Bourbon Empire (15 page)

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In the nineteenth century, White Protestant and a few odd Catholic distillers looked to their frontier forebears for bourbon brand names. Whiskey had provided an economic toehold in America for these Western European immigrants and their legacies were enshrined accordingly. Whiskey would provide the same economic opportunities for many Jewish immigrants fleeing Europe for America later in the century, but their names rarely made it onto bottles.

One such American, Isaac Wolfe Bernheim, immigrated to the United States in 1867 with no particular plans to join the whiskey trade. Nor did he plan on becoming a “bourbon aristocrat,” the term used for Kentucky’s most successful distillers during the late nineteenth century. However, by the time he died in 1945, Bernheim had started many brands, although none with his name, save for the I.W. Harper brand, which Bernheim created in 1879 but only gave his first two initials. The surname likely came from John Harper, his horse trainer (there is a minor debate about this). Bernheim, like many Jewish distillers of his era, probably feared that his ethnic name wouldn’t sell well. But after World
War II, I.W. Harper was famous, sold in 110 countries. It’s still popular today, although export-only and unavailable in the United States.
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After arriving in the United States from Germany and making his way to Paducah, Kentucky, where he had an uncle, Bernheim was invited to join a distillery owned by Moses Bloom and Reuben Loeb after they noticed the young man’s bookkeeping abilities. He earned enough money to bring over his brother Bernard, and the two siblings opened up the Bernheim Brothers Distillery in 1872, which they moved to Louisville in 1888.

In the Louisville occupied by the Bernheims, Jews comprised roughly a quarter of those involved in the whiskey trade, even though they were only about 3 percent of the local population. Other cities showed a similar pattern. In Cincinnati, one of America’s top three distilling centers, Jews owned five of the fifteen biggest whiskey operations in town in 1875. In Canada, where the Seagram empire would eventually flourish and for a time become the biggest liquor company in the world, the name of the Bronfman family who started the business means “distiller” in Yiddish.

The increase in Jewish liquor entrepreneurs in these places reflected the unique advantages whiskey offered to America’s new arrivals. Historically, the liquor trade had helped Jews skirt oppression. The need to ensure that wine used in religious rituals was kosher had long resulted in Jewish involvement in every step of the alcohol trade, from manufacture to distribution. In medieval and early modern Europe, when Jews were banned from owning land for crops, many transitioned to intermediary market roles, including alcohol importing and exporting. After Russia grabbed hold of many Eastern European enclaves, the liquor business in those places was often one of the few jobs where Jews weren’t restricted. Those same countries later launched waves of Jewish immigrants like Bernheim and Greenhut to the United States.

Jews arriving in America during the nineteenth century were familiar with many parts of the alcohol trade, but often focused their efforts on
whiskey. Wine was too small a market to seriously entertain, and even though beer offered sizable business, owing to the midcentury influx of Germans, many breweries only hired Protestant immigrants from Germany. This was a remnant, perhaps, of the ban on Jews held by many European brewing guilds. Breweries also tended to run “tied-house” saloon systems, with direct supply lines between brewers and retailers that removed intermediary positions offering entry points for Jewish immigrants without cultural or family ties to brewing.

Whiskey, on the other hand, wasn’t vertically integrated like the beer trade and didn’t have a direct distribution system, creating more opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs. Local clusters blossomed around immigrant groups who drew on family ties for manpower. One advertisement in a Louisville Jewish publication read, “WANTED: Three Jewish young men to represent a leading whiskey house. Need have no experience but must be first class, tiptop salesmen and come well recommended.” Solomon Levi and Julius Freiberg, two of Cincinnati’s foremost distillers and liquor wholesalers, made a point of hiring younger Jews as traveling salesman and clerks, a common practice throughout the industry.

