Two American Stories: 250 Years of Spirits and Perfume

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America turns 250 today. Its spirits industry goes back nearly that far. Its perfume industry is much younger. This piece covers both, in two installments, with Tiki and non-whisky American spirits still to come as a separate series.

A 1930s postcard, “Making Moonshine in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tenn.” The practice flourished in the remote valleys of the Smokies before the park existed, and stayed part of its lore long after the stills were gone. Courtesy of University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Special Collections.

Part 1

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1. A Nation Built While Someone Was Distilling

The country's oldest spirit predates the country. William Laird, a Scottish immigrant, began distilling apple brandy in colonial New Jersey in 1698. His great-grandson Robert incorporated Laird & Company in 1780, seven years before the Constitution existed. George Washington liked what the Lairds were making enough to write and personally request their recipe. Robert Laird served under Washington in the Revolutionary Army and supplied his troops with applejack at the Battle of Monmouth. Laird & Company still operates today, the oldest licensed distillery in the United States, and it was making apple brandy before there was a state of Kentucky, let alone a bourbon industry.

Laird & Company's grounds in Scobeyville, New Jersey. Distillers since 1780.

Applejack was not the only spirit in the room. Rum was the dominant drink of colonial America, and by Mount Vernon's own estimate, colonists consumed something like 3.7 gallons of it per person annually by the time of the Revolution. That popularity came from a supply chain worth naming honestly: rum production was tied directly into the triangular trade, and the sugar and molasses behind it were produced by enslaved labor in the Caribbean. Rum's place in early American life cannot be told as a purely charming colonial story, because it wasn't one.

Bourbon, the spirit most people now think of as definitively American, is actually the newest arrival of the three. It doesn't show up as a distinct regional identity until the 19th century, and its rise to prominence has a lot to do with what happens next.

2. The Whiskey Rebellion, Moonshine, and Taxation

Whiskey production spread fast on the American frontier after the Revolution. Corn grew easily, transporting it as grain was expensive, and converting it into whiskey solved both problems at once. Farmers used it as currency in places where cash was scarce.

In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton pushed through an excise tax on domestically distilled spirits, aimed at paying down Revolutionary War debt. It was a reasonable idea on paper. In practice, it hit frontier farmers in western Pennsylvania hardest. These were small operators who used whiskey as currency because they rarely saw cash, and a cash-only tax on a product they didn't sell for cash was, functionally, a tax they could not pay.

Resistance built for three years. Tax collectors were tarred and feathered. In July 1794, roughly 500 armed men attacked and burned the home of federal tax inspector John Neville outside Pittsburgh. Washington responded by personally leading a militia of nearly 13,000 men into western Pennsylvania, the only time a sitting president has commanded troops in the field. The rebels dispersed before any real fighting happened. Two men were convicted of treason. Washington pardoned both of them.

Washington reviewing the militia before marching into western Pennsylvania. Frederick Kemmelmeyer, circa 1795.

Jefferson repealed the tax in 1802, the moment he had the votes to do it. That repeal didn't end illegal distilling. It just pushed it further underground and further west.

Many of the frontier distillers behind the rebellion, most of them Scots-Irish immigrants, moved into Kentucky and Tennessee, specifically to get beyond federal reach. Appalachian terrain made stills hard for tax agents to find, and corn was worth far more as whiskey than as raw grain, one horse could carry ten times the value in liquor that it could in corn. That migration is a real, documented reason bourbon took root where it did.

The tax came back with the Civil War. The Revenue Act of 1862 funded the war and revived the standoff between moonshiners and the agents sent after them, known as revenuers. That standoff lasted for decades and hardened into a distinct Appalachian culture built around evading federal reach, the same instinct Hamilton's original tax provoked in 1791.

By the 1880s, legal whiskey had its own problem. Rectifiers blended neutral grain spirits with iodine, tobacco, prune juice, and sometimes worse, to fake the color and taste of properly aged bourbon. Consumers had no way to know what was actually in the bottle. Honest distillers were losing customers to cheaper, adulterated competitors.

Colonel E.H. Taylor Jr., a Kentucky distiller, led the public fight against rectifiers, though the bill itself came together through Congressman Walter Evans and Treasury Secretary John G. Carlisle. The Bottled-in-Bond Act passed on March 3, 1897, the first federal consumer protection law in American history, nine years before the Pure Food and Drug Act.

