>> when was that? >> in may of 2008. he just recently passed away in january of this year. he lacked two weeks of being 95 years old. had at least one shot of bourbon a day. at least one shot of bourbon a day. >> your grandfather? >> my grandfather was in the business also? my grandfather and colonel blaten. he and my grandfather were friends. when colonel blaten took over to distillery he invited my grand father to work here. he was one of the first african-americans to be taken to new york on a business trip to make decisions about whiskey and barrels of whiskey at this distillery. believe it or not, this distillery was somewhat unique.

not only like my father as a warehouse supervisor, my grand father as an operations supervisor, unheard of back in the day. but the distillery set a precedent. there were -- it was a place of equality. so what we found interesting was even though they had restrooms for the african-americans and other restrooms for the whites, the word was in the warehouse if you got to go you got to go and you go to the nearest warehouse and everybody got along. they had a unique arrangement. they basically were their own little family. so they took care of one another. they were on farms and had property adjacent to one another. they helped each other out when they were in need. just an interesting arrangement that continued on today.

so for the city of frankfort, the distilleries around frankfort had a pretty much fair balance of whites and african-americans. and it was a very supportive community. so you very seldom ever even heard of a rift at a distillery. it was not tolerated. everybody had their work to do and everybody did their job. when paddle boats came into existence, the volume of whiskey being produced went out the roof. with the expansion of buffalo trace this became one of the largest production plants in the industry and not only did the whiskey go down kentucky, ohio and mississippi river with paddle boats they were able to go upstream in all directions and at that point the industry

exploded. we're now in the heart of the distillery bourbon making process. this is our column still. it is the primary still for the making of our product. as i said, some people call them beer stills, some of them call them column stills, some people call them continuous operating stills. the proper name for the still is a coffee still named after the irishman who patented it. so you can see the corn and the water and the particulate dribbling down. what you don't see are the alcohol vapors going up. they go through a condenser and come down over here. first time through it's like lemonade. about 120 proof but a little bit of a milky color to it. while you're standing on top of

another big pot still. goes through it, back up, through another condenser. now it comes down over here. it's crystal clear. they call it white dog. ever clear. georgia moon. white lightning. it got the nickname white dog even though it's crystal clear it will bite you. so for bourbon it cannot come off the still any higher than 160 proof. most people bring their bourbon up the still a lot less than that. the lower the proof off are you still the more you can retain the natural characteristics and flavor of the product or the grains that you made it from. here's to buffalo trace. each week, american history

tv's "american artifacts." next, located about three miles from george washington's mt. vernon estate in virginia is a reconstructed 18th century style whiskey distillery. american history tv visited to learn about washington's distilling business on a day when the staff was making apple brandy. >> we're standing in front of the reconstruction of george washington's whiskey distillery. most people have no idea that washington not only was first in war -- first in peace but he was also one of the first in distillery. he operated a major distillery here, and it was a very important part of the plantation economy. and historians had known this for a long time. but about ten years ago, we decided that we wanted to

explore that. and we came out here with archaeologists, excavated the site, did about five years of excavation and other research and decided we had a wonderful opportunity to bring this back and to show what an 18th century whiskey distillery was like. and you can't see it anywhere else in the country. >> and there's a gris mill here, as well? >> the reason the distillery's here is because washington already had a gris mill located here. it was a major part of the plantation made lots of money off of it over the years. and in 1797 at the end of his second term as president, he was getting ready to come back to mt. vernon and hired a scotsman by the name of james anderson to be his plantation manager. and apparently all scotsmen know how to distill, or at least anderson did. and as soon as he was on the job, he lobbied washington and

said if you'll pay for this, i can make you a lot of money by distilling whiskey. and washington, you know, initially said, you know, look, i don't know much about that, but we have letters that he wrote to friends of his asking their advice and they said as long as he can make a good product, there's no doubt, you know, it'll be successful. >> so he agreed and in 1797, they started here sort of in a small way using an existing building and brought a couple of stills. by the end of that year, they were convinced that it was going to be successful. so washington agreed to build the building behind us. so they bought three more stills and set it up. and by the early spring of 1798, it was up and running. >> this is a large building, looks like it was expensive to build. how did you get the funding for this? and how did you decide the architecture of it? >> again, we've got great records. the archaeology gave us the footprint of the building. when we go inside, you'll see where the stills are located. and when we dug here, we found

