We’re guessing that if you ask most people where bourbon comes from, they’ll say Kentucky without a second thought.

They’re wrong.

Congress settled the matter back in 1964, when a formal resolution declared bourbon “a distinctive product of the United States” — not of any one state (source: Kentucky Distillers’ Association).

According to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association, Kentucky distillers produce roughly 95 percent of the world’s supply, but the state never got legal custody of the name. Any bourbon mashed, distilled, and aged in new charred oak on American soil — anywhere on American soil — has an equal claim to the title under federal regulation, and that means that High Cotton Bourbon, made from start to finish at Hollow Creek Distillery in Leesville, is as much a “native son of South Carolina” as the breed that was officially claimed a native son of the state — the Boykin Spaniel.

South Carolina’s relationship with whiskey was sometimes rocky. The state voted for statewide prohibition in 1915, and the law took effect January 1, 1916 — four years ahead of the nation — and decades of illicit stills filled the thirst until a 2009 law opened craft-distilling licenses to the rest of the state and finally revived legal small-batch production. Hollow Creek, a product of that revival, introduced High Cotton in 2019, a straight bourbon with a high-rye grain bill, aged a minimum of four years in charred oak — legitimate, homegrown, and every inch South Carolina’s own.

In 1985, South Carolina made the Boykin Spaniel the State Dog via the General Assembly passage of Act No. 31 which was written into Section 1-1-655 of the state code. The breed’s own origin story reads like folklore: in the early 1900s, a stray spaniel-type dog followed a Spartanburg banker named Alexander White home from church. White liked the way the little dog retrieved and gave “Dumpy” to his hunting partner, L.W. “Whit” Boykin for training. Boykin worked with him, then bred him into the foundation of a compact, boat-friendly retriever built for the tight quarters of the Wateree River swamp, where duck and turkey hunters needed a dog that, as locals still say, “doesn’t rock the boat.”

Hollow Creek’s founders, Craig and Meredith Amick, didn’t think twice when designing their first label. They worked with a local Boykin breeder, and the dog they chose to portray was “Gus” — the granddaddy of the breeding line at the nearby Hollow Creek Kennel, a separate, longtime Boykin breeding operation that shares the creek’s name. Gus’s portrait went on every bottle in his honor — a proud, sturdy dog with that liver-brown coat and the alert, ready-for-the-boat look Boykin breeders prize. It’s a detail South Carolinians tend to notice before they notice the whiskey: that’s a real dog, from a real kennel, staring back at them from the shelf.

South Carolina, in its own understated way, ended up with two native sons on the same shelf: one that doesn’t rock the boat, and one that goes down a little smoother because of him.

Image of Boykin Spaniel by Julissa Pires/Pexels