What do you do when the government decides your business is the leading cause of the country’s ills and rolls in to padlock your doors? If you’re one of these six, you pivot. Hard.

When the country went dry in January 1920, the law left one door cracked open. A doctor could write you a prescription for whiskey the same way he’d write one for anything else in his bag. You took the slip to a pharmacy, the pharmacist measured out your pint, and you walked home with legal liquor and a clear conscience. To supply that whiskey, the government authorized ten medicinal licenses.

Ten were authorized. Six were claimed.

The four nobody wanted

Four companies passed on the chance to keep selling whiskey while every competitor in the country went dark. The reasons never fully surfaced. Whiskey writer Chuck Cowdery, who has dug into this history, figures the odds of building a real business out of it looked long at the time. Picture the paperwork, the federal oversight, and the tight limits on what you could actually sell, and you can see why plenty in the trade waved it off as more trouble than it was worth.

The six who stayed in business

Brown-Forman, the Louisville company behind Old Forester, took one. It’s the only one of the six still independent and run by the founding family today. For the Browns, the license was about survival.

A. Ph. Stitzel took another. That name might not ring a bell, but the man who’d make it famous will: Pappy Van Winkle. Frankfort Distillery took a third, the company behind Four Roses. Schenley took a fourth and ran the old George T. Stagg distillery in Frankfort, the plant now known as Buffalo Trace. Stagg held onto permission to keep operating through the dry years, which is part of why Buffalo Trace bills itself as the longest continuously operating distillery in the country. James Thompson and Brother, later renamed Glenmore, took a fifth. And then there was American Medicinal Spirits.

A receipt with the boss’s name on it

The man overseeing these permits was Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury. American Medicinal Spirits was a newer operation than the others, built after Prohibition started as a consolidation warehouse, the kind of central depot the government wanted because whiskey scattered across rural barns was a nightmare to track. It picked up its whiskey stocks and its license through a Pennsylvania rye outfit called Old Overholt. Andrew Mellon owned a piece of Old Overholt. So the official who oversaw the permits, by Cowdery’s account, signed off on one that ran straight back to his own pocket. The more things change…right?

What the prescription actually got you

Picture the patient side of this. You could get one pint every ten days. It ran a few dollars at the doctor’s office and a few more at the pharmacy, which lands somewhere close to a hundred dollars a pint in today’s money once you factor in inflation. Doctors prescribed it for all sorts of things, anemia, high blood pressure, heart trouble, even the flu. Predictably, an enormous number of Americans came down with a sudden and serious case of the nerves around 1921. The bottles came standardized, one pint, sealed with a green tax stamp that listed who made the whiskey, who bottled it, and the year and season for each.

By most accounts, the whiskey was bad. These companies were mostly selling off aging stock, and as the dry years dragged on, the good barrels ran low and the bottles got filled with whatever was around. The licenses didn’t even allow new distilling until 1929, when the government let the survivors produce around three million gallons a year to keep up with all those nervous patients. Stitzel, by then under Pappy Van Winkle, was first in line to use it.

Four years later it was over. The companies that stuck it out walked into repeal with full warehouses and a running head start. The ones who’d waved off the paperwork in 1920 had nothing to pour. Kentucky went from six operating distilleries in 1933 to around seventy by 1938.

A treasury secretary writing himself a permit, a nation faking the shakes, and a warehouse of pint bottles nobody would brag about. The companies that put up with the paperwork are the names you still pour today.