By Richard Thomas A few years ago, I coined the phrase “Craft Whiskey 2.0” to describe new and evolved features that defined small whiskey-makers relative to what they were in 2005 or 2010*. However, I never codified everything I meant by that anywhere, not even in my book American Whiskey, preferring to focus on the specific issue at hand. It’s ...

The Problem Isn’t The Secondary Market Anymore. It’s The Retailers. By Richard Thomas Whenever the subject of the spiraling cost for limited edition whiskeys has come up during the last decade, someone always curses “the secondary market.” Lately, it has even become the villain for why brands like Blanton’s are no longer available on store shelves. So what, exactly, is ...

Trump’s Trade War Didn’t Help Bourbon Consumers At All, But It Could Have Crippled The Goose Laying The Golden Eggs By Richard Thomas Between March and June 2018, President Trump enacted tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum for certain countries, and then extended those tariffs to imports from the European Union. While many targets of Trump’s controversial ...

By Richard Thomas No sooner was the craft distilling boom a clear phenomenon in the United States than certain pundits began to wonder aloud and in print “when is the craft spirits bust coming?” That line of thinking wasn’t necessarily hostile, seeing as how the boom and bust cycle of business is an axiom. It’s a fair question. Indeed, it ...

By Richard Thomas No news sells like bad news, so it was a good news day for the doom-singers when Knob Creek dropped its age statement in 2016. They crowed “I told ya so,” and pointed even more forcefully to an ever grimmer future. But then an interesting thing happened. Earlier this year, Knob Creek brought back the 9 year ...