Book Review: “Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey”

By Richard Thomas

Released earlier this year to much fanfare, Michael Veach’s Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey is exactly what bourbon drinkers who are also readers have been thirsting for for at least twenty years now: a narrative history of Kentucky’s bourbon industry, produced by a regular publisher and written in modern times. As such, the book deserves all the attention it has received and more.

Veach is one of the very few individuals who could be described as a professional, independent bourbon historian: someone who gets paid to do bourbon history, but not at the behest of a liquor company (at least not in the present). It shows, with almost a quarter of the book’s page count going to the endnotes. That sort of attention to academic detail doesn’t make the book an academic work, however. Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey is instead an easy read, entertaining the reader as it  paints a clear picture of the ups and downs of distilling in Kentucky, from Revolutionary times right into the early 21st Century.

If you read and drink bourbon, and in particular if you like to read while you drink bourbon, this is the book for you. My only complaint was with the Kindle version, where the conversion from print to e-book formatting proved crude and distracting when it came to the factoid boxes. The fault there lies with the University of Kentucky Press, however, and not Mr. Veach.