A forgotten whiskey from the S.F. Gold Rush is staging a comeback

Whether Cyrus Noble can pull off this revival remains to be seen — no small task in today’s increasingly crowded whiskey market. 

But “a story really helps,” said David Wondrich, editor in chief of “The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails.” “And the greatest story in American history is the Gold Rush,” Wondrich said. “If you’ve got a legitimate link to that, that’s phenomenal.”

The story, essentially, is this: In 1871, the San Francisco merchant Lilienthal & Co. began selling a bourbon called Cyrus Noble. The product was named for its distiller, a hulking, bearded man who weighed almost 400 pounds. Made in Lynchburg, Ohio, the bourbon would travel by ship around the tip of South America in order to reach California. This was the cheapest mode of transport, but the nine-month journey also had the unwitting effect of helping the whiskey age gracefully.

Almost immediately, Cyrus Noble gained renown. “The public are hereby cautioned against adulterated imitations of the Cyrus Noble Whisky,” warned The Chronicle in its March 28, 1875, edition. It made its way to mining camps from California to Alaska, and records suggest it was favored among 49ers. “When I started in Reno I made it a point to handle over my bar the best whiskey money could buy,” said a saloon owner in the Nevada State Journal in 1903. “It’s the world famous Cyrus Noble.”

Its fame was not limited to the American West. By 1900, Cyrus Noble had arrived in Hawaii, Australia, Japan and the Philippines, records show, mostly transported by thirsty members of the U.S. military. The Cyrus Noble Saloon opened in Mexico City in 1902. (Bars were commonly named after spirits brands in those days.) Though that bar remained open only a few months, its namesake must have left an impression: El Contemporáneo, a newspaper in San Luis Potosí, described Cyrus Noble bourbon as “el mejor del mundo.”

The whiskey’s most memorable episode took place in Searchlight, Nev., where a man named Jim Coleman had purchased a claim to a mine. When the mine appeared to yield no gold, he offered to trade the deed to a local saloon keeper for a bottle of his best whiskey — Cyrus Noble. After the barman took possession of the mine, it turned lucrative, generating over $250,000. He called it the Cyrus Noble Mine.

This Searchlight tale was repeated in The Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune and a 1939 installment of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not syndicated newspaper column. According to Matthew Rowley, a spirits historian who was hired by Cyrus Noble to research its history, the story may be apocryphal — some believe that Coleman actually sold the mine for a cigar, and the saloon keeper named it Cyrus Noble because that’s what he was drinking when he christened it. Either way, it wasn’t the only Cyrus Noble Mine; there was also one in Nome, Alaska.

“The Gold Rush came at an interesting point in American whiskey,” said Wondrich. In the early 1800s, Americans vastly preferred other spirits — like applejack, New England rum and peach brandy from the South — but by the 1850s, whiskey had entered a heyday, in part because it was much cheaper to produce than fruit brandies. It became especially popular among gold miners, for whom “whiskey was the prestige good, along with French Champagne,” Wondrich said.

The Volstead Act would soon put an end to Cyrus Noble’s reign. Anticipating Prohibition, Lilienthal & Co. sold off all its remaining inventory between 1917 and 1920. In 1934, just after repeal, Lilienthal & Co. sold the Cyrus Noble trademark to Haas Bros., a grocery wholesaler whose owners were related to the Lilienthals by marriage. Haas Bros. began producing the bourbon once again, using the old recipe, at a distillery in Kentucky.   

Cyrus Noble’s appeal was not limited to miners — it also found a footing among the San Francisco aristocracy. In fact, its early history is inextricable from the city’s elite class, which in the late 19th century was largely composed of Jewish immigrant families from Bavaria who tended to marry each other.

Marriage is how the Lilienthals ended up in business with the Haas family, whose name now adorns UC Berkeley’s business school. The Haases also married into the Stern family (as in Stern Grove) and the Levi-Strauss family. Since 1972, this dynasty’s grand Pacific Heights Victorian, known as the Haas-Lilienthal House, has been a museum operated by the San Francisco Heritage nonprofit.

In its golden age, more than 80,000 cases of Cyrus Noble bourbon were produced annually, according to Steven Burrows, the current president of Haas Bros. and a descendant of the Haas and Lilienthal families. But the brand never quite regained its footing after Prohibition. Liquor production in the U.S. entered a downturn around the time of World War II, when the government needed alcohol for defense purposes. In the 1950s and ’60s, vodka began upstaging brown spirits. Whiskey sales plummeted. Haas Bros. decided to get out of the bourbon game altogether, discontinuing Cyrus Noble in 1985.

“It was a heartache,” said Burrows.

By the early 21st century, however, the craft cocktail boom was in full swing, whiskey microdistilling was having a moment and people were suddenly wild for old-fashioneds. Haas Bros. decided to resurrect Cyrus Noble. In 2009, it bought some bulk whiskey from Heaven Hill Distillery and bottled it under the Cyrus Noble brand. Then, beginning in 2011, it went more bespoke, contracting with Kentucky’s Bardstown Bourbon Co. to produce Cyrus Noble according to the original recipe.

Now, Haas Bros. has coined a logo for its flagship product: “Born in Kentucky, raised in San Francisco.” Burrows doesn’t envision Cyrus Noble becoming the next Maker’s Mark, but he thinks it deserves to be better known than it is. “We don’t need home runs,” Burrows said of his more recent marketing efforts. “We just need some base hits.”

He’s got his work cut out for him. Competition among American whiskey brands has never been fiercer, and “every whiskey, to separate themselves, needs a story,” said Shanna Farrell, the author of “Bay Area Cocktails” and an interviewer at UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center.

Often, with whiskey, that story seems to fall back on a familiar, old-timey trope: a burly, masculine progenitor. Colonels, granddads and pappies abound; some are real, others invented. Burrows hopes that the fact that Cyrus Noble was a real person — and that the brand has been sold by the same family for 150 years — will lend credibility. “In a world of people trying to create legacy and authenticity, we’re not creating anything,” he said.

As evidence of the allure of this sort of narrative, San Francisco’s Anchor Distilling rebranded as Hotaling & Co. in 2018, a throwback to a San Francisco liquor merchant founded in 1827. In fact, if Cyrus Noble had a main local competitor in the Gold Rush era, it would have been Hotaling’s J.H. Cutter whiskey.