Bourbon and Bullets Book Review

Travel Distilled reviews Bourbon and Bullets, a book which tells true stories about whiskey, war, and military service.

There have been so many books written about bourbon you’d think there couldn’t possibly be a new angle, yet Bourbon and Bullets has found one.

Bourbon and Bullets is, as the sub-title tells us, ‘True stories about whiskey, war, and military service’. I must admit that it doesn’t immediately sound like a gripping topic, but as often happens when you focus in on something very specific, it can be fascinating.

Bourbon and Bullets Book Review

A glance down the Table of Contents gives a glimpse of what’s coming, with familiar names like George Washington, Stagg, and van Winkle, and more recent names such as Bulleit and Dave Pickerell. At the end there’s a chapter on today’s veterans who are involved in the craft whiskey movement, including Garrison Brothers, the Trinity River Distillery, the Roughstock Montana Distillery, and Stranahan’s in Denver, whose master distiller is a veteran..

What you might think would make for a fairly small book actually produces one of 248 pages, so thorough is the author’s research – clearly a man who knows his history, his military, and his bourbon!

The Author

According to the publishers, ‘John C. Tramazzo is an active duty Army officer and veteran of several deployments in support of the Global War on Terror. He is also an American whiskey enthusiast and a Kentucky Colonel.

Fred Minnick

The book gets off to a good start with a Foreword by Fred Minnick who, come to think of it, must have written as many Forewords to other people’s books as he’s written books himself. As with everything he writes, it’s highly entertaining and certainly wants to make you read the book, right from the opening sentences.

Introduction

The Introduction begins with Ulysses Grant, and covers the author’s own experiences with both war and whiskey. It tells us that the country’s main still-maker, Vendome Copper and Brass Works in Louisville, Kentucky, is veteran-owned and operated. Tramazzo writes about the dangers of alcohol, especially when you’re serving in the military and witness some awful things. Whiskey is an easy way to try to wipe the sights you see from your mind. And the Introduction ends with a fact I didn’t know: in 1935 Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by someone who had taken his first drink when he was a lieutenant in the US Army.

Chapter 1

From the very first sentence you know the author has a powerful and direct writing style, and he sets his stall out too: ‘America was built, and occasionally damaged, by firepower and whiskey.’ Wow. But whiskey was an important component of the Civil War. It calmed soldiers’ nerves before battle, it enabled them to relax if they survived, and it acted as an anesthetic if they were wounded and needed to be operated on.

George Washington

Each chapter opens with a suitable quotation from someone. It’s appropriate that an early chapter is devoted to George Washington, and opens with a remark by Washington himself:

“The benefits arising from the moderate use of liquor have been experienced in all armies in all armies, and are not to be disputed!”

It can’t have been too hard, then, for George Washington’s Scottish farm manager, James Anderson, to persuade him to open a distillery, especially when Anderson promised him it would make him money – and it certainly did.

Dave Pickerell

It’s good to see a chapter near the end on Dave Pickerell, who provides a natural link between the older and newer entries, as Pickerell was involved in the reconstruction of George Washington’s distillery at Mount Vernon. He went to the US Military Academy at West Point, and when he left the military as Major Pickerell he went into the spirits business and five years later he was the master distiller at Maker’s Mark. He stayed there for 14 years, and saw their production increase from 175,000 cases a year to almost one million.

Index

You can see just from this very small bit of the Index just how much the book packs in.

This is an excellent and very thoroughly-researched book, and a pleasure to read if you have even the remotest interest in bourbon, the military, or history generally.