John Hansell's recent request for good whiskey deals resulted in a couple of suggestions for Bourbon that was "bottled in bond". If you've spent any time browsing a decent selection of Bourbon, you'll have seen this before, but what does it mean?
Simply put, a "bonded" spirit is one that was aged and bottled in a warehouse that's under the supervision of government agents. Specifically, 27 CFR 5.42 states that it must be:
1. Composed of whiskies that are of the same type
2. Those whiskies be produced within a single distilling season
3. Stored for at least four years in a bonded warehouse
4. Unaltered after leaving the cask, except for filtering
5. Reduced to 100 proof by only adding pure water
6. Bottled at 100 proof
But why? What's the big deal? Well, to understand why the label is around, you have to take in the context of when the original law was passed. The Bottled-in-Bond Act was signed into law in 1897, back when there weren't any regulations on what you put in a bottle. Unscrupulous retailers were more than willing to mix together tobacco and iodine and put it in a bottle and call it whiskey. The real distillers of the time felt this was unfair, so they looked to Congress for help. The law effectively carved out a tax exemption for distillers willing to let the government supervise their production process. By having the government supervise the warehouses, the producers didn't pay taxes on production until the bottles left the building. Then consumers would know that the product in the bottle met the six criteria mentioned above, and to ensure that things were kept clean, they'd put a green tax stamp over the top of the bottle to make sure you knew that it hadn't been tampered with.
The effect was staggering. Once the bonded whisky became available in 1901, the non-bonded whiskey dried up. The success of the law dovetailed into the others that regulated food labeling and the formation of the FDA in 1906.
But much has changed in the last century. Now we have legal definitions for all spirits and close supervision to ensure that we don't get fooled by what's on the label. The tax exemption proved to be so great that practically all aged spirits produced in America are done in bonded warehouses. So producers can get the tax benefit and avoid the extra requirements by merely flouting one of the six rules.
Today, a bonded whiskey means something else. It's the producer taking the challenge of bottling a whiskey that might change between seasons. It also assures a very small amount of blending is involved, which cannot be said for "small batch" whiskies. In short, those bonded whiskies are a treat because they're so rare. But unlike the fake whiskies they replaced, they aren't going away any time soon.