BIBLES FOR SALE?

• Is this an attempt to disguise the Speakeasy atmosphere found beyond? Sure is.

• Is this a playful snub of the prohibition movement? Yeah, you betcha.

• Is this intended to create questions and conversations? Absolutely.

You see, it all began with a story…

“Deacon Giles… was a treasurer to a Bible Society; and he had a little counting-room in one corner of the distillery where he sold Bibles.”

• Inquire at Amos Giles’ Distillery, G.B. Cheever, 1835

Deacon Giles was an impious man; distilling rum on the Sabbath, paying his workers in liquor, and selling bibles from his counting room. Such an awful union of holy and profane!

One day, after an argument over wages, Deacon Giles’ employees walked out on the job, leaving him with a new delivery of molasses and no one to distill it. To his seeming good fortune, a peculiar group of individuals appeared and agreed to work for him, and he happily locked them in the distillery for the night. On his return the next morning, he discovered the workers had disappeared, but they had produced more rum in one night than he could have expected in weeks.

In an oversight anyone might easily make, it turns out that the workers he hired were demons, sent to play a trick on him and to teach him a lesson about his evil and irreverent rum-producing ways. As they filled his barrels, they secretly branded them with messages of damnation that glowed with an unholy light when tapped.

Perhaps stating the obvious, this is a work of fiction, written in 1835 as a temperance tract by George Cheever, a prohibitionist and fire-brand author-minister from Salem, Massachusetts. Cheever claimed that the story came to him in a dream, and that it was absolutely not, in any way, a thinly-veiled attack on the popular and prosperous Salem distiller, John Stone. Nope. Definitely not that.

Cheever obviously failed in his mission to dissuade us from the evils of “ardent spirits”, as his work inspired our founders to pursue both the art and alchemy of distilling by opening Salem’s first distillery in more than 100 years. Since 2015, we’ve been making Damn Righteous Spirits through a creative process based in tradition, blended with an unconventional perspective, and infused with a strong shot of irreverence. Every spirit we make tells a story, and we invite you to add your own part to the Deacon Giles story in the pages beyond.