Bourbon Heritage Month: The Black History Behind America’s Whiskey
Every September, the whiskey industry raises a glass to Bourbon Heritage Month. The bottles come out, the “America’s native spirit” language returns, and the toasts begin. I love the celebration. I just want us to be honest about whose heritage we’re celebrating.
Bourbon Heritage Month became official in 2007, when the U.S. Senate passed a resolution recognizing September as a time to honor bourbon’s place in American culture. But the heritage is far older than the resolution and far Blacker than most of the marketing lets on.
The hands that built bourbon
In the 18th and 19th centuries, much of the labor that produced American whiskey came from enslaved and, later, freed Black people. They tended the mash. They read the char on the barrel. They knew by nose when a spirit had turned the corner from raw to refined. The most famous name we have is Nathan “Nearest” Green — the formerly enslaved distiller who taught Jack Daniel — but Nearest is the visible tip of a much larger, mostly unrecorded story. For every name we know, there are hundreds we never will. Their palates shaped the category. Their names rarely made the label.
That gap between who built the craft and who got to own it is the gap New Dawn exists to close.
Why I make whiskey
I didn’t arrive at whiskey as an outsider looking for a trend. I was raised into it — my grandfather’s Southern kitchen, my father’s whiskey cabinet, childhood moments on the river where flavor and memory ran together. I went on to earn a PhD in ecology and spend a decade in conservation, and somewhere in all of it I became a supertaster with a scientist’s vocabulary for what I was tasting. Whiskey was always there. Building New Dawn was simply choosing to stand fully inside a heritage that was mine all along.
New Dawn is a reclamation of a seat in an industry African Americans helped build but were historically excluded from owning. Not a seat I’m asking for. One I’m taking, with a product good enough to earn it.
What to pour this month
If you want to taste that lineage, our 6-Year Cask Strength Bourbon is where I’d start. It’s 70% organic corn, 15% rye, and 15% barley, grown in New York and aged in the Catskill Mountains. The nose gives you apricot, anise, sugar cane, and chamomile; the palate is smooth for something bottled at full cask strength, with real depth underneath. It’s additive-free — no coloring, no flavoring, nothing to hide behind. It won Platinum at the 2025 L.A. Spirit Awards, and it carries its heritage honestly.
This Bourbon Heritage Month, drink with a little more intention. Buy Black-owned. Pour something that means something.
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