Few industries rely more heavily on tradition and legacy than whiskey. And when it comes to American whiskey, bourbon—and its Kentucky roots—dominate the conversation. 

But that leaves out a huge chunk of the story—something Laura Fields is trying to change.

A contrarian who delights in proving that commonly held beliefs about whiskey are actually not-quite-accurate, Fields runs the Dram Devotees website and American Whiskey History page on Facebook, where she posts lively stories about key players and events, many unknown to even the most ardent whiskey nerds. Stories like those about Seton Porter, who quietly influenced the government during Prohibition and emerged, at Repeal, as the head of the most powerful distilling company in the world, doing often-shady business with the likes of Joseph Kennedy and Winston Churchill. Or the real John E. Fitzgerald who was not, despite popular lore, a thieving tax man.

Fields upends our understanding of well-known figures too, like Lem Motlow, the longtime owner of Jack Daniel’s, who shot a train conductor in a drunken rage—and got away with it. “These are things that people don’t talk about,” she says: ugly facts that marketers would prefer to sweep under the rug. Good thing Fields, whose research sources run the gamut from obscure genealogies to geology textbooks, always has receipts.

A resident of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, by day Fields runs the Delaware Valley Fields Foundation, educating about and raising support for small farms. Her historical research, which she mostly does at night, after her kids are in bed, intertwines with the nonprofit but is deeply personal, driven by pride in her home state and a desire to correct the record. For hundreds of years—long before Kentucky bourbon came to the fore—Pennsylvania was home to the bestselling whiskey in America: rye. 

“We have this huge amount of history behind us that nobody cares about,” Fields says. “I care. I make sure these people get recognized and remembered.”

In addition to starting the American Whiskey Convention—a tasting event that also includes craftspeople from adjacent industries like milling, malting, coopering, and, of course, farming—as a way to connect modern drinkers with the tangible side of whiskey history, Fields also created the SeedSpark Project to revive historic rye varieties. The efforts pull Fields’ historic research off the page and into the real world—proof that this work, however obscure, offers a real payoff for craft whiskey distillers, and drinkers too, in the form of diversified methods, ingredients, and flavors.

“Understanding our history is part of paving the way toward the future,” she says. “I don't think you could improve on the present without understanding your past.”

The New Wine Review talked with Fields about which whiskey facts are “absolute hogwash,” why rectification is a good thing, actually, and what whiskey historians repeatedly get wrong.

The New Wine Review: I’ve read a lot of whiskey books, but almost everything you post on the American Whiskey History page is completely new to me—totally original research. What resources do you use to uncover this information?

Laura Fields: Nothing is secret. It just depends on what you're willing to read. So I read everything. I read stuff about trade on the canals. I read about old cooking methods back in the 1600s and 1700s. I read about Canadian whiskey and the Bronfmans and how that came to be. I read about Mexican distilleries. A lot of the old cocktail books give little insights into why and when they were using particular products.

You can get information from anywhere. I've got a bunch of books on water and water tables, because all of that is influencing whiskey making too. The temperature of groundwater in Pennsylvania is colder than the temperature of groundwater in Kentucky, so guess who's got the leg up? It changes the character of the whiskey that you're making when your method of cooling is groundwater.

You can come at it from any angle, and I've had to, because there are no texts written on the history of rye whiskey. So it's like, what do you look at? Mostly it's local historians from the 1800s who have written about their ancestry—books on genealogy, things like that. What I end up doing is focusing on the people.

There's so many damn rabbit holes you can fall into. And that is me, welcome to my world. I live in a rabbit hole. A lot of the time while I'm down in that rabbit hole, I run into something that jibes with what I've read in the bourbon books. It's this spider web of information.

The New Wine Review: Some of the things you write are incendiary, and I mean that as a compliment. Are you intentionally trying to poke the bear, or educate drinkers, or is it just for fun?

Laura Fields: All of the above. I mean, honestly, I'm not necessarily interested in poking the bear. Nobody writes about the guys who actually were the movers and shakers of the liquor industry. And the more I read about it, the more I realize why nobody writes about them. They were dangerous men.

You can go and read my Seton Porter entry that I did on Dram Devotees. It's pretty long, but it gets into the Kennedys and these very dangerous people that worked with the oil industry and the coal industry, and there was a lot of money and a lot of violence and just horrifying stuff.

I wrote about [fromer Jack Daniel's boss] Lem Motlow being a murderer—these are things that people don't talk about. I mean, I literally just read a book that Brown-Forman published in the 1970s and it talked about how Lem Motlow was this pillar of society. Oh my God. And as I'm reading it, I'm like, how do I trust anything that you guys publish? How do I trust anything? That kind of stuff drives me to go: people need to know this just so that they know what they're dealing with.

The reason that I am always this kind of counterpoint to everything that's being written is because I'm probably the only person viewing American whiskey through the lens of rye. I do not focus on bourbon. I'm focused on Pennsylvania first and foremost. All of those voices that existed in Pennsylvania that made Pennsylvania rye whiskey the bestselling American rye whiskey before prohibition were just silenced. It went away. Prohibition destroyed it. And even when it tried to come back after Prohibition, they were so shut out by the powers that be.

I went down to the Oscar Goetz Museum in Bardstown, Kentucky. Now it's called the Bourbon Museum. And that shocked me because there's nothing bourbon about this. This is an American whiskey museum. And I know that Oscar Goetz knew that because he called it the Whiskey Museum. All of the whiskey that's in there, it's from everywhere. And there's so much Pennsylvania rye in there. It was very eye-opening to me.

