I like to remind people that bourbon didn’t really become bourbon until the early 1900s. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when bourbon became bourbon as we know it, because little tweaks to regulations and production standards have continued to happen over time, but the main thing that made it ‘bourbon’ was putting it into a new charred oak barrel.
Corn whiskey was predominant on the frontier because there was newspaper in 1821, but the earliest-known mention of putting corn whiskey into a barrel didn’t appear until 1826.
