Bourbon Tales: Elijah Craig

Nothing to see here, everything is fine!

Elijah Craig, the drink, is a very well-respected bourbon from the Heaven Hill Bernheim distillery in Louisville, Kentucky. There are 3 main variations of the bourbon - small batch, barrel proof, and a number of different age statement single barrels.

Elijah Craig, the man, is supposedly the inventor of bourbon as we know it today. The claim is that the Virginian Reverend was the first to age the distillation in ‘charred’ oak barrels, thus giving the spirit its now renowned colour and unique taste.

The story goes that the origin of charring oak barrels was the consequence of a warehouse fire - and that the ever thrifty Reverend Craig decided to continue to use the burnt barrels to store his spirit, and in doing so stumbled upon the way bourbon has been produced ever since. Now there are a few obvious holes in this legend. The most puzzling of which is that it seems mighty odd that he would risk ruining his normal bourbon output by taking a vague chance that sticking it in, now very burnt barrels, would produce anything remotely drinkable...

While the warehouse fire is probably a myth, the man himself was real. You can find a nice little biography of him here over at the 'Whisky Reviewer'

In conclusion it is probably safe to say that we shall never truly know, or agree on, the inventor of the drink we all know and love today. For example there are many others who claim that the true inventor of bourbon was Jacob Spears, who allegedly came up with the name bourbon, and was the first one to use that term on the bottle labelling. However for the Gents it doesn't really matter, we're just happy that someone did it!