the footprint of the building, the locations of all the stills. so we have five stills in here that you've seen behind me. and each one of them is located where the archaeologists found evidence for it. either in the form of remnants of the brick base of the furnace or, you know, heavily burned, reddened soils where the fires had been. and so we have two stills here and then a third one in the middle and then two more, you know, at the other end. then the floors here we found evidence of the brick floor. we found evidence of the boiler to heat the water for the mashing operation. and then where all the mash tubs are located beyond the boiler, that stone floor again comes from the archaeological evidence. so that really gave us the footprint of the building and allowed us to place -- you know to position the different parts of the process. and then the documentary evidence gave us all sorts of other information. we knew the size of the stills because we have the records of when he bought them. we know that the stone mason

spent a certain amount of time raising the walls, we knew there were 10-foot high walls. we had all sorts of records from the carpenters and other workmen. so we were able to pull that together really to get a good picture of what we think washington's distillery would've looked like. when you go inside, i think it's very, very accurate to what washington's building would've looked like. we know that there were two dorm room windows because there's records of that. so lots of information about it. although this building was gone by 1814. it seems to have burned at that time. only about 15 years after it was built. and the support we got for this was very important. miss vernon really couldn't have done it on our own. but the distilled spirits council of the united states, you know, the folks that represent the liquor industry in this country. they came -- we got together with them very early on in the project and told them we have this wonderful educational opportunity to tell a great

story about george washington, and it's also a great story about the heritage of spirits in american history. they supported that and so they actually had came up with over $2 million to support the research and then the reconstruction of the distillery. so what washington was making was a rye whiskey, with and we know his recipe was 60% rye grain, 30% corn, and 5% malted barly, and that was very typical, very popular recipe from the time period. and rye is a little different. most whiskey folks drink is mostly out of corn, which yields a sort of sweeter end product. rye's kind of spicier, little bit sharper. but it was the popular grain at the time. and how they would do this is take all of those different grains and mix them in these large barrels called mash tubs. and they would put them in and they would add boiling water. and behind us here, this is the

boiler where the water gets heated up. and you would actually have to dip that out and bring it over to one of these large tubs and deposit the grain in here, put the boiling water in, and then you'd take this mash rake and then you would stir it. and stir it up and get it all together. and you would continue to do that until this was filled up. and by doing that, essentially, what you're trying to do is cook the grain to turn the starches that are in the grain into sugars. and then once that happens, you introduce the yeast and the yeast works on the sugars to produce the alcohol, takes three to five days to do that. once that's all done, then you're ready to distill, you take it over to the stills, and then the idea is there is that you're separating the alcohol from all the liquid so you wind up with a much higher con train

station of alcoholic spirit when you're done doing all that. >> my name is steve bayshore, and i manage the historic trades department at mt. vernon and that involves the gris mill and distillery operation as well as the black smith shop and the pioneer farm site. so we basically take care of those living history elements of mt. vernon. as we know, washington made apple and peach brandy here at mt. vernon. we're doing that these next three days and the apples would have been grown in orchards on his property. and you can see some of them here. the type we're using are the newton, pippen, rust set and one other variety. the first step would they'd have to be pressed or crushed in an apple press which includes a device to crank and crush up the apples into chunks, and then that would be put into a large press, which in the 18th century would've had a big rectangular press with a wooden jack screw

that was basically hand cranked down to squeeze all of the apple chunks. the pulp is basically what you're squishing and from that excretes the juice. and that would be fed down and collected in budgets and then from that point on, you're going to ferment that juice. and in this case, what we're doing is fermenting this large barrel here called a hog's head. so this is about 5% to 6% alcohol content when you're done. so the fermentation process for apples takes longer than it would for making a whiskey, which was also made here, which was the main commodity. you're looking at 14 to 30 days, perhaps, of fermentation depending on the types of yeasts that are used. in this case, what we're doing this time, we were fermenting with a champagne yeast which is a little faster acting. it really took about 10 to 14 days to complete the fermentation. but in washington's time, they didn't know a lot about the science of the yeast. today that's very much a trade secret in many distilleries in

places. they'll tell you everything about what they do, but they're not going to discuss the type of yeast. and they all usually have labs. but in washington's day with an orchard, there's naturally occurring yeast. he may have well had the apple juice all pressed and let it sit in barrels and let that yeast get in there and do its job over weeks. when i refer to the 6%, that's at the end of fermentation. so we're going to then distill it. and so that's going to get the proof up to much higher alcohol content by volume. so by running it through these big pot stills as we're doing now, we're going to get this proof upwards 80, 90, 100 proof. right now we have all five stills charged with the 6% juice, which is the fermented apple juice. and as the stills run, this first run today, we'll bump that up, might get to 50 proof, maybe 60 proof. we'll collect that first run and

then we'll run it through on wednesday, we'll double everything. we'll run it a second time through the still. each time you distill, you gain proof, but you lose volume. our goal is to try to get 50 to 60 gallons of hopefully 90 something proof apple brandy. >> was this something that a lot of farmers would've done to make apple brandy? or was that unusual? >> no, it was a drink at the time. a lot of people, farmers are distilling, as well, various things. a still is a piece of farm equipment in the 18th and 17th century even the 19th century. if you're a small farmer, you're going to probably make a little whiskey on the side. you may do some apple jack, hard cider or brandy and the amount of orchards some of these farms had, it was a natural side business to be in. a lot of alcohol is also legal tender in this time period. you could sell it for pretty good price, trade it for other goods. it's a good, small commodity to be involved in even if you're a small farmer.

