Ancient arts
Reprinted from Oct. 24, 2004
Rob Price

The news that caught my eye this week was an item on George Washington's whiskey business.

Archaeologists recently uncovered the foundations of an extensive distillery operation at Mt. Vernon, Washington's home and plantation across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

Washington established the distillery after he retired from politics in 1797. Apparently, in his first year in the business, he made a net profit of $7,500, or $105,000 in today's dollars.

In today's lingo, the country's founder would be called an entrepreneur. The concoction emerging from his stills was a value-added commodity that began humbly as rye, corn and malted barley.

I wonder if they used expressions like "entrepreneur" and "value-added" in the 18th century.

This week, professional distillers on loan from the Jim Beam distillery used Washington's personal recipe for whiskey and 18th-century distillery equipment to make spirits replicating Washington's own product.

Master distiller Jerry Dalton sampled the liquor dripping from the still and pronounced it a pretty tasty brew.

I myself have been reading up on the issues of fermentation and distillation recently, and this news about Washington is fascinating. You can study complicated molecular explanations for alcohol production, but mankind has been fermenting sugar mixtures and distilling the result into spirits for thousands of years - long before molecular science provided its own guidelines.

I have a friend who says there are a thousand years of culture behind a good homemade soup. I would add the same applies to a good bottle of whiskey.

Washington must have been aware of this culture, which is the same as saying Washington was an educated man. He was trained in many of the essential skills of his day - farming and military tactics, for example. One of those skills also was the ancient art of distilling.

This makes me think about our modern ideas of culture. Our popular notions of a well-cultured individual generally call for a person who is well-read and familiar with the fine arts - someone who can finish the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in a single sitting.

But our modern culture involves so much more than the arts. Why do we expect an educated person to have read "Hamlet" and not expect a basic understanding of the structure of DNA? We assume an educated individual is familiar with the works of Picasso or Michaelangelo; why don't we expect educated people to know how to build a still?

This is a reasonable question in light of what Mt. Vernon custodians describe as a "balancing act" in the presentation of Washington's extensive whiskey operations. The idea, according to one article I read, is to explain Washington's life to visitors - especially school children - "without promoting alcohol."

This strikes me as muddled thinking. Surely Washington "promoted alcohol." I'll bet ancient Egyptians did too. Surely some kind of distillation process was used in the manufacturing of embalming fluids.

We try to sanitize our children's education to the point where we forget culture - and history - is a big sloppy process. It involves the founding of a democracy by men who owned slaves. And, yes, men who made good whiskey.

I'll just bet they made good soup too.