For over 25 years now, I have had a debate with John Lipman about whether Bourbon or Rye Whiskey was the first aged whiskey. John has put forward that it was Rye whiskey being aged before Bourbon. Here are my arguments for Bourbon.
The first mention of Bourbon is from 1821. Bourbon is aged corn whiskey. The aging is what sets Bourbon apart from corn whiskey. I believe that Bourbon came about because Kentuckians could not sell their corn whiskey in New Orleans for a profit, so they decided to make it taste more like French Brandy, which had been aged in charred barrels since the 15th century. The earliest documentation for the aging in charred barrels that I have found is from 1825 in the Corliss-Respess Papers at the Filson Historical Society. In one letter, a Lexington, Kentucky merchant tells John Corliss that he likes their whiskey, but he has been told that if Corliss charred the barrels “as little as an 1/8 of an inch,” it will greatly improve the flavor. This is a Lexington merchant telling a Bourbon County distiller how to make his whiskey “Bourbon”. Also, in the Filson there is a diary from one of the Tarascon brothers, merchants in Louisville in the early 1810s, and the diary mentions the prices of spirits for sale in New Orleans. He gives the price of French Brandy and “American Brandy” which he states is not real brandy because it is made from corn. These are my arguments for Bourbon being the first aged American whiskey.
Now, let me look at the arguments against Rye whiskey being the first aged whiskey. Rye whiskey had some market in New Orleans, but the majority of their whiskey was made in Pennsylvania and sold in the northeastern part of the United States. Unlike Kentucky, who had to look for western markets because of the difficulty of getting to the eastern markets, Pennsylvania had better access to the eastern markets. They were selling their rye whiskey and did not need to send it to New Orleans to make a profit. Another argument comes from 1853 in Lacour’s Manufacture of Liquors, a book of rectifying recipes for spirits, in which he states in his recipe for Monongahela Rye, that the whiskey is “to be colored to suit fancy. Some customers prefer this whiskey transparent, while others like it just perceptibly tinged with brown; while others, again, want it rather deep, and partaking of red.” This indicates that rye whiskey was not always aged as late as the 1850s.
Rye whiskey was not always aged whereas Bourbon had to be aged. I have not seen any documentation as to when rye whiskey was first aged but I have seen documentation for the aging of Bourbon. I would be happy to change my opinion if someone came across papers from Pennsylvania or even Maryland, stating that they were aging rye whiskey in charred barrels before 1821. Until then, I will continue to argue that Bourbon is America’s first aged whiskey.
Photos Courtesy of Rosemary Miller
June 29, 2026 at 2:40 pm
I think the problem with the question is the question itself. Finding a documented example of rye being matured in charred barrels before bourbon is highly unlikely.
Factually speaking, Pennsylvania was inhabited by Europeans long before Kentucky’s first permanent settlement in Harrodsburg.
Barrels have been used for storage and transport since the late Iron Age.
Charred or fired casks date back to brandy/Cognac practices as early as the 15th century.
Coopers in early Pennsylvania would’ve almost certainly used fire or heat inside barrels to make or repair them.
June 29, 2026 at 3:04 pm
Hi Mike,
“for over 25 years now…”
Well, not quite. You discovered the Tarascon connection early in 2014, after ignoring my drumming that idea into your head for years before you finally accepted the truth of what I’d been saying all along. The 1810 reference you give doesn’t mention “bourbon” at all, speaking only of “American Brandy”. Bourbon (just “Bourbon”, not “bourbon whiskey”) was marketed as ersatz Cognac in New Orleans shortly after the Great French Wine Blight of 1863, lasting to the ’90s. That also corresponds with the American Civil War and Reconstruction. And with the sudden appearance of “Bourbon” in place of American Brandy.
BTW, great photos by Rosemary. Tell her Linda and I say Hi!
June 30, 2026 at 3:42 am
An interesting question, with the answer hinging on the definition of what aged or old whiskey is.
The term ‘aged’ was not part of the whiskey lexicon; ‘old’ was the lingua franca for maturation of distilled spirits in barrel or cask.
Until the late 19th century, the prefix ‘old’ was exclusively a whiskey marketing term, not a verifiable age statement. It only carried legal weight in labelling when the U.S. government enacted distilled spirits legislation, establishing the first age or maturation standards with the March 1897 Act to Allow the Bottling of Distilled Spirits in Bond, rather than the de facto 12-month bonded warehouse duty deferral of the July 1868 Act Imposed on Distilled Spirits, predicated to give distilleries a tax concession and cash flow relief due to barrel soak, outages, etc., not giving a sensory benefit or law to protect drinkers.
