Four Steps For Selling Whiskey

Or “How To Tout A Whiskey Brand”

By Richard Thomas

These days it seems everyone is sitting in behind their computer monitor and daydreaming about getting out of the rat race and starting a second career as a whiskey-maker. Yet anyone entering the micro-distillery game now faces competition both stiff and ample.

The same factors make repositioning an existing brand just as difficult. Standing out from the crowd has never been harder, but if starting a new whiskey company is what you want to do, you can build your new brand by following these four steps.

1. Hype Your Water: Water is a big deal to many whiskey fans. Scotch snobs can tell you about the qualities of this or that burn (creek), while bourbon enthusiasts romanticize Kentucky’s famous limestone water. In bygone days, whiskey snobs used to insist on watering their whiskey only with water drawn from the same source as used by the distillery!

Draw on this fascination with water by making your whiskey from Himalayan snow melt or water bottled from Lake Baikal and smuggled out of Russia right under Vladimir Putin’s vodka-burned nose. Where it really comes from matters far less today than it used to anyway, because the trace iron in water that might sour whiskey can be easily removed these days (and often is) through filtration.

2. Get Yourself A Heritage: History is a big deal for a libation that can easily take a decade or more to reach proper maturity. So, if you can’t claim a distant cousin who was a Prohibition bootlegger and don’t have a distiller in the family tree, buy a defunct brand name and revive it, thereby inheriting plenty of whiskey heritage along with it.

If you don’t have the capital for that, just make something up. Your whiskey could be made using the same recipe as Light Horse Harry Lee’s favorite tipple, and was therefore what turned Robert E. Lee off from drinking for life. Remember what Lenin said about how “a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth,” and that “marketing truth” always trumps pesky historical facts.

3. Add Esoteric Steps Or Gear: Claim your still was designed by Nikola Tesla or that the barrels of your small batch were dumped by hand and only once per year by card-carrying Kentucky Colonels on Labor Day. Whether the added complexity actually produces results matters far less than giving whiskey nerds something new to either marvel at or gripe over. Chatter builds buzz and sells bottles, and just remember the rapper’s adage: “Even as they dis me, they still say my name.”

4. Write An Essay Of Tasting Notes: Whenever you see a 1,000-word set of tasting notes from an expert, realize that 9/10s of anything that long is pretentious bunk written for the sole purpose of satisfying the author’s sense of self-importance. 99.997% of the human race will never be able to detect all those things, even assuming they are all really there in the first place.

So, write your own tasting notes by taking what you find in your whiskey and elaborating on it. A lot. Your whiskey isn’t “smoky,” but has a hint of ash so old it could be leftover from the campfires at Culloden Moor.

Another route is to describe how exacting circumstances dramatically enhance the whiskey. Don’t suggest adding water, but describe how adding exactly 0.25 ml of Evian evokes a scent akin to the experience of rubbing suntan oil on Gisele Bundchen’s tummy on a beach in the Seychelles.