The New Wine Review: You’ve written that most whiskey facts aren’t facts, they’re simply consensus. My favorite example of this is that the term “the angels’ share” is treated like an ancient proverb when it was actually invented by marketers. What untrue “fact” drives you especially crazy?

Laura Fields: Somebody said I don't know how long ago that there were six distilleries producing medicinal whiskey during Prohibition, and that stuck. It's in every article ever written about the history of whiskey. It drives me bonkers! It’s absolute hogwash.

The history of American whiskey is all through the lens of bourbon. This is what comes of it. Rye is older by 200 years. I always use the metaphor, if you're studying American history and the only thing you're studying is World War II, you're missing some stuff. You’ve got to go back further than that.

I find it frustrating that there's so much regurgitation of information that was put out in the early 2000s, and no one is interested in vetting any of that. People come to me saying, why do you feel differently about this? Well, I'm not deciding to feel differently about this. These aren’t opinions that I'm giving to people. That's why every time I post something, I put information, I put resources that I got it from. I’m not just drawing this out of thin air. These aren't theories. I'm talking about things that I'm reading and I'm asking people to contradict me.

The New Wine Review: What’s the biggest misunderstanding about American whiskey history you see, or the most shocking thing you’ve discovered to be untrue?

Laura Fields: People still don't understand: everything in the liquor store is made by the same people. It's a very obvious thing from the perspective of someone that understands the industry, but I am on too many pages where everybody just wants the next and the next release from the same company. And the difference between those two whiskies is so slight, but they will write a dissertation on them, and it just feels like they're missing such a big world.

Another thing that frustrates me: the idea that rectification is the devil. We are rectifying whiskey and just not calling it that. Barrel finishes are rectification. That word rectification has been so sullied. And that's a shame because when you rectify something, you make it better.

[Before Prohibition] America was head over heels for rectified whiskies. They were such a threat to the straight whiskey industry because they were so unique. Each individual liquor firm had its own blend. When I taste things like Barrell today, that gets me excited. The blenders at Barrell are doing some incredible things. Their Seagrass is out of this world, and that reminds me more of pre-Prohibition, rectified whiskeys than anything else. Those unique profiles that are just so different from everything else.

The New Wine Review: Is it possible to generalize about the flavor of pre-Prohibition American whiskey?

Laura Fields: For me, historic whiskeys are research and tasting them is opening a time capsule and having insight into what distilling was like in the past. And I can tell you it used to be better. There was a great deal more whiskey variation to be had back then than there is today. When you consider that when you walk into a liquor store, about 80% of what's on the shelf is made by about eight or nine distilleries. That was not the case.

There were literal studies done in the early 1900s on the scientific character of whiskey, where they did measurements on how much fusel oil, how many esters—they actually quantified everything. And they found that rye contained more of everything. It was just a heavier-bodied spirit. There's a lot of reasons for that, but the biggest reason is the fact that it's made from rye grain. Even bourbon itself has been touting the idea that the flavoring grain in bourbon is rye. They don't call corn the flavoring grain. There's a good reason for that. If you want your whiskey to have a lot of flavor in it, you should probably use more flavoring grain.

The New Wine Review: The SeedSpark project is directly responsible for the revival of Rosen rye, which has become a bit of a darling among craft distillers and whiskey nerds. How did that come about?

Laura Fields: I started to do research into the history of whiskey in Pennsylvania because I needed it to understand what I was doing with the American Whiskey Convention. I would go on these long quests and take copious notes on who all these distillers were sourcing from, who they were doing business with, what inspired them to become distillers, all this stuff. I was looking for something to bring attention to with the Seed Spark project, because it was ultimately about maintaining grain farms across the state. My thought was to propose some kind of value-added grain to these farmers and say, Hey, grow this stuff so you can make money.

That's when I met Eric Wolfe and Dick Stoll at Stoll & Wolfe. They said they’d love to be able to distill with Rosen rye. And I was like, what is this Rosen you speak of? I looked online and I couldn't find it anywhere. It occurred to me the only way I could do this was to source the seed from a seed bank. As it turns out, in 2015 Penn State had grown five ounces of it in a greenhouse on site, on a whim. I called up Greg Roth, who was the manager at the Agricultural Extension of Penn State, and he said, we're not doing it again. We’re not funded. So I wrote him a check. Now there's 10 or so different distillers that are using it in PA now.

The New Wine Review: What does the future for rye look like in the broader American whiskey context?

Laura Fields: When Todd Leopold launched his three-chamber still I was dancing in a jig in my kitchen. Now we're getting somewhere. Now people are taking history seriously and we're going to start seeing [old-style] whiskey return in some kind of way. We're sitting pretty right now [in terms of choice], if people have the balls to expand their horizon further than bourbon. 

Bourbon has been “fighting the good fight” since the early 1900s to be the only thing on the shelves, and they did it. They won. Congratulations. You're the only thing that anybody writes books about. You're the only thing that anybody cares about. I found this very frustrating for the American Whiskey Convention, that if you don't say bourbon, nobody knows what the hell you're talking about. You say rye whiskey and everybody's like, I don't like rye. That's only because you don't know what rye is.

There's a lot more out there and there's a lot more to be done, and we haven't even scratched the surface as far as I'm concerned. If people are open to learning it— that's ultimately what it comes down to.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.