Today's well-known brands might not sound familiar to cowboys from the Wild West and that's okay.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Arizona Ghostriders | 2016-12-03 10:37:56 |  76,938 Views |
Whiskey in the Wild West
Despite all the old-fashioned imagery that adorns today’s American whiskey bottles—log cabins buffalo and long-dead distillers dressed like Civil War generals—most of today’s iconic brands wouldn’t taste all that familiar to cowboys from the Old West. And conversely today’s whiskey drinkers probably wouldn’t recognize frontier whiskey. And that’s a good thing because it probably tasted awful.
The bottles of Jim Beam Maker's Mark Wild Turkey and Buffalo Trace wrap the era in warm nostalgia with fonts reminiscent of "Wanted: Dead or Alive" posters. Bulleit Bourbon stamps the words "Frontier Whiskey" on the bottle though the brand in its modern incarnation has only been around for a little over a decade. In fact all of these brands came into existence after the West was tamed and they probably taste better than most of the offerings from 150 years ago too.
So what were they drinking? A few popular whiskey nicknames from the era offer a glimpse: mountain howitzer box varnish chain lightning strychnine and tangleleg none of which sound very appetizing. Cowboys never had a reputation for being particularly refined connoisseurs. The whiskey they drank was simply fuel for the saloon’s many other activities whatever those were.
