George Garvin Brown & the Birth of Old Forester
The man who made bourbon trustworthy did it with a sealed bottle. George Garvin Brown founded Old Forester in 1870 and, in doing so, created the first bourbon ever sold exclusively in sealed glass bottles, a simple idea that transformed an entire industry built on suspicion into one built on trust.
In the years after the Civil War, bourbon was almost always sold by the barrel. Merchants dipped from those barrels and sold whiskey by the jug, which left enormous room for tampering, dilution, and outright fraud. A customer never really knew what was in the glass.
The Sealed Bottle Revolution
George Garvin Brown, a pharmaceutical salesman in Louisville, Kentucky, saw an opportunity in that uncertainty. In 1870 he began selling his bourbon, Old Forester, only in sealed glass bottles bearing his signature as a guarantee of quality and consistency. By controlling the bottle, he controlled what the customer received, and he staked his name on it. Old Forester is recognized as the first bourbon sold exclusively in sealed bottles, and it has the distinction of being a bourbon brand that has been sold continuously since before Prohibition.
Surviving Prohibition
When Prohibition arrived, Brown's company, Brown-Forman, was one of a small number granted a license to sell whiskey for medicinal purposes, allowing Old Forester to survive when countless brands vanished. That continuity is part of what makes the brand historically remarkable: it has been on the market without interruption for over 150 years.
Building Brown-Forman
The company George Garvin Brown founded grew into Brown-Forman, one of the largest American-owned spirits companies in the world, and it remains family-controlled to this day. Beyond Old Forester, its portfolio came to include some of the most famous names in the industry. Brown's original commitment to quality and consistency became the foundation of a spirits empire.
A Lasting Standard
Old Forester is still produced today, and the sealed-bottle principle George Garvin Brown introduced is now simply how spirits are sold everywhere. Few innovations are so complete that they become invisible. Explore American bourbon in our bourbon collection.
