(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Hello, and welcome to "The Bookmark."

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Andrew Braunberg, author of "Fires, Floods, Explosions and Bloodshed, A History of Texas Whiskey."

Andrew, thank you so much for being here today.

- Thank you for having me.

- I'm really excited to talk about this book because as the title implies, there's a lot of interesting history here.

But before we dive in, I wanna ask you what got you interested into whiskey and in general, I guess, and then whiskey history specifically?

- Yeah, the whiskey history bit didn't start till I actually was distilling in Texas, which was about 10 years ago.

But the interest in whiskey goes back, boy, longer than I want to admit.

But I started out, honestly, as kind of a scotch person and drank scotch for probably 10 years before I got really kind of into this movement that was going on around the introduction of craft whiskey distilleries throughout the country.

And it's just taken off since I got interested.

- And just so everybody understands what we're talking about, you mentioned scotch, but there's also bourbon.

What is whiskey?

How do we define that?

- Yeah, the baseline for what a whiskey is, is that it's fermented grains that are distilled.

- [Christine] Okay.

- As opposed to, let's say you took a sugar cane, fermented that and distilled that down, that would be rum.

- Okay.

- So it just depends on the sugar, the source of the sugar you're using.

- Okay.

- So there are though several standards of identity for different American whiskeys.

And so a bourbon is a specific thing, a rye is a specific thing, a corn whiskey is, and they're all a little bit different, but they've, - Okay.

- all gotta start with grains.

- They're all under the umbrella of whiskey.

- The umbrella, yes.

- And now where does moonshine come into this equation?

- Well, moonshine is a funny one because I mean, generically when people think, oh, moonshine, they're thinking illegal untaxed booze of some sort.

The craft distillers kind of revived the idea of unaged whiskeys, which they call white dogs, or new mix, just because the new guys didn't wanna wait around two or three, five years before they could sell their products.

So we saw these clear white whiskeys coming on the market.

People sometimes call them moonshine, but they're really not.

They're taxed, they're regulated, but it's a different animal, it didn't see wood.

- Okay.

And I wanted to ask about, I'm gonna get off track, I'm sorry.

It's just an interesting topic, though.

The aging though, is important to, well, from what I understand as a consumer, the longer it's aged in the barrel, the more it's worth or the better quality it could be.

- Theoretically, yes.

We can, that's a rabbit hole, happy to go down that one.

But one of the things that people talk about when we started looking at regionality within the US whiskey market, I mean, originally, well not originally, historically pre-prohibition, every state had distillers.

And it was very much of a craft, how we would think about craft now.

Texas, it was very much kind of a frontiery kind of craft.

Most of these guys were associated with a gristmill or maybe a sawmill that had added a steam engine to it.

And I thought, well, I can take advantage of that, very small scale kind of stuff.

I'm sorry, I forgot the question that you asked me.

That got me off on that tangent.

- [Christine] I got off on the tangent too.

- We were talking about wood.

Oh, I'm sorry.

- Well barrels, yeah.

- Barrels.

- How long they're aged in the barrel.

- See, this is why you shouldn't give me room.

Yeah.

Why?

So originally back then, the time that spirit spent in a barrel was not nearly as long as it is post-prohibition.

And you get a lot of the historians on the Kentucky side of the Ohio, would like to tell you there was this rich history of very, very aged whiskey, but in practice, it really was not the case.

If you look at the standards of identity today, which weren't in place then, all American whiskeys, except for corn whiskey has to go into new American oak barrels for some amount of time.

Corn whiskey can go into pretty much any used barrel, which sounds kind of weird, but they're usually used bourbon barrels or something that had a previous spirit in it.

And so really, if you look at craft in Texas right now, you can find Texas whiskeys that only are a year or two old and are actually quite drinkable.

That would not be the case in Scotland.

- Sure.

- If you're in Scotland and you're drinking any kind of scotch, that's gonna be 10, 12, 16 years old.

Very different environment up there.

Things are not heating and cooling as much.

- Sure.

- And you're not getting that kind of, so it really depends on location.

- Sure, that makes sense.

What kind of research did you have to do for this book?

I can imagine that would be an interesting topic to study.

- Yeah, it, well, we were talking about grains a little bit in aging and it was originally when I was working day to day at the distillery, I was trying to think, well, I wonder what folks were making back 100 years ago let's say.

We call them a mash bill.

What's the mash bill look like?

Which means how much corn, how much rye?

And I would say very much after doing the research, just by the way, a lot of corn whiskey.

They probably didn't have a lot of new oak barrels.

So it again, probably tasted a lot like corn whiskey does today, because it wasn't in new oak.

But I'm sorry, I forgot my thought again.

- It's okay.

Your research process.

- Yeah.

- On finding all this out.