we have a number of staff here that are on the historic trades department that work for me, a couple of full-time people are here and some of our part-time staff. so these are interpreters that regularly give tours of the distillery and farm and the mill. and several of these guys have made the whiskey runs, so they know how to operate all the equipment. and then we have the master distiller here who is our main consultant for doing whiskey and these brandies. he's now independent. and many over the last 25 years, many people are familiar with how micro brew beer really took off. well, there's a movement now in craft distilling going on in the country. and so dave is involved in a number of entrepreneurial projects because he's a chemical engineer designing distillery for people. so he brought a couple of

friends here who are distillers. this is in this area and another young man from the hudson river valley in new york beginning the process of building his distillery. they're here to learn with dave and get a taste of the history of distilling as well as help us. >> i encourage people to name their stills all the time. this one is pam. and this one is sarah. and that's maggie. and this is sandra, and that's elizabeth. so it's please send me spirit, elizabeth. that's the pneumonic. today we're doing distillations. and this is one of our five copper stills. they orient themselves from my right to my left in order of size. the smallest one of the stills is about 62 gallons and the largest one is about 95 gallons. this is just the very top of the

rather large semispherical top and then a conical shape still. the still itself is probably that big. it's probably 4 feet across inside. and then it runs all the way down to about here. for the base. so it's -- this is a 95 gallons in here, the size of the bathtub in volume. i've been coming here now for nine or ten years. and one of the things that i was just fascinated with is that the level of detail that the archaeologists went to in uncovering the site. and for me it was really fun because i'm not an archaeologist, i'm a chemical engineer and i make whiskey for a living. but it was fun because uneducated me could look at the site and say, obviously the boiler went here, the fire boxes for the still went here, this

was the mass floor. the site laid itself out very nicely for us. and a tremendous amount of information was easily discoverable. there are things we learned about the operation here that are transferable into modern craft distilling. things like the use of hops as a natural antibacterial agent. people think hops are only in beer. but as a craft distiller, i can tell you that there are times i use hops when i need bacterial control. things like how to make a really high percent rye mash because rye is a grain. and it gets too thick too quick and if you don't get it -- if you don't get it all stirred into the mash hot enough, it foams. we've had -- the first time we came here, we made the foam that ate manhattan. it foamed all night long and it was 2 feet deep and 6 feet wide when we came in in the morning. and it didn't stop until --

until we distilled it. and so we finally learned how and they actually got lard and put it on a paint brush, and they would just hit the foam. and it breaks the foam. then eventually we learned how to not make the foam in the first place. and that was much better. but all that came from studying the antique techniques. >> there are a number of manuals on distilling that were written during this time period. the late 18th and early 19th century. that describe how you lay out a still house, and you know, the most efficient way of doing things. and so we were able to look at those manuals and this all fits very well with what's going on, you know, in sort of the larger distilling industry at the time. >> it's kind of a delicate balance. these are direct-fired stills, which is really rare today. but in george washington's time, this was ubiquitous. so we've got -- we go through different phases during the process. first thing we do is take what

we call the onion, the top part of the still, and we just remove it. and we charge the still with a liquid to be distilled. and then you start on low fire. you basically build a fire with the intent on getting the flame hot enough that it gets the heat going up the flue properly. because otherwise you wind up backing smoke up into the room. once we've got the fire established in the fire box, then we established the water flow in the condensers. and this is an old -- what we call a worm-style condenser. the vapor comes down the line arm and then runs down and turns and coils around inside of the condenser. and then it comes out the bottom in the back in this little tube right here as a liquid. and then it's all about balancing the amount of heat that we're putting in the still and the amount of water that we are running through the condenser.

