The Distillery Died. The Name Didn't.

Issue No. 001 · Originally published 30 July 2026 · Restored and expanded, October 2026

Pick up a bottle of Michter’s US★1 and you are holding an argument.

The star-and-numeral on the label is not decoration. US★1 is shorthand for America’s first whiskey company — the brand’s own claim, built into the name of its entire core range. Michter’s dates that company to 1753, in Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, which would make it older than the republic it’s named after.

Then there is a second set of facts, equally real. The Pennsylvania distillery that date refers to has produced nothing since February 1990. The name “Michter’s” was not attached to it until 1975. And the company selling you that bottle acquired the name in 1997, as a lapsed trademark, for about $245.

Both of those stories are true. They are just not the same story.

IS TODAY'S MICHTER'STHE SAME MICHTER'S?

That question has no yes-or-no answer, and the reason it doesn’t is the most portable thing in this issue. “The same” can mean four completely different things, and Michter’s is the rare case where all four come apart cleanly enough to see.

Keep those four words. Every revived historical bourbon on the shelf — and there are many — can be read with them.

Start with the strongest version of Michter’s case, because it is stronger than sceptics usually allow.

The Schaefferstown site is a genuine National Historic Landmark. The nomination that earned it that status is a federal document, and it is unambiguous. Under “specific dates” it reads “Site: 1753-present.” In its statement of significance it calls the property “both the Nation’s oldest distillery and a primary extant example of the small scale commercial distilling operations” that built the American whiskey trade. On a continuation sheet it is more specific still:

“In 1753 John Shenk, a Swiss Mennonite farmer, and his brother Michael built a gristmill and distillery on the banks of Snitzel Creek on the present Bomberger site.”

That is the federal government, in writing, saying there was a distillery there in 1753.

Now read the rest of the document.

The nomination was prepared in March 1978 by a historian at the American Association for State and Local History. Its bibliography — the list of what the claim is built on — contains general histories of American eating and manufacturing, two publications from liquor-industry trade bodies, a magazine feature, and two primary items of a particular kind: a letter dated 23 February 1978, and an interview conducted on 11 February 1978. Both are with the same person.

His name was Louis Forman. He was the distillery’s president. He was also, by most accounts, the man who had given it the name Michter’s.

There is a further wrinkle worth having. Local Pennsylvania history traces the 1753 date to a Lebanon County tax record showing a Michael Shenk among the taxpayers of Heidelberg Township. A tax roll proves a man was there and paying. It does not prove what he was making.

And the physical evidence is younger than the claim. The nomination dates the surviving buildings to about 1840 — a distance of nearly ninety years from the founding story they’re used to support.

What the record does support is a long and genuinely impressive run of Pennsylvania whiskey-making. The federal nomination traces it in order.

1. The Shenks John and Michael, from 1753 — an adjunct to the gristmill and the farm
2. ↓
3. Rudolph Meyer Michael Shenk's son-in-law, from the early 1780s. Two stills by 1782, a third by 1790
4. ↓
5. John Kratzer From 1827, through his wife Elizabeth Shenk Kratzer, a founder's granddaughter
6. ↓
7. The Bombergers Abe Bomberger from 1861, then his son Horst — the name the site carried into the twentieth century

That is four surnames across roughly 165 years, and none of them is Michter.

It is also not continuous. The federal nomination has Horst Bomberger running the site “until the implementation of prohibition in 1919” — other chronologies put the halt as early as 1917 — and it stayed dark until after repeal in 1933. Fourteen years, at least, and longer than national Prohibition itself. Whatever “unbroken since 1753” means, it cannot mean uninterrupted.

After repeal the site changed hands repeatedly — the Lebanon Valley Distilling Company, Schenley, Pennco among others. The nomination’s own description of that era is the detail most often left out of the romance: for the most part, it says, the distillery “has produced whiskey in bulk for other distillers.”

Long before the modern brand bought whiskey from other people, the historic distillery was selling whiskey to other people.

Here is the fact that rearranges everything else.

“Michter’s” is not an eighteenth-century name, a Pennsylvania Dutch word, or a family surname. Louis Forman built it from the first syllables of his two sons’ names — Michael and Peter. And the company was reorganised under it in 1975.

Read that against the other dates. The name was fifteen years old when the distillery closed. The buildings it was painted on were roughly 135 years older than it was. A drinker buying a bottle of Michter’s in Pennsylvania in 1980 was holding a brand younger than the Apollo programme, on a site that had been making whiskey, on and off, for two centuries.