The law ran on the same tax infrastructure Hamilton had built in 1791. To carry the bonded label, whiskey had to come from one distiller, at one distillery, in one distillation season, aged at least four years in a federally supervised warehouse. Producers got a tax deferral for participating. Consumers got a government guarantee that what was in the bottle matched the label.

Prohibition turned moonshining into a national business. Bootleggers modified cars to outrun revenue agents on mountain roads, mostly Ford V8s with reinforced suspension and bored-out engines. Junior Johnson started running moonshine at 13, later won 50 NASCAR races, and became one of the sport's first stars. NASCAR's origin traces directly back to those chases.

Tennessee legalized regulated distilleries outside a handful of counties in 2009. Unlicensed moonshine was and still is a federal felony everywhere, that part never changed, what changed was where a license could be legally issued. Ole Smoky opened the first federally licensed moonshine distillery in Gatlinburg on July 4, 2010. Estimates for the legal moonshine industry's size vary widely depending on what gets counted, but figures in the billions of dollars show up consistently.

The same legal principle, not sentiment, still separates a licensed craft distillery today from an illegal one. Unlicensed distilling remains a federal felony, and the federal excise tax on distilled spirits sits at $13.50 per proof gallon, Hamilton's 1791 idea, still on the books, 235 years later.

3. Founding Fathers Actually Drank a Lot

Not many people know the Founding Fathers drank this much.

On September 14, 1787, three days before the Constitution was signed, Washington hosted the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry, his longtime Light Horse escort, for dinner at City Tavern. The surviving bill lists 55 gentlemen's dinners, 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 of claret, 8 of Old Stock whiskey, 22 of porter, 8 of cider, 12 of beer, and 7 bowls of punch. That's roughly two bottles of wine per person before anyone touched the whiskey or the punch. Adjusted for inflation, the bill runs to something like $15,600.

City Tavern as it appeared around 1800, from an engraving by William Birch.

The actual bill from Washington's September 14, 1787 dinner. Courtesy of Dr. Gordon Lloyd, Pepperdine University.

Washington's own relationship with spirits went well past hosting. After his presidency, he built one of the largest whiskey distilleries in the country at Mount Vernon, producing around 11,000 gallons in 1799 alone. Mount Vernon picked July 4th to release its first bourbon, timed to America's 250th anniversary. Spirit of '76 Cask Strength, seven years old, about 350 bottles, sold only at the estate.

The reconstructed Distillery at Mount Vernon, marking its 1797 construction.

Two recipes survive from that era, and they take genuinely different approaches to entertaining.

Benjamin Franklin's Milk Punch is the more unusual of the two. This one isn't folklore. Franklin wrote out the recipe himself and mailed it. On October 11, 1763, preparing to leave Boston for Philadelphia, Franklin sent a letter to his friend James Bowdoin enclosing a recipe “To make Milk Punch.” The original letter survives at the Massachusetts Historical Society. It's a clarified punch, a technique where hot milk curdles on contact with citrus and alcohol, then gets strained until the liquid runs clear, closer to kitchen science than anything most people picture from the 1760s. Franklin's original recipe made an enormous batch. What follows is the Historical Society's own scaled-down version, at one quarter of his original proportions.

Martha's punch is warm and built for a crowd. Franklin's is closer to kitchen science, producing something that looks nothing like what went into it. Both still worth making 250 years later.

4. Immigrants Built This

Immigration is the through-line across almost everything in this section.

William Laird brought Scottish distilling knowledge directly to New Jersey and created America's first native spirit. The Scots-Irish farmers who resisted the whiskey tax and then relocated to Kentucky and Tennessee carried their stills and their distilling traditions with them, and that migration is a direct line to bourbon as it exists today.

Heaven Hill's own founders were immigrants too. Five Shapira brothers, sons of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, bought out the original investors within two years of the 1935 founding. Descendants of the family still run it today.

Enslaved and free Black distillers are part of this story too, and it's one this site has already told properly rather than compress into a paragraph here. Nathan “Nearest” Green taught Jack Daniel how to distill whiskey, and the Black distillers, perfumers, and blenders building on that legacy today are covered in full in Juneteenth Special: The Builders You Never Heard Of. That piece is the better place to go for that story, not a summary tacked onto this one.