- So yeah, so looking at just kind of what people were, what kind of grains they were making, what kind of wood they probably had available got me down into that conversation of looking at a lot of it was still online, like Texas History Association, the portal of Texas from University of North Texas.

Just a lot of good online stuff.

If you've got the time and the energy, you can really dig down in there and find, well, these guys were doing this up on the Red River, and that gets you to thinking about, well wonder what happened to that operation.

A little bit more digging.

You find out that one washed away.

The next one you find out burned down mysteriously, or not mysteriously, I mean, a lot of them burned down back in the day.

And the next one exploded, which explains the title of the book.

It's like, wow.

All the early guys had some horrible mishap, and all the guys who tried to get really big had some horrible mishap or just really bad timing on the way when they were coming to market.

So that kind of at first it was very much associated with me working at a distillery and wanting just to be able to recreate some of the flavor profiles, - Sure.

- let's call them.

Or think about what a regional Texas whiskey should taste like.

But the further I get into the actual people involved, I just thought, hmm, this is taken on its own direction here.

And just bringing it up with people, literally no one knew the history.

It's funny that Dan Garrison, who opened the first modern Texas whiskey distillery, he gave it a read and he said, "When I started this one," and this was like 2006 or '07 he goes, "I had a sign out front that said, 'First licensed distillery in Texas' basically ever."

He just, he had no idea.

Which is really kind of to me like, wow, if Dan didn't know, I don't think anyone knew this history.

- Sure.

- So anyway, that got me going.

- Yeah.

Well, and we'll get to the chronological history of it a little bit later, I hope, but I would imagine maybe prohibition kind of wiped out any central knowledge anyone might have had, and it was this kind of all piecemeal, like you'd have to go, as you say, to these various newspapers or localities, - Yeah.

- to try to, I mean, there certainly wasn't like a whiskey association pre-prohibition that you could look at the records of perhaps.

- Yeah, correct.

And so, but it's a little more, it's even a little trickier than that.

Because I think when the county history started getting written around the time folks were having centennials, and they'd go back and, oh, here's all the early folks that came into the county and all the important folks.

Well, the prohibition kind of ethos had got so strong by that point that when they were writing all those histories, even if someone was obviously an old distiller, they would write some weird, it would go he went off and did business in Lamar County for 10 years.

But they won't tell you, and I'm like trying to figure out is that the right whoever, William Gold I'm looking for?

You'd think they would mention it.

But a lot of times they just don't.

- Interesting.

- So it took a lot more work to kind of try to tease it out.

- To find, follow of the clues and even, yeah.

- Yeah, or the lack of clues, really.

A lot of lack of clues, I would say.

- That's really fascinating.

- Yeah.

- Okay well, let's talk about the history a little bit here, because I wanna make sure we mention that the history of distilling in Texas is older than probably anybody thinks because it's even older than Texas itself.

- Yes.

Indeed, by hundreds of years.

Well, depending on how you define Texas, right?

- [Christine] Sure.

- Yes.

But the Spanish who, when they colonized, would very typically bring grapevine cuttings with them because they liked to establish that as part of their agricultural projects where they came.

And they came up to the Rio Grande Valley around modern El Paso, and then moved up into what modern New Mexico and the Pueblo tribes.

They set up very extensive vineyards there.

And it was kind of part of the Sacramento.

They had a whole thing about, well, it's related to their Catholicism, but they also made a lot of brandy too.

And that's one thing about, I mean, when you think about frontier distillers, it's kind of the same thing.

You've got a fairly perishable product.

In the case of wine, you could say it's got a better shelf life than just some corn sitting in a bin, but it's kind of the same idea, or maybe you wanna just condense it to make it easier to transport.

And so, yeah, by the 1670s, they were probably making brandy in the Rio Grande Valley and that went on for probably hundreds of years out there.

It was much later that the modern, but you get to Austin's colony and you've already got some folks thinking about how to do it.

- Sure Because they're bringing with them their traditions from wherever they're coming from.

- Yeah, a lot.

Well, I think, yeah I'm sure, obviously a lot of those people were just coming straight over from the US, many of them from Greater Appalachia.

So a lot of Kentuckians, Tennesseans, and if they're coming by land, which many of them did, sure, bring that still, they weren't that big.

I mean, when the Civil War starts putting a big tax on stills, the kind of standard size they're estimating is only an 80 gallon pot still.

And so for a craft that's still today in Texas, that's a pretty modest still.

So, if you're bringing it on the back of a mule, I guess it seemed, - It seems larger.

- it seemed larger.

But from a production point of view, it's relatively modest.

Yeah, yeah.

- Small, okay.

When, and then we have brandy in the 1600s, but when would maybe whiskey, as we would maybe recognize it more today, start being distilled here?

- Yeah, so again, the distinction being was it made with a base of grain.