North America’s first grain distilling began in Jamestown, Virginia, in the first decade of the 17th century. Over the next 150 years, innumerable small homestead and household distillers operated throughout the colonies until the primary commercial distilleries emerged in the mid-18th century. Only one rye distillery operated in the 17th century, and for a couple of weeks in late 1648, outside Salem, Massachusetts, before turning to Barbadian molasses to make rum or cane spirit. From the mid-1700s, when whiskey production began in earnest, until the 1840s, the term ‘old whisky’ referred to whiskey aged about one year or more. New whiskey or unaged white distillate was known as ‘common whiskey’, differentiated from barrel-matured whiskey. The seed of premiumization was planted as drinkers began to desire and pay extra for the mellow qualities of barrel-aged spirits. As the demand for aged whiskey grew, adulteration also proliferated, using artificial colorings and flavorings to mask the noxious, fiery taste of raw or common whiskey, which was rich in offensive fusel alcohols. Newspapers provide a historical window into the changing palatability standards in trade literature, promoting whiskey to customers, with the appearances of ‘old: Old Rye Whiskey in January 1803 (Alexandria Advertiser), Old Malt Whiskey (rye) 1815 (Rhode Island American), Old Bourbon Whiskey June 1821 (Western Citizen), Western (not old) Whiskey February 1830 (pre-bourbon appellation on the East Coast, Martinsburg Gazette), and Old Corn Whiskey May 1855 (Nashville American). Old + whiskey entered the public’s vocabulary for whiskey in the early 19th century.
Returning to the rye versus bourbon question. By applying the 18th-century norm for what was ‘old whiskey’ made by the early commercial distilleries for public purchase, dozens of early grain distilleries on the East Coast of the colonies are potential candidates for comparison using the pre-1770 benchmark.; ergo, the first reported homestead distillers in Tennessee were in 1771, and in Kentucky in 1775 for bourbon (corn dominant whiskey); commercial distilleries were many years away. Along the East Coast, grain distillers in the 18th century mashed rye with corn, wheat, barley, and oats, with rye the dominant grain due to its cost and availability. Some of these large scaled-grain distilleries likely stored their whiskey for a year or more. Some examples of commercial Atlantic coast distillers operating before 1770: Pennsylvania (Wright, Todd, Hagenbuch, Bomberg), New York (Livingston, Tuthill), New Jersey (Schuler, Antill), North Carolina (Williams, Hart), and Virginia (Dunlap).
One interesting example worth citing was a likely case of ‘old’ whiskey in 18th-century western Pennsylvania. In October 1770, Major George Washington visited the small military settlement of Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh). Travelling ‘4 Miles up Alligany’ (Allegany River) from the confluence of the Monongahela River for dinner with Colonel Crogham, where he allegedly met Crogham’s neighbour, Jonahan Plummer. Plummer had lived at the remote military outpost since 1771, serving as a trader/retailer and established a small farm with a stillhouse operating since 1669. He likely cultivated and mashed rye grain, the hardiest and most reliable cereal, which dominated Pennsylvania grain agriculture since the mid-18th century. At Plummer’s distillery, Washington, in all probability, drank the product of the previous year’s distillation and was exposed to the first western Pennsylvania rye whiskey. The first proto-Monongahela rye whiskey, and, in all probability, an old rye whiskey.
June 30, 2026 at 4:55 am
Using surviving records alone to draw conclusions about early whiskey history is like using the Bible to describe the origins of the planet.
A couple things:
The Bottled-in-Bond Act created a controlled bottling category—it did not create barrel-aged whiskey, did not define “old whiskey,” and did not mark the first legal connection between spirits, bonded storage, and time.
The Act merely standardized a specific product.
Second, I’m sure this was a typo—Fort Pitt didn’t exist in 1669.
June 30, 2026 at 6:10 am
Hi John … your mention of the Great French Wine Blight brought a wry smile to my face.
I think the French call it the Great American Blight. It is also why the American wine and brandy industry struggled until the 20th century, as distillers were forced to make apple and peach brandies rather than grape brandy. The native American vines sent to Europe (Marseilles 1863) and Australia (Geelong 1873) brought with them the deadly aphid, the blight of phylloxera, causing mass destruction across grapevine countries. Only by grafting Vitis vinifera to American root stock, Vitis lubrusca, cordifilio, vulpina, etc., were vineyards able to recover in the early 20th century. The rise of America’s wine industry is also dependent on the grapevine centaur: American equine rootstocks grafted to European vines.
European grapevines failed in America since settlement due to endemic phylloxera and the other exported blight, powdery mildew (except in isolated California, where the Spanish had a small wine industry, until phylloxera arrived in the 1860s). In the mid-19th century, America’s brandy industry successfully began crossing Vitis vinifera with native species, notably Vitis lubrusa a native North Carolina variety (Catawba and Isabella cultivars), planted in the Ohio Valley, producing the distinctive ‘foxy’ Catawba wine and brandy. Similarly, th
e Concord grape in Massachusetts is used for food flavoring.
