Anti-Deceptive Whiskey Campaign, Crashed And Burned

Hijacked And Smothered, The Crusade Against Deceptive Whiskey Is Over

By Richard Thomas

In mid-February the campaign against deceptive marketing practices in the American whiskey industry reached a new low when a lawsuit was filed against Jim Beam for falsely claiming to be “handcrafted.”

This latest lawsuit confirms that the campaign against deceptive whiskey labeling, which began several years ago in the whiskey blogging community, has been completely taken over by two groups of lawyers: Kazerouni Law Group and Hyde & Swigert in California and Mario Aliano and Due Fratelli, Inc. and Zimmerman Law Offices P.C. in Chicago. Collectively, these two groups are now suing Templeton Rye, Angel’s Envy, Maker’s Mark and Jim Beam, the latter two owned by the same parent corporation, Beam Suntory. Of this group, only one, Templeton Rye, was ever seriously accused of deceptive practices by the bloggers prior to the wave of litigation.

Attracting The Wrong Kind Of Attention
Complaints of deceptive whiskey centered to the practice of pretending to be a craft distillery while merely being a bottler of sourced whiskey, as well as to the use of false claims and histories in marketing said whiskey. Although many of the claims made by the most vociferous bloggers were exaggerated or even false, there was sufficient grounds for real concern. Despite this, the subject of deceptive whiskey marketing remained the province of a small group of whiskey enthusiasts for several years.

That changed in 2014 when the Iowa media began to call Templeton Rye, longtime Public Enemy No. 1 for deceptive whiskey hawks, to account on some of its claims. This was followed in June of that same year when The Daily Beast published the first mainstream article about deceptive whiskey to gain widespread attention.

Unfortunately, exposure of the deceptive whiskey issue to a larger audience did not result in the reform the campaigners had long sought. Instead, it attracted the attention of a handful of ambulance chasers in pursuit of what they hope will be a quick buck. With Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark in the shyster’s crosshairs, the campaign against deceptive whiskey has been stolen away from the people who started it, and for one simple reason: they never got organized or did any real work.

From Complaining To Coordination
The logical next step for an issue-campaign like that of the deceptive whiskey hawks would have been to take their grass roots and turn it into a civic action group. Such an organized group would have been much more effective in educating the whiskey-drinking public, networking with whiskey enthusiast’s clubs and the media, and lobbying Congress and Federal agencies, as well as providing a platform for resisting the hostile takeover of their campaign by profit-seeking lawyers.

Although blogger Chuck Cowdery once encouraged his readers to write their members of Congress on the subject of deceptive labeling, and Texan Wade Woodard filed a complaint with the Federal Tax and Trade Bureau over mislabeled whiskeys, no concrete action was ever taken on the subject of deceptive whiskey beyond those two paltry gestures. Simply put, the movement was stolen because no one in it really wanted to put their back into it and make the transition from being a croaker into being an activist.

He’s Dead, Jim
It is now apparent the campaign won the only victory it ever will last summer. The lawsuits against and negative publicity received by Templeton Rye were a loud and clear warning, and those suspect bottlers that had not already begun cleaning up their act soon moved to do enough to avoid becoming another target. Although some diehard hawks won’t stop grinding their axes, others have acknowledged the changes and quietly dropped the subject.

Now whenever I see the issue of deceptive whiskey come up, it comes in one of two sources: the often asinine rantings of the few online croakers still flogging a horse that is both dead and rustled, or news of another lawsuit that defies common sense. Between the two, the anti-deceptive whiskey campaign is a morbiund issue, worse off than it was prior to the summer of last year, done in by it’s own inability to get serious, stop griping, and do something substantive.