Ontopic Alcohol Blog - Post when you're drinking!

James Woods said:
Sit at my bar long enough or take me to a pub and get a few too many beers in me and eventually you'll hear my Evan Williams rant. Too be honest I'm surprised I haven't gone off on this yet in this thread. Here ya go.


A lot of what I'm about to tell you is subject to conjecture and or urban myth surrounding the history of American Whiskey. Take my words with a grain of salt as I am no Yale educated historian but rather a man who has spent many a year on the business end of a bar and heard many a yarn about two men mired in the annals of our country's drinking history. Those men and their associated spirits are Evan Williams and Jack Daniels.

You've all heard of Mr. Daniels but who is this Evan Willams fellow you ask? Well I'll bet you a nickel that his product is available at your local liquor store. I'll even bet you another that you've noticed it on the shelf and dismissed it for a very unfortunate reason. Let me explain.

This is a bottle of Jack Daniels "Tennessee Whiskey(I'll get into that later)" like one that you will see in your local liquor store or any bar in America.


wVIFZ.jpg


Now look a couple of shelves down and you will see this.

eGWea.jpg


Now you're saying "Oh yea, Evan Williams, that generic Jack Daniels shit." This could not be further from the truth. Evan Williams was established in 1783 in Bourbon County Kentucky and is credited as being Kentucky's first Bourbon. The techniques by which Evan Willams was originally and still to this day is made has become the yard stick by which all American Whiskeys are measured. Then "Why" you’re asking "does the bottle look just like Jack Daniels?"

Jack Daniels Distillery claims to have been founded in 1866 in Lynchburg Tennessee (historians currently believe the real date to be in the mid eighteen seventies) almost a hundred years after Evan Williams had been bottling with their trademark square bottle with the black label. This is where fuzzy history and the conspiracy theories set in. The bourbon business in the late nineteenth century was a tumultuous trade. During the expansion of the frontier in the West several new distilleries were sprouting up in states like Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, or even places as far West as Kansas or as North as New York to fuel the livers of those brave frontiersmen and outlaws alike. Even in Canada or countries in Europe distilleries were monopolizing on the “Bourbon” brand. While all this was happening the owners of the original Kentucky distilleries were trying to protect the brand and traditions of what America had come to know as Bourbon. Several spirits, some no more than maple colored moonshine, were being sold as Bourbon across the country by these imitators and it seemed that the very traditions of the South were at stake. Southern pride had recently taken a hell of a whipping and they weren’t about to let a bunch of foreigners and Yankees tell them what Bourbon was.

A series of Congressional resolutions over the years tried to dictate exactly what could be sold as Bourbon or Whiskey for that matter in the United States. What followed was many opportunists foreign and domestic alike who tried to sidestep the measures put in place to get their product to the mouths of the sons of the soil who had grown up with the spirit. One such opportunist was Jack Daniels. He realized that all the quibbling over whether you used sour mash, distilled in Bourbon County Kentucky, or aged in charred oak barrels was academic for one simple reason. Bourbon drinkers were by far mostly illiterate. All Mr. Daniels had to do was approximate the taste of real Bourbon and package it in the one thing the hillbillies of the day would recognize. The square black labeled bottle of Evan Williams that their fathers and grandfathers before them had drank. He called his new product “Tennessee Whiskey” in an effort to avoid the complications associated with labeling a spirit Bourbon but, as I said, few were really reading the label.

A feud between the to companies sparked and went on in relative silence as far as the buying public was concerned for several decades until it was rendered moot in 1920 with the 18th Amendment and the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. In the thirteen years that followed the American distilleries tried to make due by merely exporting their product to places like Canada and Europe, only to have it smuggled back into the states by bootleggers, but these sales were dismal in comparison to the era of pre-prohibition.

Evan Williams had not fared well in the feud and there are to this day stories of the underhanded tactics used by Jack Daniels in trying to bury the label they had tried so hard to emulate. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933 The Jack Daniels company had survived the storm of prohibition the best of the old American distilleries and was able to get a strangle hold on the American market as the streets once again flowed with Whiskey. Sadly to this day when most people think American Whiskey they think Jack Daniels and not the age old tradition of Kentucky Bourbon.

Evan Williams struggled for decades and despite the ironic stigma of being a Jack Daniels imitator it still to this day makes bourbon the way they have for over two hundred years. In recent years the brand has been making a name for itself once again and has been wining several awards and ribbons for its classic Black Label. It retains that smooth taste associated with Bourbons seemingly superior and vastly more expensive and lacks the overly smoky taste often associated with brands such as Jim Beam or the harsh sweetness of Jack Daniels.

Over the years Evan Williams has refused to compromise their classic bottle design and label despite its unfortunate association. Another thing they have refused to compromise is the price. Evan Williams was founded as the spirit of the everyman. That simple and elegant indulgence that both a country farmer and Southern gentleman could enjoy and appreciate. When I go to my neighborhood liquor store I saunter over to the Whiskey section, hitch my pants a bit and take a knee as my eyes pass over such brands as Knob Creek, Jack Daniels, and Jim Beam in descending order until I finally see good old Evan Williams sitting sadly on the bottom shelf. I proudly grab myself a bottle and when I get to the checkout isle and shell out eight bucks for a liter I am confident in the knowledge that while I could afford the hundred dollar bottle on the top shelf behind the locked glass in the fancy wooden box, my wallet isn't making this purchase, my taste is.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back