June 30, 2026 at 8:04 am
To answer your queries, Ryan
Fort Pitt was Fort du Quesne, from circa 1756, until the French destroyed it on November 24, 1758, and the British took possession the next day. It was named Fort Pitt after William Pitt, Secretary of State and later Prime Minister of Great Britain and was rebuilt between 1758 and 1761, then decommissioned on August 3, 1797.
As ‘aged’ was not an industry term, I explained it using ‘old whiskey’ (and, equally vague), as an alternative reference point or semantic benchmark for ‘aged whiskey’, meaning whiskey matured in a barrel. The Bottled in Bond Act was referenced as the first Act in America to establish product identity standards for straight whiskeys under government guarantee, specifying 4 years in an oak wood; it also set the tax-deferral deadline for distillers’ receipts. The timeframe established the minimum maturation period required for American straight whiskeys to properly age. The leading advocate for this requirement was Edmund H. Taylor Jr. The years before the Act, and the lingering effects of the 1893 Depression, America distilled 89,992,555 million gallons of proof spirits, of which 79 million were bourbon and rye whiskey, with straight whiskey representing, or claimed, about 33% of this sub-total, or about 30 million proof gallons. The ‘claiming’ by bonus and unscrupulous distillers, wholesalers and retailers, alleging straight whiskey was the motivation Taylor had to have the government regulate the industry on product quality and labelling.
It also prevented fraud by rectifiers and compounders in adding adulterants, namely flavoring and coloring to make younger whiskeys pass off or be claimed as aged products. From July 1936, straight whiskeys were 12 months in wood (5.21 2 i), to July 1937, 18 months to July 1938 (2 ii), from July 1938, 2 years (2 iii). Barrel charring for straight whiskeys entered the product definition from July 1938, becoming a legal requirement for straight whiskey ‘‘must be stored in a charred white oak container’ (FAA Reg5)
Even the Federal Alcohol Administration (Federal Register) in 1936 had a vague definition “(j) The term “age” means the period during which, after the distillation and before bottling, distilled spirit has been kept in oak containers, charred if for whiskey of American type other than corn whiskey, straight whiskey, blended whiskey, blend of straight corn whiskey.“
Hence, using the term ‘old’ provided a more useful historical framework for evaluating the rye-versus-bourbon question.
June 30, 2026 at 1:19 pm
Thanks for the laugh. Most people would’ve said, “Yeah, that’s a typo.” You spent half the night cutting and pasting everything you could find on Fort Pitt and the Bottled-in-Bond Act. Fort Pitt wasn’t Fort Duquesne. The French abandoned Fort Duquesne and burned it. The British occupied the spot then built Fort Pitt—90 years or so after your earlier typo. You also made another typo. “89,992,555 million gallons of proof spirits” would be nearly 90 trillion gallons. What you meant was 89,992,555 proof gallons.
June 30, 2026 at 1:26 pm
That’s gigantic typo. Rivalling Sagittarius B2, making for the univers’s biggest headache. Good catch, Ryan
June 30, 2026 at 9:33 pm
No problem. It’s refreshing to be part of an intelligent whiskey discussion. So much content these days is geared to the lowest common denominator. Hazmat, unicorns, blah, blah, blah.
July 1, 2026 at 11:32 am
I would state that, the reason it remains a debate is because it can’t be proven. As soon as someone comes up with a piece of evidence, someone else finds one that reaches back even further.
Here is my fuel for the debate.
French Cognac and brandy barrels are traditionally toasted. Charring is too aggressive and overwhelms the nuances of the fruit (the same reason the Scots tend to age in used barrels…barley from a pot still has a lot of nuance). Whiskey was already being rectified by sending it through charcoal before the 1800s. Someone probably got the idea of combining storage with charcoal filtration – but people didn’t make great proclamations of whiskey distilling discoveries back then, so we’ll never know.
As for aged whiskey, Ferintosh in Scotland was selling whisky with age statements in the mid-18th century. Selling age statements didn’t require char. I’ve seen aged Tennessee white whiskey advertised in the 19th century.
In my research on Tennessee, the first known request for whiskey distillation I could find was for rye whiskey in 1780. The man who requested it, Col. Evan Shelby was from Maryland. Most of the early settlers in the popular distilling areas of Kentucky came from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and some from Virginia. They would know rye. Corn would be prevalent, but what is prevalent doesn’t always bring the most value in a bartering society. So was corn whiskey really the first choice of early Kentuckians?
