Bourbon is a storytelling spirit. It goes with sitting on a porch, with twilight, with noisy, happy Christmas parties, eggnog and Old Fashioneds. It goes with comfortable chairs by the fireplace and hard stools for wintertime hunting, a nip to release the warmth, a snort to awaken that place deep within us where our stories reside.

You don’t spin tales in the same way holding a Cosmo or a Tom Collins, a spritz or a Caipirinha. If a good dry martini is “razor-blade soup,” as Roy Blount, Jr. called it, then an Old Fashioned—or better yet, plain bourbon, neat or with a few cubes of ice—is storytelling ambrosia. It comforts the heart chilled by “the sadness of the old dying Western world,” Walker Percy’s phrase from his classic essay on the subject. Donna Tartt wrote that bourbon drinkers are some of the saddest people she’s ever known, that bourbon is “the smell of parties and hilarity but also of grief.”

Perhaps that’s what makes it so American: its sweet surface, its warm generosity, and its darker undertow of melancholy. Fittingly, bourbon is aged, by law, in brand-new, charred barrels. Burning the wood releases its sugars, imparting bourbon with its particular dark sweetness. It’s associated with Kentucky—the name either comes from Bourbon County, Kentucky, or Bourbon Street in New Orleans, nobody’s sure. But it can legally be made anywhere in the United States and still be called “bourbon,” the sweet sadness all our own.

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Links:

• Ode to Bourbon: Four writers’ sweet reflection on a sour mash - Donna Tartt, John Currence, John T. Edge, and Roy Blount Jr., Garden & Gun, Holiday 2007

  
  

• Bourbon - Walker Percy, Esquire, December 1975 (PDF)

  
  

• Bourbon demand fueling barrel business: "The magic comes from the barrel" – CBS News, 60 Minutes, April 6, 2025

  
  

• How Prohibition Nearly Killed American Rye Whiskey – Catherine Rickman, Food Republic, July 30, 2023

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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