The end was not dramatic. It was a phone call.

The independent whiskey historian Chuck Cowdery, who has written the clearest account of it, reports that the bank ordered master distiller Dick Stoll to shut the plant down, send everyone home, and turn off the lights. The owners, facing an unpaid tax bill, had simply walked away. “On Valentine’s Day 1990,” Cowdery writes, “everything was abandoned.”

Everything is the operative word. Not just the stills and the warehouses — the company’s assets entire, including its name.

The whiskey still sitting in those warehouses was sold by the county for back taxes. Cowdery’s account of its fate is careful, and we’ll be equally careful: it was probably redistilled into ethanol. You will see that detail reported as certainty elsewhere. The best available source hedges it, so we do too.

The name track is the one to read twice. For the first two hundred and twenty-two years of that timeline it does not exist at all — and it is the only line that crosses 1990.

Seven years later, two men went looking for the name.

Joseph J. Magliocco had sold Michter’s as a summer job between his sophomore and junior years of college; his family’s firm distributed it. Richard “Dick” Newman was a former Austin Nichols executive with Wild Turkey behind him. They discovered the trademark was unused and unclaimed, and filed.

United States Patent and Trademark Office records show the application for the MICHTER’S mark filed on 21 March 1997, registering in January 2002, with first use in commerce claimed as 11 October 2000.

To Magliocco’s considerable credit, he has never dressed this up. In his own account:

“we paid the $245 and we became the owner of the Michter’s name. We had no whiskey, no formulas, no packaging, nothing—just the name and an idea.”

That is a more honest sentence than most brand histories contain, and it is worth holding onto when the marketing elsewhere gets grander. The company’s own Legacy page likewise describes what it filed for as the “unused and abandoned” Michter’s trademark. Michter’s does not actually hide the gap. It simply doesn’t put it on the label.

A name and an idea do not fill a bottle. For its first eighteen years, modern Michter’s sold whiskey other people had made.

The outlines are documented, mostly through labels. From September 2000 to spring 2002, Julian Van Winkle III bottled Michter’s casks in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky — the 10 Year Rye and Bourbon of that era carry it. From July 2002, bottling moved to Kentucky Bourbon Distillers in Bardstown, the Willett operation, and the labels say Bardstown accordingly. From the mid-2000s, an undisclosed Kentucky distillery made whiskey to Michter’s account.

Undisclosed is the accurate word. Michter’s has never named that distillery. A particular producer is very widely reported, and we are not going to print it as established fact on the strength of repetition.

Sourcing whiskey is not a crime. Selling a two-hundred-year story while doing it is a different question.

Most distilleries start with a still and add a brand. Michter’s did it in the opposite order, and finished the job properly.

Construction at Shively, in Louisville, began in 2012; the first whiskey distilled there ran in 2015. The restored Fort Nelson building downtown opened to the public on 2 February 2019. Which means the young whiskey in the range is now the company’s own, while the oldest bottlings still draw on whiskey acquired from others. By the construction dates, the oldest Michter’s-made stock is around a decade old — our arithmetic, not a company announcement.

Then there are the pot stills at Fort Nelson, which are usually told as the issue’s romantic ending: the original Schaefferstown stills, rescued and brought home.

They are real, and the journey is real. But the dates deserve a look. Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Louisville quoted the equipment in December 1975 and shipped it to Schaefferstown in February 1976.

THE STILLS ARE EXACTLYAS OLD AS THE NAME.

They are not eighteenth-century artefacts. They are 1970s equipment, built in Louisville, that went to Pennsylvania, outlived the company that ordered them, and came back to within a few miles of where they were made. That is a better story than the one it replaces, and it has the advantage of being true.

From here the issue stops asking what Michter’s inherited and starts asking what it built.

Michter’s is not unusual in having a complicated lineage. It is unusual in how cleanly its four lines separate. Most revived brands are murkier. The questions, though, are always the same four, and you can ask them in a store in under a minute.

In December 2012, a Pennsylvania venture filed to use the name Bomberger’s — the family that ran the Schaefferstown distillery for half a century. Behind it was Erik Wolfe, working with Dick Stoll, the same master distiller the bank had phoned in 1990.

