whisky, rye. This entry is concerned with the rye whisky made in the United States, as opposed to Canada’s “rye whisky,” a generic term for Canadian whisky unrelated to its actual rye content. See whisky, Canadian.
In the summer of 1648 Emanuel and Lucy Downing built a small distillery in Salem, Massachusetts Colony, distilling from both rye and corn, either mixed or separately (the evidence is unclear). By the end of October, according to Emanuel Downing, the “strong water” they were making was preferred by the locals to spirits imported from London. By December, it was all gone. Lucy claimed in a letter that the people of Salem had only two objections to their product: “one, it’s too dear; two, not enough of it.” Here, in one enterprise, we have the beginning of American rye whisky and, possibly, American corn whisky. This was the first clearly documented grain-distilling in America (it’s possible that the distillery William Kieft built in New Amsterdam in 1640 made grain spirits in the Dutch style, but no documentation has survived). Unfortunately, we do not know what happened to the distillery in subsequent years; the Downings went back to England in 1663.
It has long been supposed that American rye whisky is adapted from Scotch-Irish distilling practice. But the Downings’ distillery predated the arrival of the Scotch-Irish in America by fifty years. What’s more, in a letter to his nephew a few months before he began distilling, Downing asked him for the “German receipt for making strong water with rye meal” that he had. By the mid-1600s, distilling from rye was widespread in Germany and in other countries around the Baltic; in Scotland and Ireland, on the other hand, while some rye was used in the whisky made there, barley was by far the dominant grain. See korn. There are few mentions of grain distilling between Downing’s experiment and the end of the century, and what there are come from the areas of the Middle Atlantic states that had originally been colonized by the Netherlands and Sweden, where the practice was well known.
In fact, it was not until the middle years of the eighteenth century that grain distilling became widespread in America, and when it did the German influence was also strong. While it is found in North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, its stronghold was in southern Pennsylvania (New England by then had switched to making rum from imported molasses). There, the population was largely German, immigrants from the southern Rhineland who had fled war and religious oppression and settled between Philadelphia and the Allegheny Mountains. There they made large amounts of apple and peach brandy, and also a good deal of what they called “Korntram,” or “rye dram” (in the English colonies of North America, “dram” was a common generic term for spirits). By the 1740s, this had also acquired the anglicized Gaelic name, “whisky,” no doubt through the agency of the Scotch-Irish Protestants who also arrived in Pennsylvania in large numbers beginning in 1728 (the first wave of German immigration had begun in 1683) and brought their own knowledge of distilling.
With the outbreak of the American Revolution, the cheap rum and molasses that had flooded into the Colonies from the British Caribbean were cut off, and the colonists were thrown back on their own resources. As John Adams wrote of Philadelphia in 1777, “Whisky is used here instead of rum, and I don’t see but it is just as good.” That was perhaps wishful thinking, but good, bad, or indifferent, rye whisky, by far the dominant style, was the spirit of the Revolution. Double-distilled in pot stills from a mix of rye, a little barley malt to start fermentation, and, sometimes, a portion of corn, the spirit was sold unaged. See double distillation and still, pot. For the most part, it was an agricultural product, made by farmers from their own grain.
After the war, as Americans moved west beyond the Alleghenies, they brought stills with them. Those who went on to Kentucky soon adapted the loose basic formula to use more corn and less, or even no, rye. In western Pennsylvania and the East, rye still ruled. In 1791, the federal government attempted to tax these producers. This led to the Whisky Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, a semi-organized resistance to the tax and its collectors that George Washington put down in 1794 by personally leading an army into the area (the rebels dispersed before he arrived). Ironically, in 1797 Washington himself went into the rye whisky business, building a model distillery at Mount Vernon. Its purpose-built still house and five pot stills turned out some 120 liters of spirit a day. This made him one of the largest producers in the country. See Washington, George.
