Is Wild Turkey The Most Underrated Bourbon Around? By Richard Thomas A couple of years ago, one of the popular memes in American whiskey writing was to declare that “most craft whiskeys suck,” and the strangest undercurrent of that meme was to name Jim Beam White as a very underrated bourbon and use it as a yardstick. Comparative values aside, ...

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 ...

A Rebuttal To Fred Minnick By Richard Thomas A few weeks ago, Whisky Advocate magazine did a two-part point/counter-point series on their blog, with Chuck Cowdery adopting the position (similar to The Whiskey Reviewer’s own) that the bourbon shortage is mostly yellow journalism, or “clickbait” as he called it. Fred Minnick took the contrary pose, that the shortage is very ...

By Richard Thomas Eight months have passed since the last installment in our periodic series on bad whiskey writing in the mainstream media, but there has been no shortage of boredom, hack work, ignorance, sloppiness and lack of acuity during that time. This even if we leave aside the tide of yellow journalism that yet again washed in, story after ...

Anti-Deceptive Whiskey Crusade Takes Wrong Turn In Maker’s Mark Lawsuit. Or Did It? By Richard Thomas Many in American whiskey circles felt they had scored a major victory earlier this year when Templeton Rye, long considered the top offender among those bloggers and enthusiasts concerned with deceptive practices in the whiskey industry, first came clean and pledged to change their ...