The
Men Who Made American Bourbon

Everyone who drinks bourbon knows the names. Elijah Craig, the preacher who discovered the charred barrel. James Crow, the scientist who invented sour mash. George Garvin Brown, who put his signature on the bottle and dared you to trust it.

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Most of what you know about them is wrong.

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The Men Who Made American Bourbon is the story of the men who transformed American whiskey, stripped of the mythology that commerce later built around them. The real Craig was an organizational entrepreneur whose distillery had nothing to do with charred barrels. The real Crow was a Scottish-trained chemist who brought a saccharometer to Kentucky and changed an industry that did not want to be changed. The real Brown was a pharmaceutical salesman who decided that a sealed bottle and an honest name were the most radical acts available to him in a fraudulent market.

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They were more interesting than their myths. This book proves it.