Washington Monthly - September/October 2015 - 122

preferences (Washington preferred brandy, and Jefferson snobbishly eschewed whiskey for the higher-brow wine)- Mitenbuler picks up bourbon's narrative around the Civil War. By that time, whiskey was a widely consumed beverage (though it was also still occasionally used for cleaning wounds). The book moves quickly through the 1800s, briefly discussing the Whiskey Trust of the late 1880s and its attempts to monopolize the industry before being pursued by the U.S. government under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The bulk of the book, though, focuses on the whiskey magnates of the twentieth century, and their looming legacies in today's consolidated whiskey industry. At the center of Mitenbuler's story is Prohibition, on its face a huge obstacle for the bourbon industry, but also a boon for the underground bourbon economy and its champions. During Prohibition, entre- ty to solidify their control over the bourbon industry. Consolidation in the industry began to accelerate. Between 1933 and 1958 the number of distilleries dropped from 130 to seventy-six as the bigger companies expanded through acquisition. By the end of that period, the top four distilleries controlled more than 75 percent of the market. And few attempts were made to reel in the power of these giants. In 1952, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on whiskey monopolies, but nothing came of it. In the postwar era, whiskey was booming. Not only was whiskey patriotic, but the whiskey lobby had grown in strength over the prior decades. Soon, Americans' devotion to their favorite spirit would be codified into law. Worried about losing his foothold to foreign producers, Rosenstiel used his lobby shop, the Bourbon Institute, to convince Congress that bourbon deserved a trade designation to preserve its uniquely American provenance. In 1964, Congress passed a resolution declaring bourbon "a distinctive product of the United States," protecting the domestic market from foreign imitations. (Bourbon companies can be, and are, owned by foreign companies and headquartered overseas, but production must happen stateside.) The legacy of this protection is still felt: today, nearly 95 percent of bourbon is produced in Kentucky. Over 40 percent of that production is controlled by Beam Suntory, producer of Jim Beam, Maker's Mark, Old Grand-Dad, Old Crow, Old Overholt, and Knob Creek, among many other spirits. Giving an account of the power brokers in the bourbon industry inevitably means a history that features almost exclusively white men. But there is a taste of diversity in the script of bourbon's history, to be found in the prominent role of Jewish immigrants in the early bourbon boom. Today, the bottles on liquor store shelves bear names like Craig, Beam, Harper, Daniels, Walker, or Williams. But We bourbon drinkers have consumed the industry's marketing ploys-terms like "craft" and "single barrel," it turns out, mean virtually nothing. And that legend on the label, detailing the namesake's hardscrabble success story, is almost certainly made up. preneurial types such as Lewis Rosenstiel, who would become one of the most powerful men in the industry, bought closed distilleries and their whiskey stocks to prepare for repeal, which they considered inevitable. In the meantime, they took advantage of a Prohibition loophole that allowed doctors, dentists, and veterinarians to prescribe up to one pint of 100 proof spirits every ten days. High-end doctors would give patients bourbon that was bottled and crafted essentially the same as before Prohibition, except with a four-word caveat on the label: "Unexcelled for Medicinal Purposes." When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, men like Rosenstiel seized the opportuni122 September/October 2015 a representative ode to bourbon's greats might include Bronfman, Lehman, Shapira, Abelson, and Wertheimer, in addition to Rosenstiel. In the industry's early days, however, it was assumed that bottles sporting these names wouldn't sell to a nativist and anti-Semitic American citizenry. But Mitenbuler dedicates ample inches to discussing the largely unrecognized contributions of this cohort, one of the great gifts of this book to the historical record of American bourbon. T he notion of an industry that is able to marry the economic worldviews of Jefferson and Hamilton is certainly pleasant to imagine. But the consolidation of today's industry would suggest that for all practical purposes, Hamilton's vision has won out. As consolidation has swept many American industries, so has the whiskey industry been concentrated to just a few companies. Today, thirteen distilleries produce nearly 95 percent of all the whiskey consumed in America, and those distilleries are owned by eight companies. (That percentage was virtually 100 before the recent whiskey renaissance saw the opening of many truly independent distilleries.) The distilleries sell their product to many brands you've heard of-one of the biggest, the unromantically named Midwest Grain Products Ingredients, sells its whiskey to Templeton, Bulleit Rye, and others. Mitenbuler asks the right questions about today's whiskey industry-centrally: Is big inherently bad? As the bourbon industry has grown, has it lost touch with its image of "independence, self-sufficiency, and aversion to arbitrary rules?" But when he answers these questions he focuses mainly on how such consolidation might affect quality. Large-scale bourbon producers, he argues, are still putting out high-quality products-in many instances, better tasting than the smaller-batch distilleries. And this settles the point for him. "The size of a still, big or small, pot or column, has far less impact on a whiskey's quality than the skill and know-how of the distiller operating it," he says. So long as the giants still employ top-notch distillers, the quality of our whiskey won't be in jeopardy.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2015