America's 250th · Part 1 of 5

Part 1: American Whiskey

250 Years of Distilling, Taxation, and the Founding Fathers’ Actual Drinking Habits

July 4, 2026

Written by Gautam Kannan

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America turns 250 today. Its spirits industry goes back nearly that far. Its perfume industry is much younger. This is the first of five installments covering both, plus tiki, the rest of America’s spirits, and cigars.

1930s postcard, Making Moonshine in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee

A 1930s postcard, “Making Moonshine in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tenn.” The practice flourished in the remote valleys of the Smokies before the park existed, and stayed part of its lore long after the stills were gone. Courtesy of University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Special Collections.

America's 250th — A Five-Part Series

Part 1: American Whiskey — You are here▾
  1. 1. A Nation Built While Someone Was Distilling
  2. 2. The Whiskey Rebellion, Moonshine, and Taxation
  3. 3. Founding Fathers Actually Drank a Lot
  4. 4. Immigrants Built This
  5. 5. A Few Dates Worth Knowing
  6. 6. Houses and Distilleries Worth Knowing

1. A Nation Built While Someone Was Distilling

The country’s oldest spirit started as a way to use up a surplus. Hard cider, not rum or whiskey, was the default drink at most colonial tables, since water was often unsafe and apple trees grew easily without the grain or equipment spirits required. William Laird, a Scottish immigrant, began distilling that surplus cider into apple brandy in colonial New Jersey in 1698. A descendant, Robert Laird, is the name attached to 1780, the year the company dates its first official recorded sale and the Treasury license it still calls No. 1, seven years before the Constitution existed. George Washington liked what the Lairds were making enough to write and personally request their recipe. By the company’s own account, Robert Laird and his brother Richard served under Washington and supplied his troops with applejack at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778. Laird & Company still operates today, the oldest licensed distillery in the United States, and it was making apple brandy before there was a state of Kentucky, let alone a bourbon industry.

Home of Laird's Apple Jack Since 1780 sign and grounds in Scobeyville, New Jersey

Laird & Company’s grounds in Scobeyville, New Jersey. Distillers since 1780.

Applejack was not the only spirit in the room. Rum was the dominant drink of colonial America. Historians estimate colonists consumed something like 3.7 gallons of it per person annually by the time of the Revolution, a figure Mount Vernon’s own history team cites but did not originate. That popularity came from a supply chain worth naming honestly: rum production was tied directly into the triangular trade, and the sugar and molasses behind it were produced by enslaved labor in the Caribbean. Rum’s place in early American life cannot be told as a purely charming colonial story, because it wasn’t one.

Bourbon, the spirit most people now think of as definitively American, is actually the newest arrival of the three. It doesn’t show up as a distinct regional identity until the 19th century, and its rise to prominence has a lot to do with what happens next.

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2. The Whiskey Rebellion, Moonshine, and Taxation

Whiskey production spread fast on the American frontier after the Revolution. Corn grew easily, transporting it as grain was expensive, and converting it into whiskey solved both problems at once. Farmers used it as currency in places where cash was scarce.

In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton pushed through an excise tax on domestically distilled spirits, aimed at paying down Revolutionary War debt. It was a reasonable idea on paper. In practice, it hit frontier farmers in western Pennsylvania hardest. These were small operators who used whiskey as currency because they rarely saw cash, and a cash-only tax on a product they didn’t sell for cash was, functionally, a tax they could not pay.

Resistance built for three years. Tax collectors were tarred and feathered. In July 1794, roughly 500 armed men attacked and burned the home of federal tax inspector John Neville outside Pittsburgh. Washington responded by personally leading a militia of nearly 13,000 men into western Pennsylvania, the only time a sitting president has commanded troops in the field. The rebels dispersed before any real fighting happened. Two men were convicted of treason. Washington pardoned both of them.

Washington reviewing the militia before marching into western Pennsylvania, Kemmelmeyer painting

Washington reviewing the Western Army at Fort Cumberland, Maryland, October 1794. Attributed to Frederick Kemmelmeyer, after 1795.

