George Garvin Brown and Old Forester

George Garvin Brown was born in Munfordville (opens in a new tab) on September 2, 1846, and moved to Louisville in 1862. He went to Male High School and started out as a wholesale drug salesman. That trade taught him something about the whiskey business: doctors and pharmacists bought it as medicine and needed to trust what was in the bottle.

In Brown’s day, distillers shipped their whiskey in barrels, casks and kegs. Bars and grocers bought it wholesale and sold it in their own bottles, and some watered or doctored it before they did. ExploreKYHistory (opens in a new tab) notes that this hurt customers, the doctors who prescribed whiskey, and the distillers whose names were attached to it.

In 1870 Brown and his half-brother, J. T. S. Brown Jr., started J. T. S. Brown and Brothers. Their answer was Old Forester (opens in a new tab), sold only in sealed glass bottles so that no one between the distillery and the buyer could tamper with it. Brown signed every label as his guarantee and trademarked the name, and he first sold it through pharmacies.

Where the name came from is disputed. The usual account says it honored a Louisville physician, Dr. William Forrester, which may explain the early two-“r” spelling. ExploreKYHistory notes that other sources name Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest instead, and no one knows for sure why the spelling changed.

Brown’s bookkeeper, George Forman, became his partner, and in 1890 the firm took the name Brown-Forman (opens in a new tab). Brown was the first president of the National Liquor Dealers’ Association in 1894 and wrote a book against Prohibition in 1910. He died in 1917 and is buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery (opens in a new tab).

During Prohibition (opens in a new tab), Old Forester was one of six Kentucky brands bottled under federal permits for medicinal use. A generation after Brown’s first bottles, the 1897 Bottled-in-Bond Act put a federal guarantee behind some whiskey labels too. ExploreKYHistory credits Brown’s company with the first commercially bottled bourbon, one of many bourbon “firsts” that historians still argue over.

Kentucky today

Old Forester is now distilled on Louisville’s Whiskey Row (opens in a new tab), at 119 West Main Street, which Wikipedia says was the company’s home in the 1880s. Brown-Forman is still headquartered in Louisville and is still controlled by Brown’s descendants. Like Evan Williams on the wharf and Frederick Stitzel’s barrel racks, Brown’s idea helped make Louisville a center of the bourbon trade.