Originally Posted by
Limoles
If comes to history of bourbon whiskey , some other mysterious secrets may be discovered :
Kentucky is famous for its bourbon whiskey, but even most Kentuckians don't know that bourbon is the invention of a Baptist minister. In Kentucky's late 18th Century frontier days, cash was scarce. Many people conducted business via barter, including supporting their churches. The local minister would receive far more tithes in grain than he could ever eat or resell, so most ran distilleries. In what was then called Bourbon County (and is now Scott County), Baptist minister and notorious cheapskate Elijah Craig was no exception. As the story goes, Craig decided to burn out the inside of the oak barrels he aged his whiskey in so he could get one more use out of them. Turns out people liked the flavor imparted by Craig's charred oak more than the straight, regular-oak aged whiskey, and thus bourbon whiskey was born. The sad irony of all this is that Baptists became teetotalers and Scott County went dry. While stolidly Baptist Scott County is now dry as a bone, local legend has it that several casks of Elijah Craig's original bourbon were placed inside the columns of the administration building of the equally Baptist Georgetown College. The legend never fails to lure guillible frat boys into trying to crack those columns open about once a decade.
Does "The Blue Grass" has anything to do with another legends ?
Being part Appalachian, Kentuckians are used to inbreeding jokes. However, there is one joke about Kentucky and inbreeding that's funny because it's true: The story of the Blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek. The Fugates were an extended family living in an isolated hollow in Eastern Kentucky ominously named Troublesome Creek. Most members of the family had "hereditary methemoglobinemia." This is an enzyme deficiency that causes a person's blood to run vein blue as opposed to arterial red. Instead of being pink, these people are tinted blue or purple. The condition is based on a recessive gene; the only way to acquire it is if both your parents pass down the love. So what were the odds of clan founder Martin Fugate taking another methemoglobinemia carrier as his wife? He did, and they settled in Troublesome Creek sometime in the mid 19th Century. Cousins marrying cousins was commonplace among isolated Appalachians, so by the time a doctor discovered the Fugates in the 1960s, there were several blue people living in the hills around Hazard.
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