Reviews and discussions on books and other publications
![Read more about the article A Guide to Guides for the American Whiskey Novice in the 1990s [Part I]](https://americangrain.stream/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Signet_Detail_IMG_3598.jpg)
The Signet Encyclopedia of Whiskey, Brandy & All Other Spirits would have been one of only three books a bourbon n00b would have found in the 1990s.
Whiskey nerds often like to go on about how easy it would have been ‘back in day’ to bag what today would be considered unicorn finds, paying then retail prices for bottles that now go for thousands of dollars. It’s a fun (if pointless) exercise, but it did get me thinking: if I had been interested in American whiskey back in a decade like the 1990s, exactly how would I have known where to begin?
Can the $20,000 to $40,000 asking price for a bottle of Doug Phillips 'Green Ink' rye be attributed to a 19th century Gauger marking barrels for tax purposes?
A pile of charred barrel staves also showing the characteristic 'red line' indicating the depth to which the whiskey inside penetrated.
One of the other Bourbon books I picked up over the summer (and actually finished before it was over) was Kentucky Bourbon: The Early Years of Whiskeymaking by Henry G. Crowgey (University of Kentucky Press, 2008). The book focuses primarily…
Spring supplying water to O.F.C. Distillery...except it's not
For the past few months I’ve been slowly working my way through Karl Raitz’ book Making Bourbon: A Geographical History of Distilling in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky (University of Kentucky Press, 2020). As books on Bourbon go, this is a particularly dense…
