PHILADELPHIA—Lately I’ve been performing in the state that went to war over whiskey—the Whiskey Rebellion lasted longer than World War II and had several Barley Malt Martyrs—and frankly I don’t like the way they’re honoring their heritage.
In Philadelphia I was offered a local rye called New Liberty, distilled in a “historic building” in a “vibrant neighborhood” called “Olde Kensington”—in other words, North Philly—and it came in a bottle that looked like a calligrapher had thrown up on it and the art director for Mutiny on the Bounty had spent several years designing a cork that looks like you’re about to toss the whole thing into the Sargasso Sea with a message inside that says “Shipwrecked. Send Robert Louis Stevenson.”
In Pittsburgh I’ve had similar experiences. They have a Wigle Whiskey that’s distilled seven blocks from that famous diner where they make the sandwiches with the french fries inside the bread, and you would think they know what they’re doing since Wigle refers to Philip Wigle, the whiskey patriot sentenced to death by hanging in the actual Whiskey Rebellion. Unfortunately, Wigle Whiskey dates not to 1791, the year the war broke out, but to 2012, the year they also designed a what-the-fuck bottle, but in Pittsburgh’s case it looks like a fruity protein drink that’s been fattened up with pastel steroids.
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This kind of whiskey-bottle performance art is apparently thriving all over the country, including Tennessee, home of the sacred drink of Texas—Jack Daniel’s—an aqua vitae so enshrined in lore and legend that there are actual rules for what qualifies as “Tennessee water.” Every year I go to Tennessee for the Chattanooga Film Festival, and every year somebody will rave about the Chattanooga Whiskey Co. (they don’t spell out “company” lest they be contemporary), whose products are “1816 Reserve” and “1816 Cask,” sold in squat 375-milliliter bottles (in other words, half the size of the divine standard for whiskey) so that you won’t realize that the $47 charge on your Discover card means the whiskey would actually cost $94 if they were giving you a fair pour. Once again there’s a faux connection to nonexistent history, with the “1816” implying that the contents of the bottle have some relation to the trading post on the Tennessee River established in the year of Chattanooga’s founding. The distillery actually dates from 2015.
Numero Uno: Even though all these distilleries are proud of “going local,” none of them use the water that’s just a few feet away from their gift shops and tasting rooms. This is probably because making whiskey out of the water in the Schuylkill or the Allegheny River would test the gag reflexes of fancy bottle collectors throughout the Midwest. But isn’t the whole point of making good whiskey to put your still as close to the best water as possible, even if that water is 6,000 feet up in the Smokies? There’s a reason there are 17,000 distilleries in Speyside, and they all involve the quality of the extremely cold fast-running water in the River Spey, which gushes out of the Scottish Highlands and flows north into the Moray Firth. Glenfiddich didn’t position its distillery to maximize walk-in customers in Dufftown, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