>> it wasn't -- it was off. and so it just needs to be balanced. and then also keeping track of the amount of heat in the fire box so that we can manage the process with the still. don't try this at home, but the way that we have managed the heat is we feel the still to see where the heat is in the still. and on this particular still, it's slightly uncomfortable to have my hand resting right here. and it's starting to move its way up the -- what we call the onion. it will -- as the heatwave kind of moves, it will move up the onion, and then it will move out the line arm. and then when it finally gets to this knuckle joint, we've got

about five minutes until we've got product coming out the back of the condenser. >> oh, nice. this one is all the way up on the line arm already. >> yeah. >> okay. way to go, mr. perky. >> well -- >> we really limit ourselves in how we operate here. we still boil water in the boiler. we still add hops when we're making the rye. we bucket water with wooden buckets. we stir with a wooden mash, use the old style fermenters. we don't use sacrometers when making judgments about adding the grain into the mash tub. we just do it with visual and

clues. when we're done fermenting, we bucket it over to the stills, a bucket at a time. it's very, very much -- so when we do the full-scale production days, we'll work a few weeks at a time just at full-scale production. we can understand why george washington had the staff that he did here, because that's -- that's the staff level that it takes us to do it. once we start getting liquid out the back end, we monitor the quality. and the first four shots that come off the still we call heads. and it's inferior quality, and that material we collect up and get rid of. this is going to turn into a stream pretty quick here. >> the pace is already picking up. >> yeah. it's -- it's definitely --

>> that's tasting pretty nice now. >> yep. cut. >> i'll do this. and then once the aldehydes peak, we collect the hearts. and when the hearts are coming off, we are really delicately managing the amount of heat in the still. we don't want to overrun it because it will push too hard. we don't want to underrun it because it will slow it down. you can actually see the stream volume change if you put too much or too little heat in the still. and so we're managing that to keep the hearts run, just nice and flat and smooth. just lay that in there. and -- >> there you go. >> there. okay. that will do it. that way you will cool the line arm a little bit more. all the water would come from the -- it comes actually from --

it would have come from the mill rays. and then would have gone down and found its way back out into the creek. in washington's day, the mill race was fed by a mill pond that was, what, a mile from here? two miles from here. it's a great big mill pond. that's basically a hollow log that's got a trough in it, and the water flows from the mill race down the trough. and then you can see valves stuck up at the end. do you want to go up and reach up and kind of point to a valve, maybe adjust it a little bit? so you can open and close that valve. it's the same kind of valve as are down here on the condenser that allows you to adjust how much water is coming out of the mill race. >> they did only 60 to 80 gallons of brandy on a couple of

occasions, they did apple brandy one time and peach brandy. and sold a little of it. but most was used at the mansion, so washingtons are entertaining a lot of people. this is after the presidency, so he's just supplementing his alcohol with some homemade stuff. the whiskey is a different proportion totally. this whole building was really built as a commercial distillery to make rye whiskey. so washington's men in 1798, the first year this opened, made 4,500 gallons of rye whiskey. in 1799, almost 11,000 gallons, so this brandy component is a very small measure compared to the whiskey business. >> but we've got lots and lots of plantation records, accounts. we know who was buying washington's whiskey, how much they were paying for it. 60 cents a gallon, by the way, for the twice distilled stuff. up to $1 a gallon for the good stuff that was distilled a few more times. and almost all of it was used here locally. the crew here, the folks that really made this work, would have been african-american slaves.

there were six young black men who were assigned to the distillery. and so james anderson's son john and his assistant would have been directing it, but all the work done here would have been done by those -- by those six men. and it would have been a lot of work. carrying grain around, doing the mashing, then transferring the mash to the stills, doing all of that. so it was a labor-intensive occupation. >> normally in washington's time, they didn't age whiskey. it went in a cast. it was an uncharred barrel, right to market. and people drank it as a clear alcohol. and in our case, what we do is when we make a whiskey run, we'll go ahead and bottle half of it unaged to keep in tradition of the history that was done here. and we'll sell that. so we've sold three different batches of unaged rye whiskey the last two years. and usually we only have 4 or 500 bottles at a time available. and they usually sell out in a day. but now, october 22nd for the first time we're offering the aged rye whiskey, so when we do

those runs, we'll bottle half and barrel the other half in a charred barrel, let it sit two years minimum. and then we will sell it. so we bottled that earlier this spring, and the color is very nice, what you would expect in a modern alcohol, amber color, really nice taste. so we're looking forward to people trying that. >> well, when we started this project, we really had no idea that we were going to get into the whiskey-making business. there was lots of good whiskey being made in kentucky and elsewhere. but people's interest has been so great, you know, almost from the very beginning. people were just really curious what the whiskey that washington made would have tasted like. and so over the years, we have done a number of demonstration projects, and in the last couple of years, we have actually made enough whiskey that we can sell it to folks. and so it's actually available -- we're an abc store here and you can come and buy it. >> we'll be giving tours today, as well, so there will be visitors coming through. and that's not always the case when we w