The Obscured Origins of White Dog Whiskey

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Vlad.

I am from Tucson, Arizona, and I was calling about White Dog.

White Dog.

Tell us about White Dog.

White Dog, yes, the phrase, yeah, for unaged whiskey.

What brings this to mind?

Well, I used to be kind of an amateur historian in alcohol production, and I actually made a small distillery here in Tucson.

And I just always saw that phrase coming across a lot of the books that I read.

And it just always interested me in why it was called White Dog.

What is White Dog in a distillery?

So it is unaged whiskey.

So normally when you age whiskey, you put it in a barrel and it turns brown.

And if you don’t do that, it’s the same color as vodka.

Gotcha.

So before you put it through this years-long process to give it some flavor.

Yep. The color of what we normally think of as whiskey comes entirely from the wooden barrel.

When it’s not aged in a cask or anything, it’s completely clear.

So white dog, W-H-I-T-E-D-O-G, probably is connected to some other words for either unaged alcohols or illegal alcohols or just stuff with a lot of punch.

So white lightning and white mule, for example.

And all of these have this notion that after, so the white describes the clarity.

It’s not truly white.

It’s clear, right?

Yeah, that was always clear to me.

I was always curious about the dog part.

Yeah, the dog part.

So the dog or lightning or mule, so white lightning or white mule or white dog.

It’s all about the comparison to the bite or the kick or the zap that you get from the super powerful alcohol.

But there you go.

The white dog just refers to about the bite of this clear alcohol.

Just the fact that, you know, you take a dram of that and you’re going to feel it.

Well, yeah, and I’m thinking about the expression, the hair of the dog that bit you, you know, the remedy that you take the next day if you’ve had too much alcohol.

They’re unrelated, though, so the white dog is not the source of it.

Yeah, right.

They’re unrelated, but I’m just talking about the same idea of biting.

That’s one of the things that I was curious about is that if that was related to the hair of the dog that bit you.

So that’s interesting to learn they’re not actually related.

No, they’re not.

I think that goes back actually to antiquity.

Oh, wow.

But, Vlad, thank you so much.

Do you still have the distillery?

No, unfortunately, we did not survive COVID.

Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Well, it sounds like you’re still interested in the work.

Maybe one day you’ll pick it up again.

I’d hope to.

It’s a lot of fun.

All right.

Take care of yourself and thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

You guys have a great day.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Vlad.

Bye.

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