. why such a weird number ? <| sep |> He ' s not really making it up so much as being misleading . Uisge was indeed being produced in Scotland in the 14 th century and earlier too , but it wasn ' t much like what we call whiskey now . Aging hadn ' t been discovered yet , so whiskey was unaged white spirit vodka effectively with herbs added to it to mellow its burn . Modern whiskey was developed by accident in the 18 th century when British and American taxes on whiskey drove Scottish and Appalachian distillers to load their product into small casks and hide them from tax collectors in rough country . The large surface area to volume ratio and substantial agitation of transportation increased the aging process enough that in the fairly short time it took to evade their taxes the whiskey aged enough to be noticeably improved by the experience .