![]() C-13 can indicate the kind of grain a product was made from. When this whiskey was radiocarbon dated for age - aka carbon-14 testing - it was also carbon-13 tested. Nobody today has really known what Monongahela rye was like in the mid 1800s. Lots of it wasn't even distilled in Pennsylvania, and had become a blend of swill. But by that point, a lot of "mongahela rye" was more of an imitiation of a bygone era. Nearly all discussions of Monongahela rye that you can find today rely on sources from the 1880s and onward. Whiskey historian Sam Komlenic writes in Whisky Advocate magazine, “the common mashbill for Monongahela rye contained only two grains: rye and barley malt, generally in a ratio of roughly 4 to 1.” But there, Sam is talking about rye made towards the end of the 1800s, when history recorded boozy stuff much better. Today's regulations define rye whiskey as made from at least 51% rye grain. Whiskey nerds like me love to ask about a whiskey's "mash bill," which is just a fancy way to say "the ingredients." So there was little left to sell post-war. Plus, the war had drank up the country's prewar stock of whiskey (and literally just destroyed a lot of it). The old farm style of whiskey production became a thing of the past. Because after the war, the whiskey business was never the same, as the US transformed from an agricultural society to an industrial one. The most mysterious date from the era before the Civil War. Today, 19th century Monongahela ryes are a thing of lore. This rich whiskey struggled to find a market and finally died a quiet death. ![]() Then Prohibition hit in 1920, and by Repeal in 1933, America's palate had shifted to weaker spirits. ![]() When US whiskey distillation stopped in 1917 (because of WWI), Monongahela rye was already receding into memory. Even Herman Melville enshrined it in Moby-Dick in 1851, writing of "unspeakable old Monongahela!" As in, unspeakably good.īut the style didn't last. It became known as Monongahela, after the Monhagahela river there. The whiskey these farmers made had a specific charater, basically credited to the quality of rye they grew, the limestone water in the area, distillation equipment, and regional/cultural traditions. ![]()
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