Jefferson repealed the tax in 1802, the moment he had the votes to do it. That repeal didn’t end illegal distilling. It just pushed it further underground and further west.

Many of the frontier distillers behind the rebellion, most of them Scots-Irish immigrants, moved into Kentucky and Tennessee, specifically to get beyond federal reach. Appalachian terrain made stills hard for tax agents to find, and corn was worth far more as whiskey than as raw grain, a pack horse that could move four bushels of grain could carry twenty-four bushels of it condensed into two kegs of whiskey, at roughly double the price once it reached eastern markets. That migration is a real, documented reason bourbon took root where it did. Virginia sweetened the deal, too. The state had granted land bounties to its Revolutionary War veterans in what became Kentucky, so many of these same distillers weren’t just running from tax agents, they already had a legal claim waiting on land that grew good corn.

The tax came back with the Civil War. The Revenue Act of 1862 funded the war and revived the standoff between moonshiners and the agents sent after them, known as revenuers. That standoff lasted for decades and hardened into a distinct Appalachian culture built around evading federal reach, the same instinct Hamilton’s original tax provoked in 1791.

By the 1880s, legal whiskey had its own problem. Rectifiers blended neutral grain spirits with iodine, tobacco, prune juice, and sometimes worse, to fake the color and taste of properly aged bourbon. Consumers had no way to know what was actually in the bottle. Honest distillers were losing customers to cheaper, adulterated competitors.

Colonel E.H. Taylor Jr., a Kentucky distiller, led the public fight against rectifiers, though the bill itself came together with Treasury Secretary John G. Carlisle, a Kentuckian, working alongside the straight-whiskey distillers. The Bottled-in-Bond Act passed on March 3, 1897, usually called the first federal consumer protection law in American history, though the 1848 Drug Importation Act had already applied federal purity standards to imported medicines. Either way it arrived nine years before the Pure Food and Drug Act.

The law ran on the same tax infrastructure Hamilton had built in 1791. To carry the bonded label, whiskey had to come from one distiller, at one distillery, in one distillation season, aged at least four years in a federally supervised warehouse. Producers got a tax deferral for participating. Consumers got a government guarantee that what was in the bottle matched the label.

Prohibition turned moonshining into a national business. Bootleggers modified cars to outrun revenue agents on mountain roads, heavy-duty springs and shocks to keep the jars from breaking, rear seats pulled out for cargo, and hopped-up engines. Junior Johnson started running moonshine as a boy, accounts put it anywhere from eight to his early teens, later won 50 NASCAR races, and became one of the sport’s first stars. NASCAR’s origin traces directly back to those chases.

Tennessee legalized regulated distilleries outside a handful of counties in 2009. Unlicensed moonshine was and still is a federal felony everywhere, that part never changed, what changed was where a license could be legally issued. Ole Smoky opened in Gatlinburg the weekend of July 4, 2010, the first federally licensed distillery in the history of East Tennessee. Estimates for the legal moonshine industry’s size vary widely depending on what gets counted, but figures in the billions of dollars show up consistently.

The same legal principle, not sentiment, still separates a licensed craft distillery today from an illegal one. Unlicensed distilling remains a federal felony, and the federal excise tax on distilled spirits sits at $13.50 per proof gallon, Hamilton’s 1791 idea, still on the books, 235 years later.

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3. Founding Fathers Actually Drank a Lot

Not many people know the Founding Fathers drank this much.

On September 14, 1787, three days before the Constitution was signed, Washington hosted the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry, his longtime Light Horse escort, for dinner at City Tavern. The surviving bill lists 55 gentlemen’s dinners, 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 of claret, 8 of Old Stock whiskey, 22 of porter, 8 of cider, 12 of beer, and 7 bowls of punch. That’s roughly two bottles of wine per person before anyone touched the whiskey or the punch. Adjusted for inflation, estimates of the bill run from roughly $15,000 to over $20,000, depending on which index and exchange rate you use.

