There’s a brand of rye whiskey you can sip today with a history stretching so far back that, at the time of its birth, the United States had a mere 7.2 million people, James Madison was president, and Louisiana was about to become a state.
Old Overholt started as a small farm distillery in West Overton, Pennsylvania, in 1810 and would rise to become one of America’s favorite whiskeys for a time. Among its devotees were two presidents who served nearly a hundred years apart: Ulysses S. Grant may have been an Old Crow bourbon fan, but he also loved Old Overholt, as did John F. Kennedy. It would survive Prohibition thanks to a Gilded Age millionaire, but the brand lost some of its prestige over the years and ended up on the bottom shelf, along with some bourbons that are still worth buying. Still, Old Overholt weathered good times and bad to endure for more than 200 years, and it remains the oldest continuously produced whiskey — not just rye — in America.
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Old Overholt Survived Prohibition
Old Overholt whiskey label – Alexandra Adele/Shutterstock
While the name of Old Overholt is forever associated with Abraham Overholt (his face is still on the label), it was his father, a German Mennonite farmer named Henry, who first began producing the rye before Abraham took over and turned it into a booming business. In the 1880s, it would pass into the hands of one of Abraham’s grandchildren, Henry Clay Frick, who was already rich from a coal empire. Frick partnered with another robber baron, Andrew Mellon. When Prohibition began in the United States in 1920, Mellon, who had become U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, wrangled a medicinal license to keep producing the rye, guaranteeing its existence when many other brands died out.
Old Overholt soldiered on and in the late 1980s, the James B. Beam company bought it and moved Old Overholt’s production to Kentucky. Thanks to Beam, it’s possible to enjoy a Sazarac, a staple New Orleans cocktail, with a rye that predates the old-school drink’s invention by more than 20 years. In the last few years the brand has come out with various iterations, including a 10-year-old cask strength version that’s garnered new fans for this very old whiskey.
Read the original article on Chowhound.