The beginning of the nineteenth century saw a good deal of technical innovation in the American distilling industry. The small farmhouse distillery was rapidly giving way to larger, professional enterprises like Washington’s, although a few small rye distilleries survived until Prohibition. Between 1800 and 1840, a consensus style of rye developed. It was made from a sweet mash (rather than a sour mash, as was becoming common with bourbon) of rye with a small portion of barley malt (in Pennsylvania) or rye malt (in Maryland). See sour mash and whisky, bourbon. It was steam-distilled in wooden or copper three-chamber stills with doublers and put in charred oak barrels (a practice first described in print in a western Pennsylvania how-to book in 1824) at no more than 51 percent ABV. See still, three-chamber; and doubler, thumper, keg, and retort. The length of aging was still variable, but it increasingly stretched to three or four years. Even as American whisky production became increasingly concentrated and industrialized, the rye distillers of Pennsylvania and Maryland maintained these characteristics even if that meant using huge, coopered 40,000-liter stills for the initial distillation. By the end of the nineteenth century, this style, with the additional characteristic of aging in heated warehouses, became known as “eastern rye.” Opposed to it was “western rye,” the rye whisky made principally in Kentucky. This was made from a sour mash with a significant portion of corn in it, distilled in pot stills in small distilleries and column stills in large ones and aged in unheated warehouses; in essence, it was bourbon but with more rye than corn.
The next two decades saw American distillers fighting a futile rearguard action to stave off Prohibition. After 1919, only two rye distilleries had permits to make and sell medicinal whisky, accounting for 25 percent of the country’s permitted whisky production (the rest went to bourbon). After Repeal in 1933, the industry tried to rebuild. The conglomerates that took over the dormant business during the dry years kept a few eastern rye distilleries open, but most of their investment went to Kentucky and other states. By the end of World War II, rye was in steep decline, which led to further consolidation. Old Overholt, the leading prestige brand and flagship for the category, was moved from Pennsylvania distillery to Pennsylvania distillery. By the 1960s, it was the last nationwide brand. In 1963, it advertised a new, lighter formula, a likely indication that it abandoned three-chamber distillation for column distillation. It also dropped the proof, abandoning its long-held bonded status. When, in 1987, it was sold to Jim Beam, production was moved to Kentucky. That was the end of eastern rye.
In the twenty-first century, rye came back from the brink of extinction. The handful of bottlings that were (intermittently) available, all Western-style from large producers, were supplemented by a wave of new ryes from micro-distillers, beginning with the Anchor Distilling Co.’s Old Potrero. By the 2010s, rye was growing at 20 percent or more a year (admittedly from a small base), its growth driven by the cocktail revolution: many classic cocktails need rye, and that’s what people were drinking. See cocktail renaissance. In 2015, one of those small distilleries, the Leopold Bros., in Denver, Colorado, installed a three-chamber still for making rye, the first operating in America since at least the 1960s.
Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30. 1899, Washington, DC: GPO, 1899.
Downing, Emanuel. “Letters of Emanuel Downing.” In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., vol. 6. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1863.
Dunaway, Wayland F. A History of Pennsylvania, 2nd ed. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948.
Neff, Larry M., and Frederick S. Weiser. Friedrich Heinrich Gelwicks, Shoemaker and Distiller: Accounts, 1760–1783. Breiningsville, PA: Pennsylvania German Society, 1979.
Parker, M. The Arcana of Arts and Sciences, or Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Manual. Washington, PA: 1824.
“Story of Maryland Rye.” American Spirits Journal, September 1935, 31.
Wolf, Julius. Die Branntweinsteuer. Tübingen, Germany: H. Laupp, 1884.
By: David Wondrich
A coopered wooden three-chamber still, with its (copper) doubler and (wooden) worm tub, 1912.
Wondrich Collection.
A coopered wooden three-chamber still, with its (copper) doubler and (wooden) worm tub, 1912. Source: Wondrich Collection.