Bourbon is a French royal dynasty, a county in Kentucky, a street in New Orleans and a whiskey. The whiskey took its name from one of the other three, and for two hundred years people have argued about which. The distilleries have their favourite story; the historians have a different one; and the truth is that the evidence is thin enough to leave room for all of them. This piece sets out every serious theory, what supports it, and what undermines it, in order of plausibility.
First, the word
The House of Bourbon ruled France from 1589 to 1792 and again after Napoleon. Its name comes from the town of Bourbon-l’Archambault in central France. Everything else called Bourbon is named, directly or indirectly, for the royal family. The whiskey’s spelling and pronunciation in English — “bur-bun” — are American; the French say it quite differently. The bourbon style page sets out what the word means in law today; this piece is about how it came to mean anything at all.
Theory one: Bourbon County, Kentucky
The most widely told story is the simplest. In 1785 the Virginia legislature carved a vast new county out of its western frontier and named it Bourbon County, in gratitude to the French crown for its support in the American Revolution. When Kentucky became a state in 1792, Bourbon County went with it. The original county was enormous — it covered the land of thirty-four modern counties — and the whole area was known as “Old Bourbon” for decades after it was subdivided. Farmers there distilled their surplus corn, shipped the whiskey down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and the barrels were stencilled with the name of their origin: “Old Bourbon”. Buyers downstream began asking for Bourbon whiskey.
For: The county existed, was named for the dynasty, and was a major early whiskey region. Barrels were marked with county of origin as a matter of routine. The port of Maysville, on the Ohio in what was then Bourbon County, was the main shipping point for the region’s whiskey.
Against: The modern Bourbon County, much reduced, was not an especially important distilling area in the nineteenth century, and today has only recently regained a distillery. The “Old Bourbon” shipping story is plausible but is supported by inference rather than by documents saying it happened. The earliest known printed use of “Bourbon whiskey” is an 1821 advertisement in the Western Citizen of Paris, Kentucky — which is in Bourbon County, which supports the theory, but it does not say why the whiskey was called that.
Verdict: Probably the main source, but not for quite the reason usually given. The Kentucky region page covers the geography.
Theory two: Bourbon Street, New Orleans
The historian Michael Veach, who has done more archival work on the question than anyone, proposed in the 2010s that the name came from the other end of the river. Bourbon Street in New Orleans, also named for the French dynasty, was the city’s commercial heart in the early nineteenth century. Two French brothers, Louis and John Tarascon, established a shipping business at Louisville around 1807 and began sending Kentucky whiskey downriver to New Orleans, where French-speaking buyers were used to cognac and, Veach argues, preferred whiskey that had been aged in charred barrels until it was dark and sweet like brandy. The Tarascons, or their customers, may have called the whiskey “Bourbon” after the street where it sold, and the name travelled back up the river to Kentucky.
For: Explains why charred-oak ageing became the defining feature of the style — it was imitating cognac for a French market. Explains why “bourbon” appears in Kentucky only in the 1820s, after the river trade was established. The Tarascons are real and documented.
Against: No surviving document connects the name to the street. The theory is inference from commercial logic rather than from evidence of usage.
Verdict: The most intellectually satisfying theory and quite possibly a contributing factor, but unproven.
Theory three: Elijah Craig
The distilleries’ favourite. The story goes that Elijah Craig, a Baptist minister who settled in what is now Georgetown, Kentucky, in the 1780s, was the first to age whiskey in charred barrels, around 1789, either by accident (a fire in his barn charred the staves) or by thrift (he reused barrels that had held fish and charred them to kill the smell). His whiskey was therefore the first bourbon, and the name attached to it.
For: Craig existed, was a distiller among many other enterprises, and was a prominent man in early Kentucky.
Against: Nearly everything. Craig’s distillery was in Scott County, not Bourbon County. The claim that he invented charred-barrel ageing first appears in Richard Collins’s 1874 history of Kentucky, eighty-five years after the fact, with no source. No contemporary record calls Craig’s whiskey bourbon or describes him charring barrels. Charred-oak ageing was known in Europe long before 1789. The story was adopted by the whiskey industry in the nineteenth century because a Baptist minister made a respectable founder for a product under attack from temperance campaigners, and it has been maintained since because Heaven Hill named its small-batch bourbon after him; the Heaven Hill page notes the connection.
Verdict: Legend. Craig was a real distiller and the brand is a good whiskey, but he did not invent bourbon and did not name it.
Theory four: direct tribute to the French kings
A variant holds that early Kentucky distillers, many of French descent or sympathy, named the whiskey for the royal house directly, as a mark of quality — “Bourbon” meaning “the king’s” or “the best”.
For: France was popular on the American frontier after the Revolution, and French names were given freely to towns, counties and children.
Against: No evidence of the word being applied to whiskey before the county and the street existed, which makes the indirect route far more likely than the direct one.
Verdict: Unlikely as an independent origin; the dynasty’s name reached the whiskey through geography.
Theory five: it was just a type
A deflationary possibility is that “Bourbon whiskey” in the 1820s meant no more than “whiskey from the Bourbon region”, in the way that “Monongahela rye” meant rye from western Pennsylvania, and that it became a style name only gradually as the Kentucky method — corn, charred oak — became associated with the place. On this view the name did not have an origin so much as a drift, and the question of which Bourbon is slightly beside the point: the county gave the region its name, the region gave the whiskey its name, and the river trade spread it.
Verdict: Probably the truest description of what actually happened, if the least satisfying.
Why the question matters
It is easy to dismiss all of this as trivia, but the stories have done real work. The Elijah Craig legend gave bourbon a respectable origin at a time when the industry needed one, and it has sold a great many bottles. The Bourbon County story anchors the whiskey to Kentucky, which the state’s distillers have every reason to encourage. The Bourbon Street theory, if right, explains the single most important fact about the style — the charred barrel — as a response to a market rather than a lucky accident, which changes how one thinks about the whole history. Which story a distillery tells on its tour says something about what it wants bourbon to be.
What became of the word
Whatever its source, by the 1840s “bourbon” meant corn whiskey aged in charred oak, from Kentucky or made in the Kentucky manner, and by 1964 a resolution of Congress declared it a “distinctive product of the United States”, which is why it may be made in any state but nowhere else. The glossary and the label guide cover the legal meaning today. Every bourbon in our reviews, including the one named after the minister who did not invent it, carries a name that nobody can fully explain — which seems, for a spirit built on stories, about right.
