Wow, you know if you actually read about the Whiskey tax I'm not especially surprised it set off a rebellion.

The new law set a Whiskey tax of six cents per gallon for large producers, and nine cents per gallon for small producers. The price of whiskey is hard to track down for this period, but it was $0.20 in 1820, and Washington's Mount Vernon plantation appears to have been selling their whiskey and brandy somewhere in the range of $0.17-$0.20 in 1799.

What this means is that Hamilton basically just slapped a new 50% tax on whiskey (Actually on all alcohol, whiskey was just the most commonly drunk) on an economically depressed area, exclusively payable in cash despite the fact that most people in Western Pennsylvania did not have large amounts of cash on hand.