Washington's Whiskey Hits the Barrel After 200-Year Hiatus

April 19, 2009 — -- Revolutionary War hero. Father of our country. Master distiller? George Washington boasted many honorifics in his life, but owning the country's largest and most successful whiskey distillery in the late 1700s is perhaps one of the least known accomplishments of the first president.

Washington-the-entrepreneur was an early American success story. At his sizeable Mount Vernon plantation in Virginia, some 15 miles south of Washington, D.C., the general had a lucrative distillery, fishery, meat processing facility, gristmill, blacksmith shop, textiles production and seized opportunities in farming— making his plantation nearly self-sufficient and creating enough goods to turn a profit.

In April, the Mount Vernon distillery and adjacent gristmill will open to the public for the season. And for the first time in nearly 200 years, liquor fans will soon be able to purchase whiskey made in the distillery, following Washington's own recipe.

"There's nowhere else in the country you can see what a distillery was like in the 18th century," said Dennis Pogue, Mount Vernon's associate director of preservation who oversaw the distillery's reconstruction. And the experience shows visitors an intriguing side of George Washington. "It's an opportunity to talk about different aspects of Washington's career that most people don't know about," he said.

Whiskey was one of Washington's most important business ventures at Mount Vernon. At peak production, the distillery used five stills and a boiler and produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey. With sales of $7,500 in 1799, it was the country's largest distillery at the time. Today it is the only distillery in North America that demonstrates the 18th-century distillation process.

"The science doesn't change, it's the application of the science that's different," said Dave Pickerell, a master distiller and former vice president of operations for Maker's Mark who oversaw the distilling of Washington's recipe for Mount Vernon.

In the 18th century, water was brought into the distillery by wooden channels, there were no thermometers to assist in measuring alcohol content and knowing when chemical reactions took place, and the role of yeast's fermentation wasn't quite understood, Pickerell said. Early distillers used "lots of visual and olfactory cues you can go by to get to the same point, but it took a lot more experience."