5. A Few Dates Worth Knowing

• 1780: Laird & Company incorporated, oldest licensed distillery in the US
• 1791–1794: The Whiskey Rebellion
• 1862: The Revenue Act reinstates the federal liquor tax to fund the Civil War
• March 3, 1897: The Bottled-in-Bond Act, the first consumer protection law in US history
• 1920–1933: Prohibition, which nearly wiped out both bourbon and applejack, Laird's survived on a medicinal production license
• 1984: Blanton's, the world's first single barrel bourbon, Elmer T. Lee, Buffalo Trace
• July 4, 2010: Ole Smoky opens the first federally licensed moonshine distillery
• January 19, 2025: American Single Malt Whiskey becomes an official TTB category, the first new whiskey classification added in over 50 years

6. Houses and Distilleries Worth Knowing

Laird's America's 250th Limited Release, 13 Years Old. Courtesy of Laird & Company.

The O.F.C. Distillery, destroyed by fire in June 1882. Rebuilt on the same site, now Buffalo Trace.

Before 1984, bourbon brands blended barrels together for a consistent taste. Elmer T. Lee broke that pattern at what's now Buffalo Trace. He remembered Colonel Albert B. Blanton handpicking single barrels from Warehouse H to share with guests. Lee revived that practice and named the bourbon after him. Blanton's launched in 1984 as the first commercially sold single barrel bourbon. Every bottle comes from one barrel instead of a blend, so no two taste exactly alike.

The Heaven Hill Bourbon Experience in Bardstown, built as a replica of the original 1935 distillery.

Jack Daniel's Visitor Center, Lynchburg, Tennessee.

Part 2

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7. A Much Younger Story

American perfume as an industry doesn't meaningfully exist until 1946. There's no colonial-era equivalent to Laird's on the fragrance side, no organized American perfume house, no 18th-century recipe worth reprinting. Washington did have a favorite scent, Dr. William Hunter's Number 6, sold out of a Newport apothecary starting in 1752. He liked it enough to give it away as gifts. One preference isn't an industry.

What America does have is Estée Lauder, and her own story is, fittingly, an immigrant story. She was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Queens, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. She and her husband Joseph founded Estée Lauder Cosmetic Co. in 1946 out of a former Manhattan restaurant, cooking up formulas on the restaurant's old burners. The company's real turning point came in 1953 with Youth-Dew, a bath oil doubling as a perfume. Lauder deliberately avoided calling it perfume at all, because at the time, women didn't buy fragrance for themselves, they waited for it as a gift. Youth-Dew broke that pattern by design. It sold 50,000 bottles in its first year. By 1984, that number had grown to 150 million.

Estée Lauder at work, mixing formulas herself.

Aramis followed in 1964, Estée Lauder's men's line, another early and lasting piece of the American fragrance world. The brand is still active today. It launched Intuition in 2025, fronted by Dwyane Wade, and followed it with Intuition Intense in 2026.

Ralph Lauren has an immigrant story too, a first-generation version instead of Lauder's founding one. Ralph Lifshitz grew up in the Bronx, the son of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. He changed his name at sixteen after years of being teased for it. He built Polo from a single drawer in the Empire State Building, delivering ties to department stores himself. His first fragrances, Lauren for women and Polo for men, launched two weeks apart in March 1978, the first time any designer released both genders at once.

Ralph Lauren, 1978.

Not every part of this story is about growth. American perfume has a diversity problem it hasn't fixed, and the industry has its own uncomfortable number to show for it. According to career-data firm Zippia, 68.6% of American perfumers are white, and a training pipeline running mostly through French perfumery schools has kept it that way for decades. That gap runs deeper than this piece has room for.

8. Covered Properly, Elsewhere

Rather than compress African ingredient sourcing or the American perfumers building past that gap into a few lines here, both are already covered properly:

• Africa's Ingredients: What the Continent Gives Perfumery and Who Actually Benefits covers where the raw materials behind global perfumery actually come from.
• Juneteenth Special: The Builders You Never Heard Of covers Moodeaux, Kimberly New York, Qhue, Harlem Perfume Co., and La Boticá, five American perfumers building real houses today.

9. The American Niche Wave

American perfume splits into two business models today. One chases the department store counter. The other doesn't.

Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein both stayed in the first camp. Ralph Lauren's fragrance business moved from Warner-Lauren to a license with L'Oréal. Calvin Klein followed with Obsession in 1985, now licensed to Coty. Both were built for scale from day one, sold everywhere, designed to be mass market.

Lauren, launched in 1978.

Estée Lauder's own empire owns a genuinely startling share of prestige perfume globally today, Le Labo, Jo Malone, and Tom Ford Beauty among its brands. But a separate wave of independent American houses built something different over the last two decades: Le Labo itself (New York, 2006), D.S. & Durga (Brooklyn), Imaginary Authors (Portland), and CB I Hate Perfume (Christopher Brosius, Brooklyn). None of them chased the department store model. All of them found an audience directly.

10. Houses Worth Knowing

11. American Culture as Marketing

America's real export in this whole story isn't a spirit or a scent. It's the marketing machinery around both, and that machinery runs through books, theater, film, and now platforms that didn't exist twenty years ago.

Books

The Great Gatsby did more to mythologize bootlegging than any advertising campaign of its era managed. Gatsby's fortune is implied, and eventually confirmed, to come from illegal liquor sales, and Fitzgerald reportedly drew partial inspiration for the character from George Remus, a real Cincinnati bootlegger known at the time as the “King of the Bootleggers.” A novel that is, at its core, about the emptiness of that wealth still managed to make Prohibition-era excess look glamorous to generations of readers who came after it.

The Great Gatsby, 1925.

Perfume got its own novel too, just a much darker one. Bret Easton Ellis put a real cologne on Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, PS Fine Cologne by Paul Sebastian. Decades later, that scene turned it into a cult item among fragrance collectors, entirely on the strength of one fictional serial killer's grooming routine, not anything the brand itself ever did.

PS Fine Cologne, Patrick Bateman's cologne in American Psycho.

A newer example skipped fiction and went straight to the source. Heretic Parfum licensed the estate of writer and illustrator Edward Gorey for a 2025 holiday collection of room sprays, including scents named Sumptuous Afternoon and The Haunted Tea Cosy. Heretic's founder got the deal by sending the estate a cold email.

Sumptuous Afternoon, from Heretic's Edward Gorey collection.

Theater

American theater took the opposite approach. Where Gatsby glamorized, the stage tended toward tragedy. Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof both build entire character studies around alcoholism, not celebration of it. Theater used the same subject fiction did, for the opposite purpose.

Perfume's relationship with theater runs warmer. Harlem Perfume Co. partnered with Lincoln Center Theater on a candle honoring its 2026 revival of Ragtime, sold as a companion piece to the show rather than a souvenir.

The Ragtime candle, made with Lincoln Center Theater.

Film

Elizabeth Taylor's White Diamonds, launched in 1991, is the moment American celebrity fragrance marketing became something else entirely. The campaign cost $20 million and centered on a short film, White Diamonds Starring Elizabeth Taylor, screened in department stores with popcorn served to shoppers as though it were a theatrical release. It worked. By 2018, the fragrance had generated a reported $1.5 billion in lifetime sales, more than she earned from any Hollywood role. Since 2011, Taylor directed 20% of those sales in perpetuity to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.

The original White Diamonds campaign.

A newer film tie-in shows the same instinct at indie scale. Heretic Parfum partnered directly with Focus Features on a fragrance for Robert Eggers' 2024 Nosferatu, timed to the film's Christmas release. It sold out in two weeks, built an 80,000-person waitlist, and has sold a unit every four minutes since restocking. Company revenue grew 150% in 2025, driven by that collaboration and the one that followed it.

Nosferatu Eau de Macabre, Heretic Parfum's collaboration with Focus Features.

Television did something quieter but just as real, at least abroad. Roy Morgan Research tracked whiskey drinking among 25-34 year olds in Australia climbing from 8.6% in 2006 to 13% by 2013, a jump that started the year after Mad Men premiered in 2007. No equivalent US figure is as cleanly documented, but the timing lines up with the same show driving the same kind of shift here.

Music

Busta Rhymes named Courvoisier in “Pass the Courvoisier” in 2002. The cognac brand saw a real sales bump before he was ever paid to promote it, the endorsement deal came after the song did the work. That freebie became a real business model. Jay-Z built on it directly: he backed Armand de Brignac starting in 2006, featured it in his own music videos, bought the brand outright by 2014, and later sold half of it to LVMH.

