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I was reading a whiskey connoisseurs' magazine of some sort at a friend's house. And they basically outlined how due to the popularity and profits involved. A lot of the "smaller" ("craft") distilleries are often trademarks bought by bigger companies from older distilleries that are long out of business. The booze is bought in large batches, relabeled, and resold.
Here is another article on it I found:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/28/your-craft-...
I like this quote:
Breaker bourbon, the “first bourbon produced in Southern California since Prohibition.” [...] company behind the brand, Ascendant Spirits, wasn’t started until 2013. Yet, they brag their “ultra small batch bourbon” is aged 5 years. So how do you open a distillery one year and have 5- or 15-year-old whiskey to sell the next? Not by making it.
Reminds me of when recruiters ask for 5 years experience in a language or framework that has been out for less than 3 years.
Yeah, this business tends not to be that transparent about where they source their whiskey. It ranges from the big boys (Diageo is doing it with Orphan Barrel) to the small labels. Most of the new brands just source MGP; which is not necessarily bad but it's not fun to buy bottles from two different brands that taste pretty much the same.
Whiskies with a high percentage of rye are actually fairly difficult to produce. The enzymes in common use for breaking corn starches down into sugars don't work well on rye, and the typical result is incomplete conversion, a gummy mess, clogged machinery, and a lot of extra cleaning and maintenance. Producing pure rye whisky efficiently requires special strains of fungi, etc.. For this reason and the relatively low demand for pure rye, there are very few producers out there. A mixture containing a small percentage of rye and a larger proportion of corn or other grains is much easier to work with, but a lot of whisky producers simply buy rye whisky and blend it it with their own whisky.
Other "producers" buy rye whisky and sell it unaltered. For example, Whistlepig rye and Masterson's Rye, whose websites both make it sound like they produce these products, are made from rye shipped South from Alberta distillers. Alberta Distillers supplies a significant percentage of the rye used in premium "artisanal" rye whiskies "made" in the U.S. as well as for flavoring various other blended whiskies. Oddly enough, their own whiskies (Alberta Premium and Alberta Springs) aren't typically sold South of the border.
Every few years Alberta Distillers puts out an extremely limited bottling. The last one was a 30-year-old 100% rye priced at a truly bizarre $50 a bottle. It literally sold out before hitting shelves. I had to ask a liquor store manager to set aside a bottle for me, and when I picked it up he said they weren't even bothering to put the stuff on shelves. People remembered the 25-year old bottling from 5 years previous and the bottles were all spoken for while still in the crate. The stuff was amazing. They could have sold it for $500 a bottle and it would have offered better value than any scotch priced that high (Honestly, a lot of scotches priced that high aren't very good at all). If you happen to be in Canada when the 35-year-old edition comes out...
One example is Bulleit Rye (but not regular Bulleit), produced by MGP Indiana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulleit_Bourbon#Bulleit_rye_wh... It does get you thinking about whether the whole artisanal/small batch craze is a legitimate search for better quality products or whether we just like the story behind it. (Bulleit and Bulleit Rye are both delicious.)
Excellent resource on who is selling who's whisky: http://recenteats.blogspot.com/p/the-complete-list-of-americ...
Whiskeys are making their way to China now; they are the newest wrinkle for China's growing middle-class. I don't think alcohol in general,the most popular legalized drug with all its ill-effects on society, ever goes down too far in sales. Types of alcohol are just 5 to 10 year trends outside normal consumption. It was tequila (Patron and others)for a while, vodka (Grey Goose and other boutique vodkas)before that, gin had a renaissance, and now whiskey - surprise. I remember growing up in Brooklyn, and people would trade food stamps for cash so they could buy beer instead of food.
Whiskey is probably my favorite alcohol these days and its rich history is always entertaining. Also see
India is the world's largest consumer of whiskey (despite alcohol in India taxed at 150%).
Every known international manufacturer sells in India. single malts are really big. P.S. alcohol advertising is illegal in India.
Yet the only american whiskey (sort of .. I'm including bourbon) we get is Jack Daniels. There are marginal sales of Jim Beam.
This is also true for wine and beers. We get average quality wine and beer from around the world.. but none of the spectacular Californian wine and ales. I think American F&B companies have not yet figured out the India and China markets .. like the luxury markets already have.
How much of the whiskey consumed is locally made? It seems like the US is by far the largest consumer of Scotch whisky. I would guess most of the whiskey imported is from either Japan or the US but that's mostly because I can't think of any other top whiskey producing countries. (I guess Ireland is the only other one)
Huge amounts - I stumbled upon this story recently and it was a pretty interesting read - http://qz.com/475494/how-a-cheap-indian-whiskey-beat-smirnof...
this was a decent related read
http://www.amazon.com/Bourbon-Empire-Future-Americas-Whiskey...