City Tavern as it appeared around 1800, engraving by William Birch

City Tavern as it appeared around 1800, from an engraving by William Birch.

The actual bill from Washington's September 14, 1787 dinner at City Tavern

The actual bill from Washington’s September 14, 1787 dinner. Courtesy of Dr. Gordon Lloyd, Pepperdine University.

Washington’s own relationship with spirits went well past hosting. After his presidency, he built one of the largest whiskey distilleries in the country at Mount Vernon, producing around 11,000 gallons in 1799 alone. Mount Vernon picked July 4th to release its first bourbon, timed to America’s 250th anniversary. Spirit of ’76 Cask Strength, seven years old, roughly 300 bottles at $1,000 each, sold only in person at the estate.

The reconstructed Distillery at Mount Vernon with 1797 plaque

The reconstructed Distillery at Mount Vernon, marking its 1797 construction.

Two recipes survive from that era, and they take genuinely different approaches to entertaining.

Martha Washington’s Rum Punch

Created by the Distilled Spirits Council and mixologist Dale DeGroff, and published by Mount Vernon, as an interpretation of what Martha may have served, not a literal 18th-century written recipe. Serves 6-10. Mash the orange, lemons, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg together in a container. Add the syrup, lemon juice, and orange juice. Pour the boiling water over the mixture and let it sit a few minutes so the spices open up. Once cool, stir in both rums and the curaçao. Strain well into a pitcher or punch bowl. Serve over ice, garnished with citrus wheels.

Benjamin Franklin’s Milk Punch is the more unusual of the two. This one isn’t folklore. Franklin wrote out the recipe himself and mailed it. On October 11, 1763, preparing to leave Boston for Philadelphia, Franklin sent a letter to his friend James Bowdoin enclosing a recipe “To make Milk Punch.” The original letter survives at the Massachusetts Historical Society. It’s a clarified punch, a technique where hot milk curdles on contact with citrus and alcohol, then gets strained until the liquid runs clear, closer to kitchen science than anything most people picture from the 1760s. Franklin’s original recipe made an enormous batch. What follows is the Historical Society’s own scaled-down version, at one quarter of his original proportions.

Benjamin Franklin’s Milk Punch

Steep the lemon zest in the brandy for 24 hours, then strain it out. Add the water, lemon juice, sugar, and nutmeg to the brandy and stir until the sugar dissolves. Bring the milk to a boil and add it hot to the brandy mixture, it will curdle on contact. Let the punch stand for two hours, then strain through a jelly bag or cheesecloth until it runs clear. Serve cold.

Martha’s punch is warm and built for a crowd. Franklin’s is closer to kitchen science, producing something that looks nothing like what went into it. Both still worth making 250 years later.

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4. Immigrants Built This

Immigration is the through-line across almost everything in this section.

William Laird brought Scottish distilling knowledge directly to New Jersey and created America’s first native spirit. The Scots-Irish farmers who resisted the whiskey tax and then relocated to Kentucky and Tennessee carried their stills and their distilling traditions with them, and that migration is a direct line to bourbon as it exists today.

Heaven Hill’s own founders were immigrants too. Five Shapira brothers, sons of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, bought out the original investors within two years of the 1935 founding. Descendants of the family still run it today.

Enslaved and free Black distillers are part of this story too, and it’s one this site has already told properly rather than compress into a paragraph here. Nathan “Nearest” Green taught Jack Daniel how to distill whiskey, and the Black distillers, perfumers, and blenders building on that legacy today are covered in full in Juneteenth Special: The Builders You Never Heard Of. That piece is the better place to go for that story, not a summary tacked onto this one.

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5. A Few Dates Worth Knowing

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6. Houses and Distilleries Worth Knowing

Laird & Company, the oldest licensed distillery in the country, still family-run, ten generations in. Laird & Company released a 13-year-old apple brandy for America’s 250th in 2026, 1,300 bottles at 56% ABV, marking 328 years of family distilling. The Laird family started making apple brandy in New Jersey seventy-eight years before the country existed. Eighth, ninth, and tenth generation family members still run it today.

