Tuesday at Mount Vernon, Cressy ceremoniously cracked open one of those barrels and extracted some of its precious brown liquid. He took a sip. He rolled it on his tongue. He smiled.
"Who knew rye whiskey could be so good?" he said.
Smith Bowman distiller Joe Dangler celebrates the planned $1.5 million reconstruction of the 1797 Mount Vernon distillery with a barrel of whiskey.
(Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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"It's surprisingly good," agreed Jerry Dalton, the master distiller from Jim Beam.
Chris Morris, the master distiller of Woodford Reserve, was impressed at how much the whiskey had improved in a year. "It's a drier whiskey now," he said. "It has some spice notes still but they've become longer, less sharp, more prickly."
It's impossible to tell how much this whiskey resembles Washington's firewater, Morris said. But one thing is certain: When it came to whiskey, Americans of Washington's era cared more about quantity than they did about quality.
Between 1790 and 1830, Americans went on what historian W.J. Rorabaugh termed a "spectacular binge." In those days, America was young and free and its citizens were, as often as not, besotted, pickled, three sheets to the wind or just plain drunk. Washington himself complained that booze was "the ruin of half the workmen in this Country." His successor, John Adams, worried that Americans were exceeding the rest of the world in "this degrading, beastly vice."
In the early 1800s, Americans consumed more booze than at any time in our history -- more than five gallons of distilled spirits per person per year. (Today's figure is 1.8 gallons.) And that doesn't even count the most popular alcoholic beverage of the era -- hard cider, which was consumed almost all the time by almost everybody, including the aforementioned John Adams, who drank a tankard at breakfast every morning.
"Americans drank at home and abroad, alone and together, at work and at play, in fun and in earnest," Rorabaugh wrote in his classic 1979 book "The Alcoholic Republic," from which this information was shamelessly stolen. "Americans drank before meals, with meals and after meals. They drank while working in the fields and while traveling across half a continent. They drank in their youth, and, if they lived long enough, in their old age."
But all good things must end, and by 1840, America, urged on by a growing temperance movement, began sobering up. Since then, this new, sober America has experienced the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Indian wars, the rise of the robber barons, the Spanish-American War, World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Watergate, a divorce epidemic, the Persian Gulf War, the rise of reality TV and the invasion of Iraq, among other ills.
Whew! Contemplating the catalogue of catastrophes that followed America's turn toward sobriety is enough to drive a man to drink.
Fortunately, on this day, DISCUS's master distillers have broken out their own best booze -- special stuff aged in an undisclosed location here at Mount Vernon. Ten distillers are standing behind a long table in the back of the room, pouring shots for all comers.
Soon the room takes on a warm glow, and so do the cheeks of its occupants, who begin to experience a calm sense of well-being, accompanied by pleasant feelings of brotherhood toward the whole human race. Gentle peals of laughter ring out. A chilly rain falls outside, but it's cozy in here.
Frank Coleman, DISCUS's VP for PR, announces that a shuttle bus has arrived to ferry folks to the site where Mount Vernon's archaeologists have uncovered the stone foundation of Washington's distillery, where the reproduction will be built next year.
About a dozen souls tear themselves away from the whiskey table and dash through the rain to the bus. At the distillery site, two miles from Washington's house, the drizzle has become a deluge, but that doesn't stop Esther White, Mount Vernon's director of archaeology, from leading a tour.
Fortified by whiskey, the pilgrims shuffle cheerfully through the soaked grass. The site is entirely covered in black plastic to protect it from the rain. White points to a spot of wet plastic that covers the place where one of Washington's stills might have been located two centuries ago.
"It's right about there," she says, "under that puddle."
Back on the bus, one of the drenched pilgrims stands up. He has an announcement.
"Did you know," he says, "that Washington wasn't just a distiller?" He pauses dramatically. "He was also a president."
That gets a laugh. Apparently, the whiskey's still working.
