Bourbon Empire Read Online Free

considered the frontier. Thorpe and other settlers moving to Virginia in those first decades were taking a risky and dangerous gamble into a “howling wilderness” ravaged by famine, disease, and even rare cases of cannibalism. Travel agents, had they existed at the time, likely would have steered clients elsewhere.
    Thorpe’s name isn’t attached to any modern whiskey brand—his grisly death doesn’t make for sparkling ad copy—and nobody has bothered to spend the budget to put his name in lights. This is partly because his achievements came too early—whiskey wouldn’t become popular in America until almost two centuries after his death. Until then, it was a bit player in an ensemble dominated by ale, cider, and other spirits such as rum. When whiskey finally emerged from the shadows in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, other distilling icons—people from the Ohio River Valley states where thefrontier had migrated—found the spotlight instead. By the middle of the twentieth century the whiskey industry would consolidate largely within Kentucky and Tennessee, and distillers in these places naturally chose to tell the stories of hometown favorites instead of people like Thorpe. This has diminished his legacy; most of today’s books about whiskey only put Thorpe’s name in the footnotes, if they mention it at all.
    But Thorpe’s Berkeley home is likely where the idea of producing spirits from a grain unique to America first appeared. In the centuries after his experiment, the rules and standards for making bourbon, the most iconic of American whiskies, were slowly developed and codified. For a spirit to be called bourbon today, federal regulations dictate that it has to be made within the borders of the United States (not just Kentucky); it must be at least 51 percent corn, and it has to be aged in charred new oak barrels. The remainder of the grain mixture used is up to the distiller, but typically includes a small amount of malted barley and a bit of rye, which provides a spicy kick to balance the corn’s sweetness (wheat is sometimes used in place of rye for a softer effect). The proofs at which it is distilled, barreled, and bottled are also carefully regulated.
    It’s a lot of rules, but this is what makes Berkeley so special. It’s where George Thorpe started everything before any of the rules were even written.

     • • • 
    A native of Gloucestershire, England, George Thorpe was a well-connected lawyer who had served in Parliament before partnering with three other men to form a private colony in Virginia then known as the Berkeley Hundred. He sailed from Bristol for America in 1619, leaving in England his wife, an eight-year-old daughter, and three young sons, all of whom he planned to send for once he was established across the Atlantic. After nearly three months at sea, he arrived in Virginia aboard the
Margaret.
    There was plenty of booze aboard the
Margaret
: “5½ tuns of beer,6 tuns of cider, 11 gallons of sack, 15 gallons of aqua vitae, etc,” according to ship records. “Aqua vitae”
referred to distilled spirits, a term that is often dated to the fourteenth century and credited to a physician and alchemist at the University of Paris named Arnaud de Ville-Neuve. Ville-Neuve was obsessed with unlocking the secrets—including health benefits and the possibility of achieving immortality—presented by the distillation of alcohol. He suspected that alcoholic spirits were the concentrated essence of sunlight, funneled into fruits and grains that were later fermented and distilled. He wrote that aqua vitae
was “a water of immortality. . . . It prolongs life, clears away ill humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth.” The term
meant “living water” and translated to
akvavit
in Swedish,
eau de vie
in French, and
usquebaugh
in Gaelic. The Gaelic version became
uisge-betha,
was eventually shortened to
uisge,
and finally became
whiskey,
referring to the spirit