By Richard Thomas During a Zoom tasting of the Four Roses Small Batch Limited Edition 2025, Master Distiller Brent Elliott revealed that not only did his distillery have a new mash bill, but they had two and had already put barrels of the new whiskey onto their ricks. Until very recently, Elliott and his predecessors …
By Richard Thomas The Bourbon Boom is over. Although just how bad the current whiskey sales slump is unclear to outsiders, the slump is very real. Attending this slump is the bursting of the investment bubble that led so many tech\finance bros to sink their excess cash into barrels of whiskey and warehousing ventures, while …
By Richard Thomas As a rule, Scotch Whisky is the category of whiskey least compatible with the term “bargain.” While it is true that scarcity has driven Japanese Whisky prices to a level that would make me consider teetotaling were it the only choice, Scotch has always been somewhat more expensive than American, Canadian and …
By Richard Thomas Two Stacks Irish Whiskey is a relative newcomer to what had been an Emerald Isle whiskey boom. Founded in 2000 by a trio of friends, the company was established as a classic Irish bonder and has the stated intention of helping to revive what had been a thriving commercial sector in Ireland. …
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 Nowadays, a map of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail looks like a skewed quadralateral set onto Central Kentucky. While there are distilleries nestled deep in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky; in the remote river country of the western part of the state; and in bucolic and isolated college towns like Danville; most of …
By Richard Thomas Buffalo Trace Distillery draws in some 340,000 visitors annually which places it among the most visited distilleries in the world. For most of those visitors, the distillery’s location on the banks of the Kentucky River is one of its most bucolic features; indeed, the distillery itself figures prominently for kayakers and boaters …
By Richard Thomas When Maker’s Mark released Maker’s 46, it was a major landmark for Kentucky bourbon. Since its inaugural release in 1953, the only product the Loretto, Kentucky company had ever sold was its flagship expression, Maker’s Mark itself. Five decades passed between Bill Samuels, Sr. starting the family business over again, famously burning …
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 …