Laird's America's 250th Limited Release 13 Year Old Apple Brandy

Laird’s America’s 250th Limited Release, 13 Years Old. Courtesy of Laird & Company.

Buffalo Trace, home of Blanton’s and Elmer T. Lee, a National Historic Landmark. The site burned down in 1882, when it was still called the O.F.C. Distillery, and was rebuilt shortly after.

The O.F.C. Distillery destroyed by fire in 1882, historic engraving

The O.F.C. Distillery, burned in the great fire of 1882. Rebuilt on the same site, now Buffalo Trace.

Before 1984, bourbon brands blended barrels together for a consistent taste. Elmer T. Lee changed that at what’s now Buffalo Trace. He remembered Colonel Albert B. Blanton handpicking single barrels from Warehouse H to share with guests. Lee revived that practice and named the bourbon after him. Blanton’s launched in 1984, billed by Buffalo Trace as the world’s first premium single barrel bourbon. Every bottle comes from one barrel instead of a blend, so no two taste exactly alike.

Heaven Hill, one of the few houses that kept Bottled-in-Bond alive through the deregulated 1980s when most of the industry dropped it.

The Heaven Hill Bourbon Experience with vintage barrel truck

The Heaven Hill Bourbon Experience in Bardstown, its exterior a replica of how the distillery looked in 1935.

Jack Daniel’s, whose real history runs through Nathan Green and is told properly in Juneteenth Special: The Builders You Never Heard Of rather than repeated here.

Jack Daniel's Visitor Center in Lynchburg, Tennessee

Jack Daniel’s Visitor Center, Lynchburg, Tennessee.

Part 2 picks up with American perfume, an industry that’s less than a century old, and the marketing machinery, books, theater, film, music, and platforms, that sells both spirits and perfume today.

View Complete Article Part 2: American Perfume & Culture as Marketing →
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Sources

