BOURBON NEWS & NOTES – 25 September, 2020, by Susan Reigler
Special 150th Anniversary Old Forester Release
Louisville-based liquor giant Brown-Forman Corporation was founded in 1870 by George Garvin Brown, a young pharmaceutical and whiskey salesman (at that time synonymous occupations) who had the radical idea of selling his bourbon exclusively in sealed glass bottles. This was more expensive than the common practice of having your own vessel filled from a barrel at the local store. But it guaranteed the whiskey would be unadulterated and he named it after his friend, prominent Louisville physician, Dr. William Forrester. After all, if a doctor’s name graced the label, it had to be good.
Today, 150 years later, Old Forester (one of the R’s was subsequently dropped) is the only bourbon brand to be made continuously by the same company before during, and after Prohibition. (It was made, fittingly, as medicinal whiskey in the 1920s.) Brown’s...
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