Is the public allowed to purchase any of the whiskey?
We tasted premium bourbons from Kentucky and Tennessee as well as Virginia Gentleman, including Maker’s Mark (my personal favorite), Jack Daniel’s, Woodford Reserve, I.W. Harper, Geo. A. Dickel, Jim Beam, Rebel Yell and Wild Turkey. Fifty bottles of each bourbon were auctioned off in 2003 to raise money for the restoration of the distillery.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, given the fact that we had to drive back to Washington, we weren’t able to sample the Cruzan rum from St. Croix or the small 10-gallon barrel of George Washington American Whiskey, a special batch doubly distilled at Mount Vernon two years ago by Dangler’s company.
The special batch was made according to the rye recipe used by Washington himself, in an exact replica of a 200-year-old copper still found at the Smithsonian Institution, which Treasury agents confiscated from a moonshiner in Fairfax County in 1940. Although the still is stamped with the date 1787, Pogue doubts that it came from Washington’s distillery. The replica was made by a Louisville company, as were the whiskey barrels.
If everything goes according to plan, whiskey lovers will soon find bottles of George Washington’s whiskey, just as he made it and no doubt sampled it, and I’ll be one of the first in line to buy it.
http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Features/CapitalLiving/060905.html