So, by the 1830s absolutely.

You've got wheat and corn and rye being produced in let's say northeast Texas.

You did get a little rum production before then, because if you're down on the coast and you're coming in and you're thinking about being a sugar baron, that's kind of what you're shooting for.

But I think the first likely distiller was a guy in Fanin County up on the Red River, Jabez Fitzgerald.

He was a Tennesseean.

He came in just mid 1830s, just about when the revolution was kicking off.

He didn't go fight, but he lent his neighbor a horse, and that got him big points with the government.

And when his distillery got washed away on the Red in the early 1840s, it was considered a big loss.

The people in the community really liked that distillery that he had set up.

But it's kind of hard to tell because the republic gets established and then they're like, wow, we got a lot of bills we need to pay off and spirits is always an important one.

But that didn't start till 1840, 1841.

So, depending on which county's records you're looking at, they may or may not show up right away.

- [Christine] Sure.

- But his show up by, I think 1841 or so, but then he gets washed out shortly thereafter, unfortunately.

- So speaking of bills, - Yeah.

- the idea of taxes and taxation on spirits comes up a lot.

It's kind of a through line, - Yeah.

- in the history here.

Why is taxation so important, how does that go hand in hand with the distillery business?

- Yeah.

I think in a couple of ways.

One, it's just, if you're on the collection side, a whiskey tax is a relatively painless way to go after folks.

So I think that's the unavoidable one.

But then if you look at, and whiskey taxes did help float the Republic for quite a while.

So it was an important part of the overall tax base, like 25% or something.

It was pretty impressive.

But the other part about taxes, which kind of gets into this whole way that Texas approached liquor and prohibition and temperance, is it's potentially a way to try to curb alcohol.

And so the best example was during the Civil War when Governor Lubbock tried to unilaterally outlawed distilling in the state.

And that got pushed back really, really hard, unfortunately for him.

Well, then he went to the legislature and said, "Can you guys back me up on this?"

And they said, "Well, actually, why don't we just tax it instead?"

Because they really wanted that tax base too, goes back to argument number one.

- Sure.

- Whereas Lubbock was a prohibitionist and he really saw the detrimental effect of alcohol on troops.

And that's its own story.

I mean, he had a point.

But the other problem with it was that folks were making so much money, and until today, there's never been as many distilleries in Texas as there were in the Civil War.

I mean, just people were making money handover fist.

Insane amounts of money.

But the state decided to start a levying tax on stills at $1,000 a still.

- Wow.

- Which, I mean, it's kind of a lot of money now.

- Yeah.

- But the thing is, there were counties in Texas where the price of grains, particularly corn, were getting driven up to such a degree because distillers wanted all those grains that you had people complaining that they couldn't afford to feed their families.

I mean, it was a serious problem.

And that wasn't just in Texas.

I mean, there's a whole really interesting story, just history around every state, how they tried to deal with that.

And there were legitimate military needs for what we can call medicinal whiskey.

So, the military guys were very much in the camp that we need this for a lot of reasons.

Maybe most notably because the blockade was keeping them from making the medicines that they needed.

But Texas was a really good example, I think, of a state that had a lot of trouble with the way they could approach taxes during the war.

After the war, I think a general strategy was to if we're gonna get prohibition to be acceptable, we need to move that tax base off of spirits because it's always an argument that's hard for us to refute.

So if originally you think I'm gonna keep people from drinking by taxing it, eventually you give up on that idea 'cause it doesn't really work.

So you move off that and then figure out how to change the conversation from temperance to prohibition.

- Sure.

- Which is a really big shift for that whole argument.

- [Christine] Sure.

- Because we'd tried temperance for hundreds of years and temperance worked for a lot of different communities.

I mean, the German Americans were fine with temperance and Mexican Americans were fine, it worked in their communities.

They didn't need this prohibition idea to them, it was absolutely insane.

And that's the way they voted.

So San Antonio or New Bronzeville, zero people voting for prohibition going all the way up until it finally became national.

- Before we get to the passing of prohibition, I think maybe something that helped the idea along in people's minds is that the kind of idea of saloon culture and how that was maybe not so good for communities in towns in Texas.

Can you talk about what the saloons did and how they were perceived?

- Well, this is when I go back to that kind of point about the difference between making the temperance argument and the probation argument is that difference between moral failings and societal failings.

And the saloon generally, not just in Texas, but generally was the perfect villain.

Because you could tie almost anything to saloon culture.

And we think of saloons in Texas in a very specific way.

And in Texas often they were exactly the way we think about them, swinging doors and saw dust floors and all that.

But generally, saloon was more general kind of term for bar for most of that century.

And so that idea that saloons were kind of the root of all evil was a pretty easy argument to make, not just in Texas but elsewhere.

