Most Craft Whiskey Doesn’t Suck

Don’t Believe The Haters, Because Craft Whiskey Hasn’t Sucked For A Long Time

By Richard Thomas

The meme “craft whiskey sucks” has been around for a decade now, and like most memes, it just plain refuses to die. Nevermind that much has changed since 2010 and there were plenty of examples of fine craft whiskey even back in the day (fine, albeit different from what Kentucky and Tennessee produce), the notion that if it comes from a small or new distillery it must be bad stubbornly clings to life, passed on by cranks and croakers. Before the pandemic, I was regularly meeting enthusiasts who weren’t even able to drink in 2010, absorbed this bit of ignorance from some blog, article, forum or toxic nerd at their whiskey club, and were repeating it back to me. As recently as last year, one could still find the idea being kicked around in major media headlines.

A kernel of truth always rested in the center of that meme, of course. Then and now, it’s not hard to find a whiskey from a small distillery that not only fails to float your boat, but doesn’t suit almost anyone. I know that perfectly well, because I try as many of them as anyone around.

Some of them do suck. Yet here is the thing: there are almost 600 small distilleries making whiskey in America today, and the people who cry “most craft whiskey sucks” have not actually tried the hundreds of examples necessary to make a broad, sweeping and authoritative generalization of the entire sector. Said pundits also always have their exceptions, whether those exceptions be announced in private or public. “But not my favorite few pet micro-distilleries,” they have sniffed sniff. It is not like those exceptions overlap to any large extent either; it’s just the few that said pundit knows and likes, and thus reflects the narrow opinion of one person. It would therefore be more appropriate to say “these few craft whiskeys suck.” The entire meme sprang from ill-informed bloviating that should, at best, be labeled as curmudgeonly, and at worst venomous.

Whiskey fans continue to stumble into the “most craft whiskeys” suck meme, even as it becomes more obviously untrue as the growing ranks of bonded and fully mature whiskeys from small distillers adds some sophistication to the bold and novel flavors created by that sector. Yet the sector was always marked by its bold and novel flavors, and it had to be because there is no profit to be found in doing what the Kentucky and Tennessee Majors do, only on a smaller scale and at greater cost. That was always the point, one that has been misunderstood by some who weren’t paying enough attention, and it’s not like anyone ever writes “I like my Wild Turkey, and just my Wild Turkey, and this isn’t my Wild Turkey, so I don’t like it.”