be labeled "imitation whiskey."


So Chuck does that mean that all of today's popular Scottish; Irish, & Canadian blends would have to be labeled as imitation whiskey?

:arrow: ima :?:
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Unread postby cowdery » Thu Jan 25, 2007 10:04 pm

bunghole wrote:So Chuck does that mean that all of today's popular Scottish; Irish, & Canadian blends would have to be labeled as imitation whiskey?

:arrow: ima :?:


Probably not, the difference being that those products contain only aged whiskey, even though some of it is so high proof as to be nearly neutral, whereas then as now, American blended whiskey contains unaged whiskey and grain neutral spirits, as well as flavorings and colorings.

At the time of the Taft decision, imports were such a tiny piece of the market as to be off the radar.
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Unread postby gillmang » Fri Jan 26, 2007 9:01 am

Examples were given in the arguments and materials leading up to the Taft Decision of how spirits might be labelled where they were a combination of high proof spirits aged or not and traditional whiskey. The term "compound" figured largely in these examples, e.g. "A compound of whiskey and aged grain spirits", (this might have defined Canadian whisky). One can envision similar formulations to account for use of GNS (unaged), spirits made from non-grain fermentables and so forth.

I haven't read all the evidence given before the committees that looked at this question, but from the extracts published in Dr. Wiley's book (widely available on the web if you search "what is whiskey?"), I do not get the sense that it was well-understood, or well-explained to the committee members, that whiskey was essentially (aged or not) a low-proof product. Some of the testimony I've read referred e.g. to the use of pot stills in Scotland and Ireland as evidence of traditional practice and this was likened to how whiskey was made in Kentucky. Well, at that time (circa 1910), the column still had been widely adopted to make bourbon. It was the distilling out at low proof that was the key to its being whiskey (and being made from a mash of cereal grains). Aging was not the key although quality whiskey was of course aged. Whiskey completely unaged is still whiskey if distilled (as later was written down) under 190 proof. Maybe there was more detailed testimony that explained all this I haven't seen. If there wasn't, I wonder if the infancy of chemical engineering at the time and scientific analysis might have explained the situation. I don't think so, though, because if you look at the definition of whiskey in the (on-line) 1911 Brittanica - the 1911 edition is famous unto itself, hence its availability online - the fusel and other congener content of whiskey seemed well understood with tables giving percentages of these compounds in whiskey of different kinds.

To this day though, I find this crucial distinction - between highly rectified and low-rectified spirits - is often missed by observers of the spirits scenes.

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Unread postby bourbonv » Fri Jan 26, 2007 10:10 am

Chuck,
The fact is that most foriegn whiskey was going to be forced to be labeled "immitation" or "compound" whiskey by the original ruling under Roosevelt. That is one of the big factors that forced the Taft decision. It is also the reason that the same people who made their arguments in England for the King's commision to define whisky were also making their arguments to Taft in the months leading up to the Taft Decision. It should be noted that the Taft decision was not made overnight. Taft listened to arguements and did research for almost a year before making his final decision. He also looked for precedent and was influenced by the decision in Great Britain. In the end his decision looked very similar to the British decision.

So, Linn, the answer to your question is "Yes, Canadian and Scotch whiskey would have been forced to call itself "immitation" or "compound" whiskey under the original 1906 decision, but only forced to call itself "blended" under Taft. It is interesting that the only whiskey mentioned by brand name by the Taft Decision is Canadian Club. Taft recognized the fact that they aged their Neutral spirits before blending it with aged whiskey and flavoring agents.
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Unread postby gillmang » Fri Jan 26, 2007 10:39 am

I agree with Mike and essentially, the key thing about Taft was that whisky was anything fermented and distilled from an all-cereals mash. Later, the 190 proof limit was imposed, in order to ensure I guess that whisky retain some residual taste of those cereal origins. In a way, the future definition of bourbon whiskey really was what Dr. Wiley and those against the lobby Mike mentioned (well, they were a lobby too) wanted for the definition of all whiskey. It didn't happen that way, and this assisted no doubt the great expansion of the American whiskey (blended), Canadian and Scotch whisky categories.

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Unread postby bourbonv » Fri Jan 26, 2007 11:18 am

Gary,
The Filson has three scrapbooks of newspaper and magazine articles dealing with this very public debate. These scrapbooks were put together by E H Taylor, Jr and his sons Jacob Swigert Taylor and Edmund W Taylor, who lobbied on the side of the straight whiskey industry. Wiley and Bonepart and the rest of Roosevelt's staff wanted to keep the very strict definition of whiskey. It was actually pressure from the foriegn companies as well as the American rectifiers that forced Taft to make a decision.

Taft was a judge before he was President. He also went on to serve as a Supreme Court Judge after he was President. His mind preferred that branch of public service and he applied those skills when making his whiskey decision. He listened to both sides of the arguement and looked at existing laws. He also took into account how this would affect foriegn companies and thus foriegn relations. In the end he made what must be the right decision, because both sides were unhappy with it, but in the end accepted it.
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Unread postby gillmang » Fri Jan 26, 2007 12:52 pm

I understand and I was referring in my last post not to the real rationale for the decision, but simply what the decision itself (or its key point) was, which was that anything no matter how distilled could be whiskey if distilled from a grains mash, subject (ultimately anyway) to a maximum proof limit.

It would be interesting to know when that 190 proof limit was legislated.

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Unread postby bourbonv » Fri Jan 26, 2007 1:37 pm

Gary,
The 190 limit was set when they had the "light whiskey" category created in the 1970's. Before that the limit worldwide is 180. For American Straight Whiskey it is 160. I believe these numbers came about in the 1960's with world trade treaties recognizing whiskey from a particular country (Scotch, Bourbon, Canadian, Irish, etc.) Before that, in the 1930's there were definitions of whiskey with lower barrel proofs and I do believe, lower distillation proofs. John can find that answer in his 1930's book defining whiskey types.
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