The first record I’ve found of consumable whiskey comes from the 1630s when the Dutch first settled in the Hudson Valley. They made brandy from rye grain (the word whiskey wouldn’t first appear in print until 1715 in Scotland). Chris has a record that predates this with Jamestown, but the record only shows Thorpe drank corn beer. While there was a still in his inventory, it doesn’t say how large the still was. It may have just been a small apothecary still, too small for any level of consumable whiskey distillation. If he ever did distill a consumable, I’d assume it would be brandy from grapes, since he was charged with growing vines, not corn.
And I still haven’t seen any evidence to show that Bourbon was anything more than a geographical indicator, at least until the 1840s. The 1821 record is from a Bourbon County newspaper with an advertisement from a Mason County wholesaler. It was probably more a selling point to Bourbon County readers than anyone else. Early mentions along the Mississippi always state Bourbon County whiskey, not Bourbon whiskey.
What is fascinating is that in New Orleans, Monongahela and Kentucky flour was sold long before those names were attached to whiskey in the area. The first mention of Bourbon as a whiskey doesn’t show up there until the 1840s. Kentucky whiskey doesn’t show up until the 1820s. The French Creoles and the Americans did not get along. The dislike didn’t resolve itself until after the city was split into quarters in 1836. With the Americans able to govern themselves without French Creole overlords, tensions settled. This is probably why the 1840s became the first real sign of Bourbon making a dent in the market, but the advertisements always seem to be in the American sectors not the French Quarter.
From my research, if I had to choose a side, I would say rye whiskey has a much longer and storied history than corn whiskey. Even in Kentucky’s early distilling and in New Orleans’ American markets. But there is always a chance someone will come along with new evidence. That is definitely the fun of whiskey history.
Cheers!
Drew
July 1, 2026 at 1:08 pm
It is ultimately an unanswerable question. There simply isn’t enough evidence. A paper trail could leave early farm distillers exposed to tax collectors, creditors, informants, and courts.
What remains are the same old stories, repackaged over and over again, based on the same meagre bits of information.
July 2, 2026 at 4:12 am
Michael’s posting has two premises to the debate on ‘America’s first aged Whiskey’ and ‘whether it was rye or bourbon’ – timing and time: who came ‘first’ and what defines ‘aged’.
First, we need to investigate etymology. The term bourbon whiskey may have been in limited use before its first print appearance in the 1821 Western Citizen; however, rye whiskey predates the arrival of grain distillation in Kentucky and Tennessee. Citing Benjamin Franklin’s 1765 Poor Richard’s Improved (Almanack) published in Philadelphia, he wrote on the subject, ‘How to manage the distillation of spirit from Rye.’ Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Package, on July 15, 1776, published the first rye whiskey advertisement, exhibiting commercial quantities of whiskey for sale. We must note that neither mentioned age/aged/old, as spirit(s), and aqua vitae were the vernacular terms for whisky, before its first appearance of the Gaelic aqua vitae as ‘whisky’ in English (1733, London newspaper article described the fatal over-consumption of ‘Liquor called Whisky’ in County Meath, Ireland; and the spelling of ‘whiskey’ in 1737). The smoking gun for ‘old rye whiskey’ appeared in newspaper advertisements from 1803, as mentioned in a foregoing post. Provocatively, like the mixed grain mashes of 18th-century East Coast distillers, even the English distillers might have had dibs on manufacturing a bourbon-style whiskey before Kentucky – it’s all a matter of provenance/GI, terminology and changing regulations.
Also requiring qualification is the meaning of ‘aged’, or, as I have proposed, ‘old’. Universally, ‘old’ was the common trade term and consumer parlance for describing the maturation or aging of raw distillate into whiskey/whisky for organoleptic improvement. When and where did this start?
And are we defining whiskey against the current American TTB product standards for rye and bourbon whiskeys, from 1938 to today, mandating a minimum of 2 years in wood, or against the 18th- and 19th-century terminology, where old represented about a year or more in barrel?
Whether from a homestead still or a commercial distillery, the answer remains opaque. It may never be known due to an absence of archival records (for reference, search Untangling America’s Rye Roots). If Emmanuel Downing cellared his badly distilled rye distillate in 1648, could this be the zero date? With no documentation, and the likelihood that he ever bothered, as grain spirits were not aged but compounded until the late 18th century, especially proto-whiskies/malt spirits in Anglo-Gaelic countries.
Regarding Jamestown, VA, circa 1600s, I agree that George Thorpe was not the first American grain distiller, nor did he brew the first corn beer, see: https://whiskymag.com/articles/mythbusters-the-case-against-george-thorpe
Good to be part of this interesting historical discourse prompted by Michael. I hope this brings more clarity to the helping answer the debate points, and fingers-crossed, Ryan, no typos this time.
July 2, 2026 at 3:52 pm
Since you asked, TTB standards do not require bourbon or rye to be aged for a minimum of two years. That requirement is only for “straight” bourbon and “straight” rye.