Washington Distillery

When a president leaves office these days, they leave with a lifetime pension, but until 1958, when a president left office, he was not afforded any compensation. That meant that after their time in office, they had to go back to earning a living on their own again. I understand that our presidents have a really big job, but the longest they can be in that office is eight years, so a lifelong pension doesn’t totally make sense to me, but that is clearly another story.

After his term in office, our very first president, George Washington, was approached by James Anderson in 1797, who urged him to open a whiskey distillery. Anderson, who had experience distilling grain in Scotland and Virginia, told Washington that Mount Vernon’s crops, combined with the large merchant gristmill and the abundant water supply, would make a whiskey distillery a very profitable venture, So, after his term, Washington opened that whiskey distillery. By 1799, his distillery was the largest in the country, producing 11,000 gallons of un-aged whiskey!

By the 1810 census, distilleries were quite commonplace in the United States. In fact, there were more than 3,600 operating in Virginia alone, but George Washington’s distillery was one of the largest in the nation at that time, measuring 75 x 30 feet, or 2,250 square feet as opposed to the average being 800 square feet.

George Washington’s whiskey was not bottled, branded, or barrel-aged like most whiskeys of that time. Instead, his was put in an uncharred barrel, which was usually 30 gallons in size. It was then sent into Alexandria, where it was consumed right away as an unaged whiskey. This process brought a hefty stream of cash to Mount Vernon. Not only did George Washington earn his own living, but he also paid taxes on his income. He left office and became a normal everyday citizen again.

George Washington’s Mount Vernon still produces limited batches of both aged and unaged whiskey today. These days, however, the whiskey is placed in branded bottles. It is, nevertheless, produced in the traditional 18th-century way as it was before, in George Washington’s reconstructed distillery, proving yet again that if a president was resourceful, he is unlikely to need a lifelong pension for eight years of work. I have a lot of respect for such a resourceful man like George Washington was. He didn’t expect the American people to carry his lifestyle on their backs for the rest of his life.