But in Texas particularly, there was a lot of violence in Texas saloons.

Now I try to make the point, well, look, if you had a beef with somebody, you knew they were gonna be down at the bar, you knew where to find them.

And that doesn't mean the bar was, it just was a convenient place to go confront the person.

But that level of violence, and not just kind of that typical barroom violence, but the idea that alcohol, excessive alcohol use contributed to domestic violence was a big, and then all these moralists will tell you well, and that money's better spent on people's families.

But then the other two really big things that the prohibitions wanted to hang on the saloons, number one, gambling and that one, yeah.

I mean that actually, especially in Texas, if you wanted to gamble, there was probably a spot upstairs for you to go play some cards or tables.

And then the last one was prostitution.

And prostitution was not something that typically would happen in a saloon.

These were very male domains.

It was that kind of separate cultural idea where the men wanted to be on their own in these places.

But I mean, you add up 1/2 of those and it's enough to get people, again, to have a target that was very, very effective.

So, I mean, the number one national prohibition organization was the Anti-Saloon League, and it was the Anti-Saloon League for a good reason.

It wasn't the Anti-Cocktail League or the Anti-Beer League.

But on that point, I'd add one more thing that as the reputation of saloons got worse and worse, the ironic thing as the distiller is that it really wasn't the distillers that were driving that.

It was the breweries.

And the breweries were, this started in the UK, but they called it the Tide System, where the breweries ended up buying a lot of retail locations.

Just the way their go-to-market model worked, they tended to have to interact with the retailer more mostly for quality control issues.

I mean, a distiller just give them a bottle or a barrel and it's only gonna get better even if it just sitted in a basement forever.

But the breweries took over a lot of the retail locations and really kind of drove the quality of those establishments down.

It just became a complete numbers game.

So anyway, long short, the saloons were a really easy target and at least 1/2 of what you heard in Texas I'm sure was true, yeah.

- And now we don't have a lot of time, but I wanna make sure we cover the prohibition aspect of it, because it surprised me, but it probably shouldn't have because dry counties do still exist.

It wasn't like we snap a finger and prohibition happens when the amendment is passed.

In Texas, it was a more gradual county by county even processed to dry up the state long before there was a national movement for it.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And it wasn't for lack of trying.

I mean, when national prohibition hit, most states, southern states already had a statewide prohibition.

Texas didn't, Louisiana didn't, I think maybe Florida didn't, but most of them did.

And Texas again, you had those blocks that were just not gonna get behind the idea, Germans, the Mexican Americans.

And so what they did was, yeah, the local option became the easiest way where you could say, well, we could do this county by county.

And then you had a block of folks, at least within that county that would say, okay, we're gonna go dry.

And so by the time national prohibition came around, yeah, I mean, out of the hundreds of counties, I think only maybe 50 were left that were wet if that, but they were probably larger population areas.

But the kind of the ironic bit is that it was exactly the counties that tended to attract those early distillers.

Everything kind of that wedge up from going east of Dallas and Denison, and then maybe you'd go down to Waco and Tyler and everything that way would kind of get you where almost all the distillers were.

And those were all the ones that ended up going dry.

So by the time prohibition hit, Texas really didn't have any distilleries left.

So, you weren't getting any arguments from them.

- Sure.

Okay well, we are unfortunately running really short on time.

So in our final two minutes, what would you hope people take away from this book?

- Well, I would hope they, a couple things.

One, that it is a really rich history.

I mean, there's a lot there and I don't think people appreciate it or they're just not aware of it.

I mean, no one is.

I know all the distillers I know and no one knows any of this has been going on.

I guess also that it's always been a hard business.

I mean, that was part of the thing for me as a distiller.

I thought, what are the things that make it hard for me?

Well, regulation and competition, capital cost, they're kind of modern problems.

These are real problems, you know?

I mean, all these things that would go wrong for these guys plus, which we haven't talked about, just the lack of refrigeration.

I mean, it's like, wow.

So yeah, then I think that one thing I know I was not born in Texas, but one thing I really appreciate about Texans is that they admire people who do things that are tough.

And this is a tough business.

And I think if you read this, you'll come away, hopefully you'll come away with that, that for a lot of reasons it was a really difficult thing to do.

But some folks did it really well.

- Well, thank you so much.

I think you did what you set out to achieve.

This is a really rich, interesting book, and it's just, - Thank you.

- a fascinating history that, like you said, I don't think has been, pardon the pun, tapped into enough, - Yeah.

- because yeah, there's a lot here.

There certainly is.

So thank you for writing this book and for coming today to talk about it.

- Thanks for having me.

- Well, that is all the time we have for today.

The book, again, is "Fires, Floods, Explosions, and Bloodshed."

That is all the time we have, and I will see you again soon.

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