The History of Bottled in Bond Whiskey

Bottled in bond whiskey almost went away after the deregulation of the distilled spirits industry in the 1980s. A few brands, mostly Heaven Hill, held on to the designation for posterity. But the history of this designation can give us great insight into the ramifications of lack of government oversight on consumer safety. The Bottled-in-Bond Act was one of the first ever consumer protection laws instituted in the United States, and before it took effect, there were people who were sickened and even killed from tainted whiskey.

Wild West Whiskey

“In the late 1800s, it was literally and figuratively the Wild West,” says Heaven Hill Global Whiskey Ambassador and Bottled-in-Bond evangelist Bernie Lubbers. “Bourbon had been called bourbon; there weren’t any laws. To make whiskey, if you’re going to put it in a bottle, you want it to look, smell, and taste like whiskey. So a lot of places that made bourbon in Kentucky took pride in what they did and wanted it to be the best that they could make, basically the way we make it today. We distill it, put it into barrels. There was no law on the barrel, either. The first law of the barrel of being charred is 1936. It could have been a new or used barrel or whatever they could get hold of. If it came straight from the barrel, people called that straight whiskey.”

But the history takes a dark turn, as Lubbers recalls, “There were other people that didn’t have all that and didn’t want to take all those steps. They wanted to do shortcuts. They just bought or made neutral grain spirits. So you remember the first college party you had and somebody bought a bottle of Everclear, right? That’s 190 proof, 100% corn distillate. So you have to add something to it. So you know in college parties, they probably add Hi-C Punch or Sunny D. But what they did is they would just take neutral grain spirits like that and they would add strong coffee or tea. They would add different acids. They would add things like tobacco spit, which doesn’t sound so great. They would also add prune juice and cherry juice. But they would also sometimes add unsafe ingredients like iodine or creosote or carbolic acid. So this was not so good. But they could, by law, just put a Bourbon label or a whiskey label on it and sell it.”

Whiskey as medicine

Basically, the “rectifiers” were trying to emulate the final product of barrel-aged whiskey by adding a bunch of stuff to grain neutral spirits and selling it for the same price, which posed a twofold problem: straight whiskey producers couldn’t compete and consumers couldn’t count on the safety or quality of the products they were buying. And then doctors began to complain about the lack of quality in the whiskey they were prescribing patients — there were very few medications available back in the late 1800s and whiskey was one of the most commonly prescribed of the time.

Medicinal whiskey Sunnybrook — Medicinal whiskey

“Doctors were prescribing whiskey as medicine,” Lubbers says. “We’ve seen examples of these prescriptions even into the ‘60s and 1970s. I’ve got a copy of a 1972 prescription for whiskey, honey, and lemon. That’s 50 years ago. So back in the 1800s, it was very common. And sometimes their patients would get it filled at the drugstore, but the drug store, they might not be carrying the good straight whiskey. They might be carrying the imitation whiskey, and that was making their patients more sick. So you had these doctors that were lobbying for this. Doctors are people with money and influence, and so you have that group lobbying, especially in Kentucky, their representatives and things like that.”

But not everyone wanted whiskey to be safe and protected. After all, selling adulterated grain neutral spirits was an incredibly lucrative business. Instead of making whiskey and putting it into a barrel for a couple of years, you could make grain neutral spirits today, mix it with a bunch of stuff, and ship it out the door within a few hours.

The Whiskey Trust

“You have this man named Charles Clarke, and he has Clarke’s Pure Rye,” Lubbers says. “He has a big distillery out in Peoria, Illinois, which is on the banks of the Illinois River. And to this day, there is one of the world’s largest stills in Peoria, Illinois, and that is at Archer-Daniels-Midland, and they make neutral grain spirits. Mr. Clarke, though, wanted to have a monopoly on the whiskey business. So he started to organize this Whiskey Trust. He didn’t care about the quality of the whiskey. He was going to make that imitation whiskey, that compound whiskey, but he wanted to dominate it. And back then, it was legal to have a monopoly. There were no antitrust laws back then, either. He was also threatening people using mafia techniques, setting off some dynamite charges in distilleries that wouldn’t come into the trust with them.”

Even some well-known whiskey rectifiers like George Garvin Brown and Isaac Wolfe Bernheim were opposed to the regulations because they thought it would give an advantage to the folks who owned the distilleries, and both of those well-known figures would buy whiskey from a distillery they didn’t own (both would go on to own distilleries). Colonel E.H. Taylor and Colonel James E. Pepper along with Secretary of the Treasury John G. Carlisle, a Kentuckian, all fought to get the purity laws passed.

The Whiskey Trust was very powerful, but a series of regulations, including the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and national Prohibition, reigned in the organization’s power. The group eventually reorganized several times, and while parts of it still exist today, regulations were able to put a stop to the group’s strongarm efforts to force tainted spirits on the public.

The Bottled-in-Bond Act

Eventually, the doctors and distillers lobbying for purity laws prevailed, and in 1897 the Bottled-in-Bond Act was passed as one of America’s first consumer safety laws. In 1905, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, which exposed the need for safety regulations in the food industry, and the Bottled-in-Bond Act served as a template for the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 and later the Taft Decision that further defined straight whiskey.

The Bottled-in-Bond Act specifies that a distilled spirit must be made by one producer in a single season with nothing but pure water added to adjust proof, aged a minimum of four years, and bottled at exactly 100 proof.

Lubbers argues that Bottled-in-Bond is still relevant today, and that’s why he’s certifying bars and package stores as “Certified Bonded Premises,” places that have a minimum number of Bottled-in-Bond spirits.

“One of the hallmarks of Bottled-in-Bond is purity and transparency so you know exactly who made it,” says Lubbers. “You have to put the name of the distillery or the trade name. Of course, at Heaven Hill, we own many trade names, including Elijah Craig and Evan Williams and Henry McKenna, and Rittenhouse Rye. But you also have to put your distilled spirits plant number on. At Heaven Hill, we’re DSP-KY-1, the Bernheim plant is one. If you put the bottling plant, if it’s separate, which ours is because it’s in Bardstown and it’s more than 10 miles away, we have a separate DSP there. So that’s DSP-KY-31. It’s called a distilled spirits premises, so I came up with a Certified Bonded Premises.”

The whiskey landscape today

Adds Lubbers, “The whiskey landscape today is so cluttered and confusing because when I started in 2005, there were 10 distilleries in Kentucky and four outside of Kentucky. Today, there’s over 100 in Kentucky, and there’s 2,600 outside of Kentucky. If everybody makes four brands and even small little craft distilleries like Hard Truth and Chattanooga and Rabbit Hole, they make more than four, that means there’s over 10,000 brands on the landscape. Bottled-in-Bonds are the most restricted spirits on planet Earth. Of the 10,000 brands of American whiskey in the landscape, there’s only about 100 Bottled-in-Bonds. And in any given market, like Kentucky’s got the most at about 30, so they’re not only the most restricted, they’re the rarest spirits on the planet. And so a Certified Bonded Premises pledges to keep as many Bottled-in-Bonds as they can offer in their state and to promote Bottled-in-Bond, not just Heaven Hill. We want Old Grand Dad to be back there. We want Early Times to be back there. We want Old Tub to be back there. That’s why Heaven Hill likes to promote it. It is an industry thing we should be proud of. When I hand it to them, I say, ‘There are many whiskey bars in the world, but there’s only a few that are Certified Bonded Premises.’”

WhiskeyMaggie KimberlJune 11, 2025historyComment