American whiskey’s Jewish heritage is largely unknown, and Isaac Wolfe Bernheim wouldn’t get his name on a bottle until nearly a half century after his death, when the Heaven Hill distillery introduced Bernheim Original wheat whiskey in 2000.
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It was a fitting tribute from a distillery started in 1934 by the Shapira family, itself the progeny of Russian Jewish immigrants. Like Bernheim, the name Shapira has never been enshrined on a label. Instead, Heaven Hill built much of its success with brands like Elijah Craig and Evan Williams—two labels named after bourbon’s favorite fairy tales rather than the people actually behind them. Even so, Heaven Hill today quietly honors bourbon’s lesser-known Jewish legacy in one other way. Built into the very architecture of the distillery’s visitor center the wooden beams above the tasting bar are held up by iron supports shaped like the Star of
David. You have to look carefully for them—the gesture is subtle, carrying the weight of bourbon’s most famous names.

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As brands like Old Forester, I.W. Harper, Campbell’s Soup, and Coca-Cola grew, companies obsessed over how to best grab customers’ attention. What made people tick? What do most people spend their time thinking about, and how do you get inside those thoughts? Today, companies employ teams of psychologists and market analysts dedicated to that sole task. Icons, heroes, and other symbols of national greatness resonate with the nation’s collective psyche and sell lots of booze. The other ways to grab people’s attention were easy to figure out: sports and sex.

The first Kentucky Derby was held in 1875, the same year that two brothers from the Chapeze family introduced Old Charter bourbon.
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For years after its Derby debut, Old Charter boasted of its horse-racing connection. Drinking and gambling are allies as natural as bourbon and mint, and juleps from day one have been a part of the race’s culture. At Churchill Downs in Louisville, where the race is held, juleps became the event’s official drink in 1938. They were first sold in “official” souvenir glasses for seventy-five cents a piece. Today, while spectators wait for the race—which takes less than two minutes to run—Churchill Downs goes through 150 bushels of mint and 60 tons of ice.

The roots of Kentucky’s legendary horse-racing culture are entwined with its bourbon industry. A tiny sculpture of a horse sits on stoppers of Blanton’s, and Rock Hill Farms features a picture of a thoroughbred in a field. W.L. Weller used to advertise itself as “The Thoroughbred of Bourbons,” and Green River, the most advertised brand before Prohibition, had a lucky horseshoe logo. Hundreds of now-extinct labels from before Prohibition had horses as mascots and names like Kentucky Champ, Old Sport, and Trotter. Many of the sprawling mansions and horse stables in Woodford County were once owned by bourbon
aristocrats, and this was where Isaac Wolfe Bernheim stabled Ten Broeck, one of the most successful racehorses of the nineteenth century. According to Kentucky lore, the first barrels of whiskey shipped to New Orleans were even traded for horses. The animals needed to be fast, as the legend goes, to provide quick getaways for whiskey merchants attacked by robbers along remote stretches of the Mississippi River during their return. Once the horses reached their new home in Kentucky, they thrived by munching on bluegrass, which helped their bones grow strong because it grew in soil enriched by the same calcium deposits that makes bourbon sweet by removing iron salts.

Of course, historians of horse racing tell the story differently, countering that Kentucky’s famous reputation for the sport really started when uptight Yankees banned gambling in eastern states during the 1890s and 1900s, including betting on horses. There was no such ban in Kentucky, and Louisville businessman Matthew Winn took advantage of the situation by lowering minimum wagers and eliminating the role of bookies by initiating a form of gambling called parimutuel betting. This drove up profits, allowed more people to participate, and allowed horse racing in the state to become financially successful. After that, millionaire gamblers and big-wheel thoroughbred breeders from all over the country began building their mansions in the same Woodford County where James Crow had brought bourbon into the modern age a half century earlier.

Today, the Woodford Reserve Distillery, situated on Crow’s old stomping ground, makes the “official” bourbon of the Kentucky Derby. Since the brand has only been around since the 1990s, it’s an unlikely choice for such a historic event. It is a “classy” brand, however, and the association is likely related to Churchill Downs’ attempts in recent years to clean up the Derby’s image. It’s always been known as an extravagant society event, marked by southern belles and Colonel Sanders doppelgängers wearing seersucker and fancy hats. But as Hunter S. Thompson famously pointed out in a 1970 article titled “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” the event can also resemble a blurry carnival of besotted jackasses braying at each other while gulping
mint juleps and gambling away their kids’ college funds. Making a business-class drink like Woodford Reserve the Derby’s official bourbon helps offset that image.

