Edmund Haynes Taylor Jr. was born in 1830 into a Kentucky family with a presidential bloodline, a famous name, and almost nothing else. His father died on the Mississippi when Edmund was five. His grandfather died of cholera seven months later. By age six, Edmund had watched two generations of Taylor men disappear and understood, at a level no child should have to, that the people you rely on can simply vanish. He carried that knowledge for the remaining eighty-six years of his life and it explains, more than the presidential pedigree or the aristocratic bearing or the famous wardrobe, everything he subsequently built.

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The Father of Modern Bourbon is the biography of the man who invented the American bourbon industry as a modern commercial and legal institution — not the man who first made bourbon, or the man who made it best, but the man who spent sixty years fighting to ensure that what the label said was what the bottle contained, and who wrote that fight into federal law. His name is on a brand sold in every serious whiskey bar in the world. The distillery he built and lost has been excavated from the ground and found, after a century and a half of burial, essentially intact. The castle he built when he had nothing left to build with has been restored and is producing whiskey again. He got almost none of this right on the first attempt. Or the second. That is part of the story.