12/7/2023 0 Comments Uncle nearest whiskey commercialRay Walker, the owner and founder of Saint Cloud, a luxury bourbon company that contract distils in Kentucky and operates in California, wants whiskey to be for everyone, too. Of the few dozen black-owned distilleries in the United States, only a handful make whiskey. And it helps us to show to our market that bourbon is for black folks, too… even though many companies are not focusing on selling it to them." "What Che brings in is a more obvious opening line as how to communicate. "If we see someone doing something in the community whom we can support, we do it," said Healy of Ramos. Ramos has a residence at Alley Twenty Six one Wednesday each month where he educates customers on the whiskeys being poured that night. They pour expensive, lesser-known whiskeys at break-even prices, aiming to educate their customers in a city where the black and white populations are both near 50%. "They let the market know that they wanted their business," said Shannon Healy, owner of Alley Twenty Six, a James Beard-nominated bar in Durham.Įach Wednesday, Healy hosts Whiskey Wednesday at his bar. One of the reasons cognac is associated with African Americans is because cognac producers in the 1950s made a concerted effort to target their advertising dollars to black publications like Ebony and Jet. And president Andrew Jackson once offered up a bounty to have his escaped distiller returned to him. President George Washington's rye whiskey operation, one of the largest in the country at the time, was run mostly by slaves. The stories that Ramos tells at bars and homes across Durham, North Carolina, where he lives and conducts most of his classes and tastings, helps flip the script on whiskey's history.įor instance, charred oak barrels, an indispensable component to whiskey making, might have come from the distilling practices of enslaved men who used the charcoal barrels to lessen the bite of their moonshine. I've heard this story 100 times before.'" "It's a 'wow' moment, but it's also 'Of course this happened. "When you study African American history, you find a lot of these stories in parallel industries," he said. But it has become undeniable that black people had played a role in creating America's favourite spirit. And after slavery was abolished in 1865, segregationists in the Southern whiskey industry didn't offer plaudits either. Slaveholders, for instance, weren't quick to share praise of the enslaved men who made up the majority of the whiskey workforce. Historical records from the 18th to the 20th Centuries in places like Kentucky and Tennessee don't often credit black people for their contributions to the industry. As a black man who'd always enjoyed this spirit, he noticed that something was missing at American whiskey bars and in the telling of America's whiskey story. Ramos conducts tastings, teaches cocktail classes and consults with distillers and restaurateurs, all with the aim of making whiskey more accessible. Che Ramos calls himself The Black Bourbon Guy.
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