  1. William Laird’s arrival from Scotland, the 1698 start of distilling in Monmouth County, the 1849 fire and the move to Scobeyville, the Washington recipe request, the Battle of Monmouth applejack supplied by Robert and Richard Laird, the 1933 permit to distill apple brandy for medicinal purposes, the 1976 move of all distilling to North Garden, Virginia, and ten generations of family: Laird & Company’s own history. Every one of these rests on the company’s account; no independent record of the Monmouth story was reachable. The 1780 date, Treasury License No. 1, and the “oldest licensed distillery in the United States” claim as commonly repeated: Wikipedia’s Laird & Company entry, used here as a cross-check because nothing better is reachable. Laird’s own page dates 1880 as one hundred years since the first official recorded sale, which is a different claim from incorporation. The 2026 America’s 250th release: thirteen years in oak, 56% ABV, 1,300 bottles, each number chosen for the thirteen colonies and the fifty-six signers: retailer listing carrying Laird’s product copy. No primary page for that release was reachable on Laird’s own site.
  2. Cider as the everyday colonial drink at roughly fifteen gallons per person a year, and urban water treated as unsafe enough that clean water was bought from tea-water men: National Museum of American History.
  3. Colonial rum consumption of 3.7 gallons per head by the Revolution, and the molasses trade behind it: Mount Vernon’s digital encyclopedia, which attributes the figure to Ian Williams, Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 (2005), rather than to its own research. The same entry documents Washington issuing rum allowances to the people he enslaved.
  4. Bourbon arriving late as a distinct regional identity, with the earliest dated advertisements for “Bourbon County Whiskey” running in Natchez newspapers in 1824, 1825 and 1826, and the term becoming standard by the Civil War: Robert F. Moss’s survey of the documentary record.
  5. The 1791 excise tax pushed through by Hamilton to service Revolutionary War debt, its rates, the July 1794 attack on John Neville, the death of James McFarlane, Henry Knox’s request for 12,950 militiamen and the nearly 13,000 who gathered at Carlisle, the two treason convictions, Washington’s pardons in 1795, and the repeal of the tax by 1802: TTB’s own history, corroborated on the militia number and the Neville attack by Mount Vernon. Sources disagree on the size of the crowd at Bower Hill: Mount Vernon says “hundreds,” the Smithsonian says between 400 and 500 returning on July 17. That same piece names the two convicted men, John Mitchell and Philip Weigel, and dates the pardon to November 2, 1795, where TTB says July.
  6. The 1791 tax as a short-lived measure, its repeal under Jefferson in 1802, the Act of July 1, 1862 levying twenty cents per proof gallon to pay for the Civil War, and the present rate of $13.50 per proof gallon: Congressional Research Service, Federal Excise Taxes on Alcoholic Beverages, RL30238. The statutory rate itself is at 26 U.S.C. §5001, which also provides reduced rates as low as $2.70 for a small producer’s first 100,000 proof gallons, so $13.50 is the headline rate rather than what every distillery actually pays.
  7. The pack-horse arithmetic, four bushels of grain against twenty-four bushels condensed into two kegs of whiskey, with the price roughly doubling by the time it reached eastern markets: Leland Baldwin in American Heritage, August 1963.
  8. Virginia’s Revolutionary War bounty land in what became Kentucky: warrants were issued against the Kentucky Military District established in May 1779, between August 1782 and October 1793, and the district closed in 1795: Kentucky Secretary of State, Land Office.
  9. The 1862 tax reviving illicit distilling after a long gap, Appalachian hostility to revenuers, and moonshining as an entrenched occupation across the Tennessee mountain counties: Tennessee Encyclopedia.
  10. Rectifiers flavoring and coloring neutral spirit with iodine, tobacco and other substances before 1897, the March 3, 1897 passage of the Bottled-in-Bond Act as Public Law 54-379, and the tax deferral that made participation attractive: Wikipedia’s Bottled in bond entry, named as a cross-check. E.H. Taylor Jr. as the public face of the fight and Treasury Secretary John G. Carlisle as the Kentuckian inside the administration: Brian Haara and bourbon historian Michael Veach. Neither credits a single congressman with the bill.
  11. The bonded requirements as they stand in federal law today, one distiller at one distillery in one distilling season, at least four years in wood, and bottling at exactly 100 proof: 27 CFR §5.88. The 1848 Drug Importation Act, which required imported drugs to meet USP standards for strength and purity and complicates the “first consumer protection law” claim: United States Pharmacopeia. The Pure Food and Drug Act followed in 1906.
  12. Prohibition running from 1920 to 1933, the 18th Amendment taking effect one year after ratification and repealed by the 21st: Cornell Legal Information Institute. Bootleggers running heavy-duty springs and shocks to keep the jars intact, rear seats pulled for cargo, and high-powered engines, and NASCAR founded on December 14, 1947 by Bill France, himself out of that world: Smithsonian. No source I could reach supports the specific claim that the cars were mostly Ford V8s, so that detail has been dropped. Junior Johnson’s 50 wins in NASCAR’s top division, the most of any driver never to win a championship: NASCAR. Sources disagree on how young he started hauling liquor: Motor Sport says age eight, other accounts put it in his early teens, and NASCAR’s own obituary gives no age at all.
