I was listening to a podcast recently* where the interviewee kept saying “congeners” to describe the specific chemicals produced during fermentation, and I kept thinking- I wonder how many people in the industry know that’s a made-up word?
I mean, it’s not a made-up word in the English language-
Congener: noun
con·ge·ner (ˈkän-jə-nər)
1: a member of the same taxonomic genus as another plant or animal
2: a person, organism, or thing resembling another in nature or action (ex. the New England private schools and their congeners west of the Alleghenies)
3: a chemical substance related to another
It is a real word, of course. It just wasn’t used to describe anything having to do with whiskey until the early 1900s. For more information on congeners, you can READ THIS BLOG POST.
When the straight whiskey interests in New York (that owned most of the distilleries in Kentucky) wanted to promote their products over those being made by blenders, bottlers, and rectifiers, they made friends with the men that could help to make that happen. A movement, which had begun in the 1880s to pass laws protecting consumers from tainted food and drink, was underway. The Pure Food and Drug law, passed in 1906, was the culmination of these efforts.
The man behind the Food & Drug Act was Harvey Washington Wiley. His moral stance on which whiskeys should be considered “medicinal” made him a helpful ally for the straight whiskey interests- even if he may have been an unwitting accomplice…at first. (Wiley took to his role with a great deal of enthusiasm as time went on.) Wiley began to petition the US government as an expert witness for the whiskey interests whose goal had been to grant straight whiskeys exclusivity to the term “whiskey”. His expertise influenced the parliamentary committees in London, as well, as Britain’s government debated which of their own spirits should earn the title of “whisky”. English syndicates had become financially involved in KY interests by then, and Wiley was within their sphere of influence. (For more on this topic, Read THIS.)
The Food and Drug Act of 1906 DID NOT determine a definition for whiskey, so Wiley and others began to craft that narrative. Wiley insisted during Congressional depositions that straight whiskey was superior, explaining that after three years in the barrel, time would eliminate all the poisonous fusel oils that tainted other whiskeys. This assertion had been his leading argument when claiming that straight whiskey was uniquely qualified to be called whiskey. (Remember there WAS NO legal definition for the term “straight” back then; At the time, “straight” simply implied that a spirit had been matured in a barrel. It had been a well-known industry term implying that a spirit had not been “rectified” or altered by additives.) When Harvey Wiley’s assertion that barrel maturation eliminated the presence of fusel oils was quickly proven WRONG by other chemists, he changed his tact. He would literally re-invent the word “congeners” to explain how straight whiskey contained special chemicals that set it apart from rectified spirits.
Perhaps Wiley meant that certain chemicals were congeners (a chemical substance related to another) for flavor compounds – but that’s not how he used the word. Wiley began using the word “congeners” to describe the flavor compounds that were created naturally through barrel aging. It was a very political move and he was often laughed at for his quick, face-saving reversals. Thankfully, President Taft saw through Wiley’s politically-driven machinations. Taft allowed the word “whiskey” to be used universally- by both straight whiskey makers AND by rectifiers. Instead, through the Taft Decision of 1909, he chose to focus his attention and apply more oversight into what really mattered- false advertising and the adulteration of products. (You can read more details about the time between the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Taft Decision HERE.)
The fact that we still use the term “congeners” so readily today to describe the superiority of barrel aged spirits just goes to show how incredibly successful Wiley’s politically motivated campaign had been over a century ago. The funny thing is that the podcast I was referring to earlier involved a distiller who was explaining how unfair it was that the American single malt category would exclude whiskeys distilled over 160 proof and that certain congeners produced when spirits are distilled above 160 were ideal for producing certain flavors in the barrel. So here we are in 2022 using a term invented in 1906 to defend what should and should not be considered whiskey. Gotta love the whiskey world and all its funny little eccentricities😊
*This post was pulled from a 2022 post on my Facebook page, @AmericanWhiskeyHistory.