The liquor stock at Delilah’s, a dark punk and country bar on North Lincoln Avenue, can make you think you’re seeing triple. Not only is there no room for more bottles behind the bar, there’s barely space for the bottles that are already there.
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Miller’s been mulling this idea since Delilah’s tenth anniversary in 2003, which he celebrated by bottling and selling shots from a single barrel of decade-old wheat bourbon he’d sampled in Kentucky. This year, for Delilah’s 13th anniversary, he did the same thing with a 13-year-old rye bourbon, then worked to make more of it available. “The idea was to continue to produce it,” he says.
Miller has deep connections in the whiskey world–especially the Kentucky part of it, where he gets access to forgotten barrels in the back corners of warehouses. He claims to know every master distiller in the Kentucky bourbon business, and says that a well-known distiller in Scotland (whose name he agreed not to disclose) has promised to let him cherry-pick from its barrels once a year. The bottles for Delilah’s have arrived from France, the labels (an eye-catching monochromatic design) are finished, and Miller has a local distributor, Maxwell Street Trading. Larger distributors have expressed interest but Miller has turned them down, saying he doesn’t want to grow too fast.
If American whiskey producers missed their own comeback, that’s not so surprising: they’ve had a tough century. Before Prohibition, whiskey was America’s drink, and it was produced in prodigious quantities. “As soon as Prohibition hit, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of barrels in dozens and dozens of distilleries,” Miller says. “All these family distilleries–what are they going to do with all this whiskey? They’re fucked. Some people had licenses where they could continue to bottle for medicinal purposes only–you could get a prescription for whiskey.” In fact, Delilah’s carries one brand, Old Mock, whose pre-Prohibition bottles came with a medicinal label on the back. It’s $40 a shot.
But even Miller, who likes to say that his bar “is never going to be Delilah’s Martini Ranch,” admits that prestige whiskey isn’t what most Americans think of as whiskey. “The market will still continue to consume more young American whiskey than older whiskey,” he says, before uttering a statistic that must give him heartburn. “I mean, 75 percent of whiskey is mixed with Coke.”
