Bourbon Empire by Mitenbuler Reid

Author:Mitenbuler, Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

• CHAPTER TEN •

THE HOLY BIBLE REPUDIATES PROHIBITION AND DEAD PUPPIES

During the early 2000s Prohibition returned to America in a surprising form. Many of the hippest bars in the country modeled themselves after speakeasies from the 1920s, requiring reservations and secret passwords at the door—if you could even find the door. One place in Washington, D.C., marked its entrance with only a single blue light. Another spot in New York was entered through a phone booth along the side of a restaurant serving hot dogs. Gaining admission often required explaining oneself to a grim-faced hipster staring through a peephole.

The Prohibition era has slowly begun to muscle aside the frontier as a wellspring of whiskey marketing. In 2013, when Heaven Hill opened the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, a multimillion-dollar tourism destination in Louisville to promote the distillery’s flagship brand, the facility included a tasting room styled after a speakeasy (the trend had finally migrated from the coasts). Tours began with interactive displays of Evan Williams arriving at the frontier and opening a distillery, but ended with a visit to a tasting room pumped full of jazz music. Many whiskey brands created after 2000 have followed suit by focusing on Prohibition-era themes: Heaven Hill’s Larceny Bourbon, Speakeasy Bourbon, Smuggler’s Notch, and countless other brands named after bootleggers like Jack “Legs” Diamond, Al Capone, and bootlegging-legend-turned-NASCAR-celebrity Junior Johnson.

The Prohibition era lasted thirteen years beginning in 1920, and its appeal is easy to recognize. Crimes committed around bootlegging and speakeasies crackle with subversive glamour. Drinking became a symbolic gesture of fighting against the tyranny of a moralizing minority, and while the act technically might have been a crime, few really thought it criminal. Even President Warren Harding drank from a private stash of bourbon while in the White House, effectively sanctioning the rebellion and giving it a stamp of approval that would eventually help transform the era into marketing gold. Prohibition even helped birth NASCAR, a sport whose earliest stars learned to drive while evading the law. Their outlaw appeal created NASCAR’s success even though the association’s owners battled to scrub it into a clean form of family entertainment.

It was an odd series of events and full of contradictions. So how did it all even come about, and what happened to whiskey?

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