Bourbon and the Labor It Was Built On

Kentucky bourbon has a creation mythology that emphasizes limestone water, the new charred oak barrel, the angel's share evaporating from rickhouses in the summer heat, and the names of the men who built the brands. The mythology is largely accurate as far as it goes. What it does not tend to include is the labor.

Before the Civil War, bourbon production in Kentucky was substantially dependent on enslaved workers. Distilleries were labor-intensive operations: wood had to be cut and hauled, grain mashed, fermentation tanks managed, barrels made by coopers who were often enslaved craftspeople, and the finished whiskey bottled and moved to river barges. The cooper's trade in particular, which required significant skill, was practiced extensively by enslaved Black men whose expertise was foundational to the industry's quality and efficiency.

After emancipation, bourbon production continued to rely heavily on underpaid Black workers performing the same physical tasks under conditions that were now technically free but economically coercive. Distilleries in the late nineteenth century employed large numbers of Black workers in the lowest-wage positions at operations across the Bluegrass and Louisville corridor.

The specific labor histories of individual distilling companies are not well documented in publicly accessible corporate records, a gap that is not neutral. What is documented are the broader economic patterns: the bourbon industry grew to international scale on the labor of workers, most of them Black, most of them poorly compensated, whose individual names and contributions have not been included in the brand histories that appear on bottle labels and distillery tour materials.

The bourbon renaissance of the last two decades has generated enormous wealth for the industry. The conversation about what that wealth owes to the labor history it was built on is still largely at the beginning.