Ok, so all bourbons are whiskeys, but not all whiskeys are bourbon, make sense? Yea, I did not get it at first either but I understand now what the difference between bourbon whiskey and whiskey is.

To start off with, lets look at the ingredients:

Whiskey

• Whiskeys are distilled from a fermented mash of grain, usually corn, rye, barley, or wheat, and then aged in oak barrels.

Bourbon

• Bourbon Whiskey has to be distilled of a mash that contains at least 51% corn (legally) and is aged in NEW charcoal oak barrels.

A lot like wine, it all depends on what part of geography they are from. Bourbon gets its name from "Old Bourbon" county in Kentucky. This is where Bourbon originally got popular and was distributed from, around 1800.

Now since people tend to get jealous (like being born in Boston and hating the New York Yankees) and wanted what Bourbon has, Tennessee decided they would make their own version of Tennessee Whiskey. Which has its own distinct sugar-maple flavor that actually got recognition from the US Government in 1941 as a separate style of its own.

It is pretty simple, as long as you follow the rules of Bourbon, you can call your whiskey Bourbon. But if you do not and you make whiskey you cannot, by law, call it Bourbon, it has to be called whiskey. That is the basis of knowing the difference between bourbon whiskey and whiskey. You now know more than most of the population about this subject. You can now sit at a bar and argue with a guy who thinks he knows more than you, shouldn't be hard to find.