  13. Tennessee’s 2009 bill opening distilling to 41 additional counties, where only three had allowed it before, later expanded again to roughly 75: Tennessee Distillers Guild, with the current statutory tests at Tenn. Code Ann. §§57-2-103 and 57-3-202 summarized by the University of Tennessee’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service. Ole Smoky opening the weekend of July 4, 2010 as the first federally licensed distillery in the history of East Tennessee: Wikipedia, named as a cross-check; Ole Smoky’s own history page confirms the law change and the Gatlinburg opening but gives no date and makes no “first” claim.
  14. The City Tavern bill of September 14, 1787, itemized: 55 gentlemen’s dinners, 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 of claret, 8 of Old Stock, 22 of porter, 8 of cider, 12 of beer and 7 large bowls of punch, plus a separate accounting for sixteen servants and musicians, totalling £89 4s 2d: Quill Project transcription of Edward Moyston’s bill. The occasion as a farewell dinner given by the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry, the Light Horse: Gordon Lloyd, Teaching American History. Inflation conversions vary wildly; one calculation reaches about $20,270 in 2022 dollars, which is why the article now gives a range rather than a single figure.
  15. Washington’s distillery: construction begun October 1797, five copper pot stills of 616 gallons combined, a mash of 60% rye, 35% corn and 5% malted barley, and almost 11,000 gallons produced in 1799 at a building measuring 75 by 30 feet against a typical 20 by 40, making it among the largest in the country: Mount Vernon.
  16. George Washington’s Spirit of ’76, the first bourbon ever made at the reconstructed distillery, cask strength, seven years old, $1,000 a bottle, released July 4, 2026, one bottle per person, in person at the estate only: Mount Vernon’s announcement. That announcement is internally inconsistent on the bottle count, roughly 300 in the body against 350 in the headline; the article follows the body.
  17. Martha Washington’s Rum Punch as printed, ingredient for ingredient, and its attribution to the Distilled Spirits Council and Dale DeGroff as a recipe “inspired by what Martha Washington may have served” rather than a surviving 18th-century text: Mount Vernon.
  18. Franklin’s milk punch: the letter to James Bowdoin of 11 October 1763 enclosing “To make Milk Punch,” with the original calling for six quarts of brandy, the rinds of forty-four lemons, four quarts of water, four grated nutmegs, two quarts of lemon juice, two pounds of double-refined sugar and three quarts of boiled milk: Founders Online. The original held in the Bowdoin-Temple papers, and the quarter-scale modern version reproduced in the article: Massachusetts Historical Society.
  19. Heaven Hill founded in 1935 by Bardstown-area investors including the five Shapira brothers, David, Ed, Gary, George and Mose, with descendants of the family still owning and operating it: Difford’s Guide. The father as a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who peddled goods in Kentucky before opening a store: Kentucky Monthly and Aish. Kentucky Monthly also dates the buyout to about a year into the venture, when the outside investors wanted out. Heaven Hill’s own family page describes the patriarch as a Russian immigrant, so the two accounts disagree on which empire he left.
  20. The Heaven Hill Bourbon Experience opening June 15, 2021, with an exterior built as a replica of how the distillery looked in 1935: Heaven Hill Brands.
  21. Nathan “Nearest” Green teaching Jack Daniel to make Tennessee whiskey and serving as the distillery’s first master distiller, with charcoal filtration drawing on West African practice: National Museum of African American History and Culture.
  22. Buffalo Trace named a National Historic Landmark in 2013, E.H. Taylor Jr.’s purchase of the site in 1870 and the O.F.C. name, and the 1882 fire followed by rebuilding: Buffalo Trace, with the March 11, 2013 designation date at Wikipedia, named as a cross-check. Neither gives a month for the fire, so the caption no longer names one.
  23. Blanton’s introduced in 1984 by Elmer T. Lee as a tribute to Colonel Albert B. Blanton, who had hand-selected barrels from Warehouse H for guests, and billed by its maker as “the world’s first premium Single Barrel Bourbon whiskey”: Blanton’s. The word premium is the brand’s, and the article now keeps it.
  24. American Single Malt Whisky added to the federal standards of identity by a final rule published December 18, 2024 and effective January 19, 2025, requiring 100% malted barley, distillation at a single U.S. distillery to no more than 160 proof, and oak of no more than 700 liters: TTB. TTB does not call it the first new whiskey classification in fifty years, so the article no longer does either. The painting reproduced in the article is Washington Reviewing the Western Army at Fort Cumberland, Maryland, attributed to Frederick Kemmelmeyer and dated after 1795, showing the review of October 16, 1794, per The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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