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Imitation Copper-Distilled Bourbon
To make Bourbon Whiskey.
RECIPE No. 4.
Take 36 gallons proof spirits, 4 gallons highly flavored proof rye whiskey, 1 gallon highly flavored domestic brandy (see page 58), together with the same proportions of vinegar, glycerine, and oil of cognac, as before. (See Recipe No. 1.) To make Bourbon Whiskey.
RECIPE No. 5.
To 36 gallons proof spirits, add 4 gallons highly flavored proof Bourbon, 1 gallon New England rum, gallon sweet Catawba wine (or 1 quart sherry wine), and 1 pound white glycerine. Color to suit with caramel.
To make Bourbon Whiskey.
This is not a cooking recipe but a rectifier's formula: a nineteenth-century trade method for turning bulk neutral spirit into something that could pass as aged Kentucky whiskey. It is readable as a historical document; it is not usable as written.
- Scale and legalityEach formula makes roughly 41 gallons of spirit. In the United States, producing or blending distilled spirits outside a bonded, permitted facility is a federal offence regardless of whether any still is involved, and rectifying is exactly what these recipes describe.
- "Proof spirits"In the American trade of this period, proof spirit meant 100 proof, or 50 percent alcohol by volume. Quantities on this scale imply bulk purchase from a distillery, which is not a transaction available to a private person today.
- GlycerineRecipe No. 5 calls for a pound of white glycerine, presumably for body and a faint sweetness. Glycerine is sold today in both pharmaceutical and industrial grades, and the industrial product is not intended for ingestion; the recipe makes no such distinction.
- Oil of cognacTraded under the name oenanthic ether, this was a concentrated flavour essence bought from an essential-oil house, though much of what was sold was a synthesised ester rather than a true wine distillate. What went by the name varied widely and was frequently adulterated, so products sold under it today cannot be dosed against this formula with confidence.
- The vinegarVinegar turns up in these compounding formulas, presumably to suggest the acidity that barrel aging develops. It is a flavour adjustment, not a preservative or a safety measure.
- Vanished ingredientsSweet Catawba was a sweet wine from the American Catawba grape, once a major commercial variety around Cincinnati and the Finger Lakes and now a specialty item. New England rum meant a heavy, low-grade molasses rum distilled in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, a trade that Prohibition all but finished, though the name survived as a labelling category for decades afterwards.
- Caramel"Color to suit with caramel" is the giveaway. Real bourbon takes its colour from years in charred oak; caramel colouring was the shortcut that let a week-old blend look like a decade-old one, and it was among the practices that later labelling rules were aimed at.
Books like this served the compounding and rectifying trade, which in the decades after the Civil War supplied a very large share of what American drinkers bought as bourbon, rye or brandy. A rectifier bought cheap neutral spirit, added a few gallons of genuine flavourful whiskey plus essences, glycerine and caramel, and sold the result under a familiar name at a fat margin. Straight distillers fought back through legislation: the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 let the government vouch for whiskey aged at least four years in a bonded warehouse, and after the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 the question of what could legally be called "whiskey" went all the way to President Taft, whose 1909 decision allowed the compounders to keep the word so long as they qualified it as "blended" or "imitation." National Prohibition ended that world a decade later, and the formulas survive mainly as evidence of how thoroughly the American whiskey supply was once manufactured rather than distilled.