By Richard Thomas Straight off the bat, below are valid definitions and indicate the real meaning for the term “secondary market:” A market where investors purchase securities or assets from other investors; a market in which securities are traded after they are initially offered. So, secondary market is basically a Wall Street term, and most …
By Richard Thomas The other day my inbox had a share in it, a video short from the TikToker Barchemistry about frothing whiskey to improve its taste. The idea is to use a milk frother, the sort of device that an avid home barista ought to have handy, to give the liquid a vigorous stir …
The Kentucky Bourbon Trail marked its 25th anniversary last year with some good numbers: attractions on the trail were visited by a record 2.7 million visitors in 2024. Visitors came from all 50 states and more than 20 countries across six continents poured into the Bluegrass State last year, up from 2.5 million tourists in …
By Richard Thomas When I penned Why The Trade War Didn’t Put Pappy Back Within Reach in December 2021, a year after Joe Biden’s clear victory in the 2020 elections, I never expected to revisit the subject of tariffs on American whiskey exports again. But here we are. The trade war started by President Trump …
By Richard Thomas At the end of 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared “no level of alcohol consumption is good for you.” Before that came an EU study linking even moderate drinking to cancer, but that received less media attention. This issue did not garner cause a press furor until Summer 2024, when a …
By Richard Thomas At the end of 2020 and in the midst of the Pandemic, the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) announced that they would alter regulations allowing for the sale of spirits in 700ml bottles in the United States. For decades prior, the US had a singular requirement for the …
By Richard Thomas A shift of tectonic proportions has taken place in American Whiskey these last couple of years, but to judge from the trade headlines one would assume that nothing had actually happened. Since long before I started writing about whiskey, there have been three stable-as-granite facts about the whiskey business: 1) Johnnie Walker …
By Richard Thomas One of the ugly little secrets of sensory science is just how much the senses of taste and smell can be influenced by preconceptions. Ideally, this reality can be guarded against, and it’s what makes the notion of the blind taste test so interesting. The Paris Wine Tasting of 1976 was the …
New Economic Numbers And Tax Breaks Leave More Questions Than Answers By Richard Thomas February saw the release of a key economic report from the Kentucky Distillers Association (KDA), the trade group that represents the Commonwealth’s bourbon industry. The statistics presented in the report were held up as a cause for celebration, billed as a …
By Richard Thomas My initial reaction upon first reading about the emerging California Sober movement was thinking “You have got to be f***ing kidding me.” My disbelief was that even in an era when people love to cloak their bad behaviors behind a thick layer of phony moral superiority, disinformation and deflection, the hypocrisy of …
