num_pages: 190
description: Bourbon whiskey is perhaps Kentucky's most distinctive product. Despite bourbon's prominence in the social and economic life of the Bluegrass state many myths and legends surround its origins. In Kentucky Bourbon Henry C. Crowgey claims that distilled spirits and pioneer settlement went hand in hand; Isaac Shelby the state's first governor was among Kentucky's pioneer distillers. Crowgey traces the drink's history from its beginnings as a cottage industry to steam-based commercial operations in the period just before the Civil War. From spirited camp meetings to bourbon's use as a medium of exchange for goods and services to the industry's coming of age in the mid-nineteenth century the story of Kentucky bourbon is a fascinating chapter in the state's early history.
language: English
title: Kentucky Bourbon: The Early Years of Whiskeymaking
publisher: University Press of Kentucky