This is a defamatory conspiracy propagated by enemies of the people.

Bourbon is a region: Old Bourbon County, the region in which "Bourbon whiskey" was first produced. https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/1297921522473082881

It is true that as a legal matter the US does not dispute product labels for products outside of Kentucky, but *in point of fact* it actually *is* a geographic label.

There is a faction of bourbon historians who argue that the geographic designator belongs not to the country but to "Bourbon street" New Orleans, since Kentucky whiskey was in its early days almost universally sold downreiver via New Orleans and sometimes stored on Bourbon street

One of the oldest textual attestations to "Bourbon whiskey" does indeed come from Louisiana. The 1843 humorous book "Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor." It is referred to as "old" in that text, however.

Moreover, the author, Henry Clay Lewis, leaves both possibilities open via his bio: he grew up in Cincinnati and went to medical school in Louisville and you'll note his name is "Henry Clay," the Senator from Kentucky.

OTOH, he worked on a New Orleans-based riverboat for years.

Another early attestation comes from an 1850 memoir by a former riverboat gambler, who has one of his characters, a charlatan and whiskey-vendor, ask for a bottle of "old Bourbon whiskey" on a riverboat headed from Cincinnati to Galena.

The riverboat connection strongly militates in favor of New Orleans.

But the "old" bit is interesting. Why?

Because "Old Bourbon" was for a while a meaningful toponym to refer to the former territories of the pre-statehood Bourbon County.

Today, 34 KY counties and many of the top whiskey-producing counties are within "Old Bourbon."

Ergo, it seems VERY likely that "Bourbon" is indeed a geographic reference, as its early usages uniformly include the grammatucally unnecessary "old" in front of it, likely a holdover from hearing it described by KY-based vendors as coming "from Old Bourbon."

It was popularized on steamboats going from the KY/OH ports down the river to New Orleans, and indeed it's likely that New Orleans was a major place of popularization for it.

Indeed there's some suggestion in the Bourbon historiography that what Kentucky distillers did was just make white dog, barrel it, and ship it to New Orleans or sell it to a steamboat, and trust that it would age sufficiently in transit and storage!

It's possibly not until the 1860s that KY distillers cottoned on to the fact that they could command a higher premium by holding and aging, and distilling for specific taste. And distilling-for-taste didn't become a meaningful practice until the 1950s and 1960s!

So. @jbarro and @KevinWGlass , get off my lawn if it's not Kentucky, or Bourbon street New Orleans, or sitting in the hold of a boat on the Mississippi river, it ain't bourbon sorry not sorry.