Bourbon Empire by Reid Mitenbuler

the important regional trading hub of Louisville. * Before the railroads, more than 95 percent of whiskey exported from the western states through the middle of the century went through New Orleans, according to trade data from the era. Once there, spirits generally weren’t reexported elsewhere, as were most other goods, but were consumed within a city that was one of the heaviest-drinking places in the world. *
    New Orleans demanded whiskey, but what were they calling it? In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the term “bourbon” wasn’t common. The first known case of anyone in Kentucky calling the whiskey bourbon was in 1821, but that was a rare instance. Three years later, France’s Marquis de Lafayette visited Kentucky, but his hosts didn’t offer him bourbon. Instead, they presented him with a “wiski,” according to one journal account. Lafayette had helped arrange the financial assistance that France had sent to America during the Revolution, after which Bourbon County was named in its honor. If Kentuckians had been calling their whiskey by the same name, they surely would have let Lafayette know.
    Up until the 1840s, whiskey was typically referred to generically—simply as “whiskey”—or was given the name of the closest town or village: “Bardstown whiskey” or “Loretto whiskey.” Almost all of it was consumed locally. In 1812, Kentucky alone had two thousand registered distilleries, and probably many more unregistered ones. The only places that imported whiskey—and thus might have cared about the name or origins—were large cities. Grocers and middlemen such as the Tarascon brothers would have needed a way to make their whiskey stand out in these far-off places, especially in New Orleans, their biggest market. More modern theories speculate that a name like “bourbon” would have been a perfect marketing tool, appealing to the city’s large French-speaking population.
    But the explanation for bourbon’s name as it’s often told today is that the spirit was named after Bourbon County in Kentucky after liquor dealers in New Orleans started asking for whiskey shipped from the port at “Limestone, Bourbon County, Kentucky.” Unfortunately, this explanation isn’t backed by a paper trail, as historians such as Michael Veach and Charles Cowdery have pointed out. Limestone, Kentucky, which is today called Maysville, was only briefly part of Bourbon County before Kentucky became a state in 1792. When that happened, Bourbon County shrank drastically as it was divided into many smaller counties. The port at Limestone, to which the name is so often attributed, became part of Mason County. People continued calling the port “Old Bourbon” for about twenty years after the name change, but that habit ended well before the term came into common usage for the whiskey. During the period when “Old Bourbon” was still a widely used moniker for the port at Limestone, trade with New Orleans was still limited, and it’s highly unlikely that liquor dealers in New Orleans would have noticed a spirit by that name. *
    The most interesting theory about the origins of bourbon’s name isthat it was likely a shrewd marketing ploy cooked up by middlemen merchants like the Tarascon brothers. The French population living alongside the Tarascon brothers around the shipping hub of Louisville would have been well aware of the affiliation the name once had in the region and its suitability to their biggest market. Many French residents moving to New Orleans in the early nineteenth century were royalists fleeing the Revolution and would have appreciated the name. For any revolutionaries taking offense at it, the term could simply be linked back to the Bourbon County that had been named in honor of France’s support of the American Revolution. “Bourbon” was a perfect marketing tool—it meant different things to different consumers and didn’t offend anyone. It also had the perfect sound: a word full