So if Pappy was a distiller, who was Fitzgerald? And why did his name end up selling so many bottles? It’s a good question, and one that Pappy, if he knew the answer, didn’t exactly pass on to his children.

A candidate for the mysterious John E. Fitzgerald behind the famous brand.

Pappy’s granddaughter, Sally Van Winkle Campbell, in the excellent book But Always Fine Bourbon concedes that no one quite knows who Fitzgerald was, or why there was a brand named for him, but offers two competing narratives.

The first is perhaps calculatingly vague, and taken from a Stitzel-Weller official history from the 1950s: Fitzgerald was an “ardent imbiber with exacting taste” who would “siphon off generous helpings of this special formula for his private stock.” Does this mean that Fitzgerald was a distiller, a client of the distiller, or a just a guy? If he was the client, he wouldn’t have much need to siphon some of the whiskey since he contracted to buy it anyway. And if he was the distiller or owner, presumably there was equally no need for a special reserve with his own name? And if we he were just a guy, how was he getting into locked warehouses and stealing whiskey without upsetting anyone?



One thing we know for sure is that before it was made at Stitzel-Weller, Fitzgerald bourbon was made at what is more commonly known as the Old Judge Distillery, on Benson Creek outside of Frankfort, a little bit east of where the Buffalo Trace Distillery is today. While the brand was distilled there after 1900 or so, the brand’s founder and owner was a man named Solomon Charles Herbst from Milwaukee, a wholesale spirits dealer.

Ms. Campbell tracked down some correspondence with one of the distillers at Old Judge, who recalled conversations with Herbst suggesting that Fitzgerald was a treasury agent in Milwaukee. In those days, whiskey tax was a more significant source of revenue for the U.S. Government and whiskey warehouses were closely guarded. Only Federal agents had keys to bonded warehouses. The story goes that Fitzgerald had a refined palate and skimmed some of the better bourbon on his rounds from specific barrels such that when they finally arrived for bottling, slightly light, the barrels were called “Fitzgeralds.”

Maybe this treasury agent was the “ardent imbiber.” The story has the same thrust: special barrels, a refined palate, this time specifically attributed to Herbst, the brand’s originator. This story, of a treasury agent is the one that has stuck. Heaven Hill created a new brand of bourbon called Larceny based around the legend of Fitzgerald stalking the bonded warehouse and stealing whiskey from the best barrels, and most whiskey writers seem to accept this story as good enough.

Still, at least one historian claims that John E. Fitzgerald was a distiller — Sam Cecil, whose book on Kentucky distilleries remains the most comprehensive, if somewhat rambling and sometimes confusing account of the historical distilleries intelligently organized by registration number (since owners and names change often). Cecil seems to suggest that Fitzgerald worked at Old Judge and then went to work at a distillery in Hammond, Indiana.