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March 27, 2026
Library of Congress Blog Posted by: Lena Mattson I love making cocktails at home, and on a recent visit to re-supply from one of my favorite local distilleries, I noticed a newly released whiskey with a designation I had not previously heard of, “bottled in bond.” I asked one of the distillery staff for clarification and learned that “bottled in bond” is in fact a legal designation: to be considered “bottled in bond,” a whiskey or other distilled spirit has to be produced from one kind of spirit, distilled over one distilling season by the same distiller at the same distillery, stored for at least 4 years in wooden barrels under government supervision, unaltered (no additives), and produced/bottled at 50 percent alcohol or 100 proof. A few months later, I remembered this bit of information at work one day when, to my surprise, I came across Sanborn fire insurance maps from the 1890s that were not of a single town or city as usual, but of whiskey warehouses in several states, and some of those warehouses were labeled as “bonded.” Was the term “bonded” here related to the designation of “bottled in bond”? As I learned, yes, and not only that, but also it turns out that the history of whiskey and its regulation is highly intertwined with some foundational regulatory moments of the American republic. One of the first tests of the United States government’s federal power came in the form of the Whiskey Rebellion, during which farmers of southwestern Pennsylvania – which was then the American frontier – raised an armed rebellion in 1794 against a 1791 excise tax targeting distilled spirits. President George Washington Federalized a militia and had to personally lead troops into the field – the only sitting U.S. President to do so – in order to calm the rebellion, fortunately without casualties. Though it remained unpopular, the tax stood. Interestingly enough, three years later Washington was convinced by a friend to build and run a whiskey distillery on his property at Mount Vernon, which proved to be an immensely successful and profitable retirement project. The original facility has been restored to a working distillery that tourists can visit and sample the wares from to this day. And yes, Washington paid his distilled spirits taxes properly. The 1791 excise tax on distilled spirits remained in place until 1802, then was repealed, and then was reinstated off and on again through the remainder of the 19th century along with several other excise taxes in the United States. At the same time, the American frontier continued to expand westward, and distilling went from being a big family business to being a very big corporate business. One of the tensions of the original spirits excise tax that had led to the Whiskey Rebellion was the fact that larger distilleries around big cities (far from the frontier) were able to bear the initial costs more easily due to the sheer volume of their production and the fact that their wealthy consumers would pay a higher price if it was passed along to them. On the other hand, frontier distillers had to pay what was essentially a regressive tax per gallon, since they could not produce the quantity needed to get a flat fee the way the big city producers could, and their local consumers could not afford any cost increase passed along. This is where the bonded warehouses I saw on the fire insurance maps come in. Bonded warehouses proliferated over the course of the 19th century in the US and they are still in use today. Their existence is directly related to excise taxes on products like alcohol and tobacco, because they are a legal category of building or other secured area in which dutiable merchandise can be stored without payment of duties for a set amount of time. (Perhaps the most recognizable public-facing form of bonded warehouse that still exists is the duty-free store at airports.) While in current parlance we associate bonded warehouses with imports, they also mattered for domestic products in the days of excise taxes in the United States, because if distillers could sell their spirits without having to pay a tax on their goods upfront, it gave them financial flexibility and further incentivized producing quantities at a large scale. By the end of the century, bonded warehouses for distilled spirits (almost always whiskey) appear on Sanborn maps, like this one of Frankfort, Kentucky from 1886. However, as whiskey production became an ever larger cash cow, so did an insidious side hustle that plagued practically every aspect of food and beverage production in those days: fraud and tampering. The problem in the 19th century was that once American distillers sold their barreled wares, they often went to distributors who had financial incentives to be unscrupulous, stretching out their whiskey supply by blending it with coloring agents and chemicals before bottling the final products for unsuspecting consumers. The additives ranged from disgusting to dangerous, commonly noted to include tobacco, turpentine, iodine, and kerosene! To make matters worse, especially if you happened to be a US lawmaker from a whiskey-producing state, was that consumers had an alternative to the unregulated American goods in the form of Canadian whiskey, which flooded American markets neatly bottled and stamped with the assurance that it had been produced under government control and with no possibility of tampering. Congress decided to act, and in so doing would pass what is considered the first consumer protection legislation in American history. In May 1896, An Act to Allow the Bottling of Distiller Spirits in Bond was taken up for debate in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman Walter Evans of Kentucky’s Fifth District. Evans laid out the proposal, for bonded warehouses to be controlled under lock and key by government agents, and for distillers to be permitted to bottle their own products on premise and label them as “bottled in bond.” The bottled in bond seal would give the assurances I mentioned at the beginning of this post that are now codified in federal regulations, and would also mean that consumers could know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the homegrown American whiskey they bought with this seal was pure and unadulterated. If you want to read the full text of the debate, which is very lively in part because of a Temperance-minded Representative from Massachusetts who joined the fray, it’s available in the Congressional Record on Congress.gov beginning on page 5377. The act passed into law in the following year, and by the time of the 1910 Sanborn fire insurance maps of Kentucky and Tennessee warehouses pictured below, you can see the bottling plants as well as the bonded warehouses on distillery grounds. The bottled in bond designation was seen as less important after the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act created the food and beverage regulation that are the cornerstone of the modern U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Prohibition cut into the existence and profitability of the business model, but as I saw for myself, the practice is seeing a resurgence now at some distilleries. Cheers! Learn More
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