The farmers dispersed around the country, heading south with their leaders tried for treason.

Ironically, at the end of his career, when Washington had achieved his goals and retired post-politics he decided to invest in whiskey! He starts his own distillery with a Scottish distiller and became the largest commercial whiskey operation of its time in the US. The history of American whiskey continues!

When Jefferson became president he was all about small growers and enterprises and abolished Hamilton’s Whiskey Tax; the only time in history where there was no hard liquor tax in the United States.

Lincoln then reintroduced the American Whiskey tax back to generate money in order to fight wars. He was a temperance man, or as I’d probably describe him; a boring bastard, so did not want people to drink – or have fun – so introduced the ‘Sin Tax’ to tax whiskey, liquor, pianos, playing cards, feathers, yachts and cigarettes. Essentially anything not fundamental to survival and life. He wanted to rid culture of sin… and smiles by the sound of it.

American drinking of hard spirits at that time was off the charts vs today, seven gallons of hard spirits were consumed per person, per annum as an average. That’s a lot. And basically, due to how society and culture was back then, this stat did not include women, children or the elderly. That’s 19th century American men alone. Wow. It caused domestic abuse and lots of heavy machinery injuries, so it did make a lot of sense to curtail that, tho it does sound like he went to the extreme end of curtailing cultural enjoyments.

A few years later, President Grant needed to know where this tax is coming from, 65% of federal government taxes were from hard liquor in the day. He noticed that in Brooklyn that lots of whiskey was flowing out and not much tax flowing in. This area was known as Irish Town, people who were fleeing the potato famine and a fear of the British were essentially distilling to survive but he decided to put a stop to it.

This led to the Brooklyn Whiskey Wars – Grant authorised tax collectors to station themselves outside the Navy Yard where the Kings County Distillery is based to collect tax, backed by hundreds and then thousands of marines. They didn’t know where the stills were so knocked doors down, dragging stills out onto the street, the Irish fought back with lookouts spotting marines and throwing Irish confetti, otherwise known as bricks, down on the soldiers. Despite this aggression, there was only one recorded death 1859-1864 which was a tax collector who became the first in his line of duty to lose his life.