Old Crow - History

History

Dr. James C. Crow, a Scottish immigrant, started distilling what would come to be Old Crow in Frankfort, Kentucky, in the 1830s. Reportedly a very skilled distiller, he made whiskey for various employers, which was sold as "Crow" or, as it aged, "Old Crow" — the brand acquired its reputation from the latter. He died in 1856, and while W.A. Gaines and Company kept the name and continued to distill the bourbon according to his recipe, the original distillation formula died with its creator. The last remaining stock of Old Crow (of which there seemed to have been quite a bit) acquired near-legendary status, and offering drinks of it reportedly secured a re-election for Joseph Clay Stiles Blackburn, senator for Kentucky. A dispute over ownership of the name "Old Crow" was decided in 1915 in favor of the Gaines company. Old Crow's logo, a crow perched atop grains of barley, is rumored to stem as a symbol bridging the North and South during the Civil War. A Pennsylvania brigade training at State College, Pennsylvania thought Old Crow was the only good thing to ever come out of the south. Fearing never being able to drink Old Crow again, the soldiers wrote Lincoln proclaiming "We must not let the fine gentleman Old Crow escape. Remember Mr. President, the crow with the sharpest talons holds on to barley forever." After the War the logo was changed from a picture of James Crow to the current crow holding on to barley.

Although the whiskey had been, at one time, the top selling bourbon in the United States, it underwent a swift decline in the second half of the twentieth century. A production error in the amount of "setback" (the portion of spent mash added to a new batch in the sour mash process) negatively affected the taste of the whiskey, and the distiller's inability or unwillingness to correct it led to many drinkers moving on to other brands. Parent company National Distillers would be sold to Jim Beam in 1987; the Old Crow recipe and distillery were not kept and the product after this would be a three-year-old bourbon based on the Jim Beam mashbill.