Michter’s had meanwhile released Bomberger’s Declaration, and asserted earlier use. Its counsel wrote that Chatham “began referencing ‘Bomberger’s’ and using its Bomberger’s Declaration trademark in commerce prior to your client’s alleged first use in commerce date of September 23, 2014,” and asked the Pennsylvania side to withdraw.

Both men went on the record. Magliocco: “We wholeheartedly believe in good faith that both the facts and the law support our rights to the brand Bomberger’s Declaration.” Wolfe, more bluntly, called it “them using further legal wrangling to export our local history,” and added the line that sticks: “We are just trying to keep local history local.”

We could not establish how it formally ended. The trade coverage leaves it unresolved in March 2015. What is on the record is what happened next: the Pennsylvania distillery opened in 2017 under a different name — Stoll & Wolfe — about eight miles from the original site. Dick Stoll died in 2020.

So: is Michter’s America’s first whiskey company?

It depends entirely on what you’ll accept as continuity. The claim holds only if you accept a 1753 founding with no primary distilling record behind it, and treat a company as continuous across a sixteen-year production halt, a bankruptcy, the total abandonment of every asset, seven years of dormancy, a change of state, and complete replacement of the owners, the staff, the buildings, the equipment and the recipes.

Under a narrower definition — continuous operation, or continuous ownership, or continuous production — it does not hold.

Michter’s isn’t lying to you. It’s using a definition of “same” that it has never been asked to defend.

And the company’s current wording shows someone has thought about this carefully. The website says the whiskey company “which ultimately became known as Michter’s” was founded in 1753. That construction asserts a line of descent without claiming unbroken anything. It is doing a great deal of quiet work.

Where Michter’s is plainly straight with you is the folklore. Asked about George Washington buying whiskey there, the company itself files the story under “Pennsylvania historical lore” rather than history. That is the right call, and more than most brands make.

The current range is best read not as a ladder but as a set of questions. One caution first, and it applies to every row below: Michter’s publishes no mash bills. Any percentage you’ve seen attached to these whiskeys is inference.

Not a ranking. A decision, by what you want.

• Want the house style? US★1 Bourbon. It is the control glass for everything else.
• Want to learn something? US★1 American Whiskey, against the bourbon. Used barrel against new charred oak, same house.
• Want the single most interesting bottle? Sour Mash — a whiskey that fits no standard category.
• Want the story in the glass? Shenk's or Bomberger's, knowing exactly what you're buying.
• Chasing the 20 Year? Know that you are buying someone else's distillate at a collector's price.

US★1 Small Batch

Michter's US★1 Bourbon

Michter's Distillery · 91.4 Proof

Issue No. 001's featured bottle — the modern Michter's house style, and the reference point the rest of the range is measured against.

TBD

Review Pending

Here is the exercise this issue is built for, and it needs no allocated bottle.

Pour US★1 Bourbon, US★1 Sour Mash and US★1 American Whiskey side by side. Same producer, same era, same broad house character — but three different legal categories and, critically, three different relationships to the barrel.

Score only three things: sweetness, wood, and finish length. Write your scores down before anyone says anything out loud. Groupthink is real, and bourbon people are not magically immune to it.

The question is not which is best. It is which differences come from the grain and which come from the wood — because the American Whiskey, matured in used barrels, is the one that tells you what new charred oak was doing in the other two.

This issue’s cocktail keeps the name it was given in 2026, because the name is the lesson: 103 is the entry proof, and the drink is built to put texture — the thing that number is supposed to affect — in front of everything else.

The build is deliberately spare. Sugar and bitters only, no citrus, no vermouth, nothing aromatic competing with the whiskey’s own weight.

We haven’t made it yet, and we’re publishing it anyway. That’s deliberate: you get the spec before we do, which makes this an actual experiment rather than a verdict handed down. Run it, and judge it.

Of everything that existed at Schaefferstown — the warehouses, the jug house, the mash tubs, the yeast, the recipes, the people — almost nothing crossed into the modern company. The whiskey went to the county for back taxes. The buildings stayed and fell down. The master distiller stayed too, and spent his last years making Pennsylvania whiskey eight miles away under another name.

What crossed was a trademark filing and, eventually, a pair of pot stills that Vendome had built in Louisville in 1975 and shipped east in February 1976. They went to Pennsylvania, outlived the company, passed through Ohio, and came back to a building a few minutes from the shop that made them.

They are the same age as the name. Both of them are younger than almost everything the brand invokes, and both of them are, in the most literal sense, the real inheritance.