As an “upgraded” brand, Woodford also offers a valuable lesson in brand marketing. It is made by the same company that makes Old Forester, and even though its price is higher, the two share the same mash bill and yeast—the Woodford is simply aged a little longer, and in heated warehouses that prod the aging process along a little bit. Woodford Reserve’s flavor is a little more round and rich, with less of the brighter grain notes of Old Forester. Using similar mash bills among different brands owned by the same company is a common practice in the whiskey industry, although the similarities between labels that are marketed to different demographics are almost never advertised—Old Forester is marketed for its good value, whereas Woodford is usually sold as something fancier. Buffalo Trace’s W.L. Weller 12-Year Bourbon is very similar to the lauded Pappy Van Winkle, which the distillery also makes from the same recipe, but whereas Pappy sells for astronomical prices reaching into the four-figure range, the Weller sells for much less. Because Buffalo Trace markets and names the two products differently, most drinkers are unaware of just how similar the two are.

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When James Pepper, the most flamboyant of the bourbon aristocrats, considered how he should brand his bourbon, the choice was easy: he named it after himself. As the grandson of Elijah Pepper and son of Oscar Pepper (the man who had employed James Crow), James Pepper was bourbon royalty. He continued his family’s respected distilling legacy but was a trailblazer in another important aspect of whiskey marketing: much of the history he advertised was made up. The truth of his claims and the veracity of the dates he put on his bottles were all extremely questionable. Today that point is easy to forget, since the simple passage of time has turned Pepper’s artificial history into actual history. But in another way, he was also helping to establish an industry tradition.

Like so many other iconic brands, James E. Pepper Whisky (he spelled it without the
e
) has faded from existence. It folded in 1960, its last decades spent as an asset traded between different corporate conglomerates. But during this century the Pepper trademark was revived by a businessman named Amir Peay, who sources the brand from an outside supplier. Bourbon’s resurgent popularity has made this practice with defunct brands common, as companies attempt to resurrect the lost glories of once-famous labels in an industry that thrives on heritage. Peay is a whiskey geek’s whiskey geek, and rents a private storage unit dedicated entirely to Pepper memorabilia (bottles, titles, advertisements, office paperwork).
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The whiskey sold under the Pepper brand name today might not be identical to what it once was, but it is still quite good, and if not for Peay the memory of this bourbon icon would be entirely lost.

Even though Pepper was the offspring of a trailblazing distiller, his parents died when he was young, and the boy was adopted by Edmund H. Taylor Jr., the éminence grise
of bourbon. Taylor had purchased the rights to the Old Crow brand shortly after Oscar Pepper died, and around the same time he agreed to be James Pepper’s legal guardian. Pepper eventually inherited the Old Crow brand, selling it in 1867 to Gaines, Berry, and Co. (his distillery continued to make it for them). In 1879, he opened the Henry Clay Distillery in Lexington, which, like many distilleries, made brands for outside wholesalers.

By 1890, Pepper had tired of making whiskey for outside blenders who used it however they saw fit. Like his contemporary George Garvin Brown, he saw the value of owning the entire process. When he created his own brand he claimed that it was “Born with the Republic 1776”
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and that it used his grandfather Elijah’s Revolutionary War–era recipe. Of course, 1776 was the year his grandfather Elijah was actually
born,
not the year he started making whiskey. When Elijah started making whiskey in 1810, it certainly didn’t taste like his grandson’s product.
Pepper had backdated things by 114 years in order to exaggerate his brand’s legacy.

But no matter: Pepper’s marketing bravado simply helped blaze a trail that many have followed. Few, however, have done it with his panache. He also managed to get himself credited as the person who introduced the cocktail known as the old-fashioned from the Pendennis Club in Louisville to New York. Of course, people were talking about the old-fashioned before the Pendennis Club even existed, and nobody knows for sure where the cocktail came from. Peay, who shoulders the duty of reviving the legacy of somebody who often invented many parts of his own “legacy” out of thin air, has decided to keep the exaggerated claims about such things on the brand’s current labeling. His move is tongue-in-cheek, honoring a history of bourbon marketing that has often played fast and loose with actual history.