A drink of whiskey by Washington’s recipe
A distillery, opened for business three miles from Mount Vernon, just outside of Alexandria, after the Virginia General Assembly allowed the owners to sell rye whiskey in small amounts.
The special thing about it is that they are selling, 213 years after George Washington started to make his own rye whiskey, the same product as the one drank by the president. Historians from Mount Vernon managed to recreate the first president’s whiskey recipe after 15 years of research. The bottles obtained were sold immediately for 85 dollars each. Unlike whiskey made today, Washington’s whiskey was not aged. The story says that the general’s whiskey was aged by the time spent on the road to get from Mount Vernon to Alexandria for sale, that meant a distance of exactly eight miles.
So, in 1797, the Founding Father and the first United States president became a successful whiskey distiller. Washington returned from the presidency in 1797 and he was looking for an easy way to make some bucks. After a while he became the largest distiller of that time, and was producing about 11,000 gallons of rye whiskey per year from rye, corn and malted barley. Dennis Pogue, vice president for preservation at Mount Vernon, said that Washington paid his taxes for the alcohol commerce, and the tax paid in 1797 was 300 dollars, which were a lot of money at that time.
