Another Spirit of 76: George Washingtons Whiskey

When George Washington left the presidency in 1797, he may have brought his political career to a close, but he didn’t stop working.He returned to his Virginia estate, Mount Vernon, where he opened what would become his final legacy: a distillery.At the encouragement of his Scottish-born farm manager, James Anderson, Washington bought a set of copper stills to turn the extra grain grown on his expansive farm into whiskey.

A lot of whiskey: Within a year the Mount Vernon distillery was one of the largest in the country, primarily producing rye.“Two hundred gallons of Whiskey will be ready this day,” he wrote to his nephew William Washington in 1799.“The sooner it is taken the better, as the demand for this article (in these parts) is brisk.”George Washington died later that year, and the building burned down soon after.

Its remnants sat forgotten until 2001, when a group of distilling companies teamed up with Mount Vernon and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a trade group, to bring it back it as a working distillery....