Courvoisier, named in Busta Rhymes' 2002 single.

Armand de Brignac, Jay-Z's champagne.

Perfume got its own version of that story from a different direction. Beyoncé launched Heat in February 2010, and it sold 72,000 bottles in its first hour at Macy's alone. By 2013, the line had done $400 million globally, one of the best-selling celebrity fragrances ever released. Music didn't just endorse a scent this time. It built one from scratch and outsold most of the industry doing it.

Metallica took a different approach entirely. In 2018, the band partnered with master distiller Dave Pickerell to launch Blackened American Whiskey, finished with a patented process called Black Noise: barrels blasted with low-frequency sound waves from the band's own music to force deeper interaction with the wood. The inaugural batch, labeled 081 for the year Metallica formed, takes its soundwave graphic from the song “Blackened” itself. Every batch since has shipped with its own curated playlist. This wasn't an endorsement or an ownership stake. It was the band manufacturing the product.

Blackened American Whiskey, finished with Metallica's own Black Noise process.

What America Actually Contributes, Financially

American celebrities haven't just endorsed these products lately. Increasingly, they're making them.

Matthew McConaughey became Wild Turkey's creative director in 2016. He spent two years with master distillers Jimmy and Eddie Russell developing Longbranch, a bourbon finished through Texas mesquite charcoal. It launched in 2018. Bob Dylan co-founded Heaven's Door that same year, named after his own song, and helps select barrels and blend the whiskey himself.

Wild Turkey Longbranch.

Heaven's Door, co-founded by Bob Dylan.

Perfume runs on endorsement more than ownership. Johnny Depp has been the face of Dior Sauvage since 2015. He re-signed in 2023 for a three-year deal reportedly worth more than $20 million, the most lucrative men's fragrance endorsement in history. Bernard Arnault, CEO of Dior's parent company LVMH, credited Depp's image directly for the fragrance's category-leading sales during a January 2023 presentation of the company's 2022 results. Brad Pitt became the first-ever male face of Chanel No. 5 in 2012 for $7 million. Zendaya has fronted Lancôme's Idôle since 2019, joining a roster that's included Julia Roberts for over two decades.

Zendaya, the face of Lancôme's Idôle since 2019.

Wild Turkey is owned by Campari, an Italian company. Dior and Chanel are French. Heaven's Door and Blackened are two of the few names on this list that Americans actually own outright.

Platforms

The newest layer of this is distribution itself. YouTube, Meta, and X are all American companies, built by a mix of immigrants and native-born founders alike: Steve Chen (Taiwan) and Jawed Karim (born in East Germany to a Bangladeshi father and German mother) co-founded YouTube alongside Chad Hurley, born in Pennsylvania. Meta and X trace back to founders born across the country. A craft distillery or a niche perfume house no longer needs a department store campaign or a studio deal to build a global audience. They need a following, built directly, one post at a time.

12. Where This Leaves Things

Both industries got this far on marketing, endorsement money, and now platforms instead of permission from a department store buyer. That's the story the last section just told. Here's where I'd like to see both industries go next.

Spirits and perfume tell two different American stories. Spirits go back to before the country existed. Perfume goes back about eighty years. Both trace through immigration. Both get marketed by American culture at a scale that outpaces what America actually owns.

On the whisky side, small distilleries are already leading on sustainable practices: local grain, spent mash reuse, less water waste. I'd like the bigger houses to catch up instead of treating it as a marketing angle. Sustainability should get the same attention as barrel selection or the Bottled-in-Bond designation.

Since the closing of Barneys, niche perfume houses have been building their audience through social media. I'd like to see them get real space in current department stores, not just dedicated perfume stores. I would love to see transparency in sourcing and sustainability across niche, designer, and clone houses.

The faces selling both industries skew narrow too. Depp, Pitt, McConaughey, Dylan, that's the roster of top-dollar deals this piece found, and none of them are immigrants in a story built almost entirely on immigrant founders. I'd like to see that gap close along with the others.

America turns 250 today. I feel more hope than worry about what happens next. The Lairds, Nathan Green, Estée Lauder, none of them set out to build an industry. They just kept working, and it added up over two centuries. I think the next 250 years get built the same way, by people nobody's watching yet. I'm glad to be around for the start of it.

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