It is a little difficult to speak of this art in connection with whisky—wine being a more poetic word—yet it is a matter of knowledge that three places in the world have devoted to the production of whisky the same spirit which France and Portugal devoted to their wines. These three districts are Glenlivet in Scotland, the region of Dublin in Ireland, and the Blue-Grass region of Kentucky. Why in these three regions? First, because there were men—non-Jews, of course—who were willing to wait ten years to produce a good article. Second, the waters of these regions are of a quality which is beautifully adapted to the making of pure goods. Pure whisky, it should be remembered, is a vegetable product matured by natural forces and no other. Grain, water and time—not even artificial heat added, nor any other thing—completes the best whisky product.
In older times in America there were men who were as choice of their whiskies as of their horses or books. There was then such a thing as quality. But there was no such thing as delirium tremens. That came later, with the disappearance of pure whisky. A distiller seldom grew rich—he was too engrossed in maintaining the quality of his product; and it consumed much time.
There were certain brands known nationally because of their mildness and purity—purest wine of the choicest grapes, aged in the best adapted cellars, was not more mild or pure. There are names that remain until this day—Pepper, Crow, Taylor, and others—the names of men who took time and pains, whose names became “brands” which guaranteed quality and purity. These men were distillers in the true sense, not manufacturers nor compounders, but distillers in a time when distilling was both a science and an art, and not a mere name to conceal a gigantic fraud on the public.
In time to come, when the people’s justifiable moral indignation will permit a study of the steps by which the reputation of whisky came to its present low degree, they will see how much better it would have been,