Robert F. Moss - Southern Spirits : Four Hundred Years of Drinking in the American South, with Recipes

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The Old Absinthe House bar in New Orleans, LA, in the early 1900s. The bar is still in operation today.

Sometime in October 2013, 230 bottles of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon went missing from the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky. Despite a $10,000 reward, no tips were received as to who might have pulled off the heist.

It was the perfect climax to Pappys meteoric rise. Hailing from a long line of whiskey makers and whiskey sellers, Julian Van Winkle III got into the business with his father in the 1970s. Back then, the only way they could move whiskey was by putting it into novelty-themed decanters shaped like college football mascots. Then, in the 1990s, following the course charted by the makers of single-malt scotches, bourbon distillers started introducing premium lines to the market, which won over new converts to their products. Around the year 2000, a lot of those drinkers started discovering the smooth, long-aged whiskeys sold by Julian Van Winkle.

We got some really nice ratings, Van Winkle told me, when asked to explain how his products got so popular, and a lot of word of mouth and a lot of nice press. The real boost came when a few celebrity chefs, including Sean Brock of Charlestons Husk and David Chang from New Yorks Momofuku, started professing their love for Van Winkles bourbon. A flurry of magazine articles profiling Pappy followed, and the boom progressed directly to a bubble.

At first, savvy fans could watch the companys Facebook site to learn when the allotment for their state was about to ship, then race to their local retailer to stake out a bottle. That trick doesnt work anymore. Liquor store owners just roll their eyes when greenhorns come in and ask, Do you carry Pappy Van Winkle? Bottles float around on the underground market for $500 for the fifteen-year-old bourbon and more than $1,000 for the twenty-three-year-old. Once in demand for its smooth, rich flavor, its now in demand simply for being in demand.

The rise of Pappy Van Winkle coincided with a more general vogue for Southern food. Restaurants like Seersucker and Peels brought updated Southern classics to New York City. Celebrity chefs on the West Coast started importing Bentons country ham from Tennessee and Anson Mills grits from South Carolina. Indie filmmakers created documentaries to explain pimento cheese to Yankees, and suddenly, from coast to coast, everyone was eating barbecue. Invariably, the drink they chose to sip alongside their Southern fare was bourbon.

And why not? When you ask people today to name a Southern drink, bourbon is almost certainly the first word that springs to their tongues. If they manage to come up with a cocktail, its bound to be a mint julep (made with bourbon, of course). The funny thing is, from a historical perspective, bourbon is by no means the dominant Southern spirit. It didnt even exist during the colonial era, and it was not widely drunk in most parts of the South during the antebellum days. Yes, plenty of Southerners sipped mint juleps. But contrary to the misty myths of the Old South, they usually werent sitting on the veranda of a white-columned plantation house, and the liquor in their tumbler was not bourbon. Bourbons transformation into the dominant Southern spirit happened not during Reconstruction nor the Gilded Age but after Prohibitions brutal scythe laid low the entire American liquor industry, setting Southern drinking back almost a century in the process. It was only in the aftermath of Prohibitions repeal, as the industry reorganized itself into marketing-driven conglomerates, that bourbon emerged as the premier spirit on the Southern bar.

So if it wasnt bourbon juleps on the veranda, what was it that Southerners were drinking all those years? Quite a lot of things, as it turns out, and thats good news for modern drinkers with a taste for history. Peach brandy, rum, Madeira, Cognac, rye whiskey, and locally brewed lager: the history of drinking in the South offers a rich and delicious legacy that can be drawn upon today to open entire new fields of tasting and experimentation.

Booze provides an intriguing lens into history, offering new perspectives on the larger social trends that occurred over the course of centuries. Alcohol helped lubricate the wheels of commerce, for when business-minded folks got together to negotiate and trade, they shared plenty of drinks. In fact, the places where people drank and the places where they conducted business were frequently one and the same. Alcohol taxes were a key source of governmental revenue as well, and excise taxes led to the young United States first constitutional crisis and, decades later, to the rise of moonshining in the South. At the same time, the legitimate alcohol business helped lead the transition to an industrial, commercial economy, both in terms of large-scale production techniques and the evolution of brand-based marketing. The temperance movement, in its century-long run-up to the failed Prohibition experiment, encapsulated the tensions of a growing and changing society coming to a head, and that movement played out in a formative way in the South that is not frequently addressed in social histories. Prohibition, of course, brought everything to a crashing halt, and once alcohol was legal again, the world of drinking in the South was reshuffled into a totally new set of patterns and preferences.

This book tries to capture the full sweep of that rich, multifaceted story. Each of its chapters opens with a drink recipe or two that are appropriate for that particular point in the narrative. Whether you choose to mix up your own version and sip it while reading is totally up to you, but it certainly wouldnt hurt. Well start with rum and brandy and traditional colonial preparations, like punches and slings, and enjoy a little fine old Madeira too. Well sample a range of whiskeyswhite corn liquor, aged rye, and old bourbonand trace the evolution of whiskey making over time. Well explore the classic cocktails of the Southern bar, like the Sazerac, the Ramos gin fizz, and, of course, the iconic mint julep. They all link up to provide a tasty representation of what people in the South were drinking and how that changed over time.