It was in 1780 that Elijah Pepper built his first distillery, in the midst of the American Revolutionary war. After the war ended in 1790, he ventured out and built another distillery in Kentucky, and when the Whiskey Rebellion came about in 1794, Elijah was one of the few able to pay the demanded taxes. In turn, this meant that farmers who could not pay these taxes would give their grain to Elijah to distil. The business ran successfully, and after Elijah’s death in 1838, the distillery was left to his son, Oscar. It was Oscar who built a larger distillery, working with chemist Dr. James C. Crow. ‘Old Pepper’ bourbon grows in popularity, and in 1867, the distillery is passed to James E. Pepper.
James was proud of his continued use of his grandfather’s original Revolutionary-era recipes, naming his whiskey ‘Old 1776’ as a tribute. However, in 1879 financial problems meant that James had to sell the family distillery, though he rebuilt the James E. Pepper distillery soon after, which was the largest bourbon distillery in the US at the time. James E. Pepper passed away in 1906, and before his death, he had hidden a reserve of three hundred barrels of whisky at the distillery, for his personal use. The brand managed to survive during Prohibition as it was still sold for medicinal purposes, and the brand continued to thrive after it was repealed.
1958 saw some hard times fall on the brand, and in the 1970s the stocks were sold and the distillery was abandoned. However, in 2008 in a historical moment, Amir Peay acquired the rights to the brand and relaunched it. We spoke to him about the revival of the brand here.