Renewed hope came to the distilling industry in the 1980s in the form of single-malt Scotch whiskey. For over one hundred years the world had been drinking blended Scotch whiskey. But now the individual malt whiskeys that went into the blends—each of which has a very strong, individual flavor profile—were being exported and sold on the American market. The marketing strategy employed by distillers piggybacked on the 1970s vogue for wine tastings. Tastings of single-malt Scotches were promoted, hoping to increase interest both in the single malts and in the blends. The strategy worked, and sales grew, attracting media exposure and, thus, generating further sales growth.
Bourbon distillers watched these events closely, trying to figure out how they could capitalize on the popularity of single-malt Scotches. The answer was single-barrel bourbon. Elmer T. Lee, the master distiller and plant manager of the newly formed Age International, remembered that Colonel Albert Blanton, the manager of the distillery under Schenley in the 1930s and 1940s, would find a very high-quality barrel of bourbon and have its contents bottled, without blending, for use as gifts for dignitaries visiting the distillery. The Blanton’s brand of single-barrel bourbon hit the market in 1984.
Age International counted on the presence of the word single in its advertising to generate interest in its product. But, to further expose consumers to its product, it convinced the Lane Report, which covered business and economic news in Kentucky, to arrange a yearly contest—a blind tasting— between Blanton’s and Maker’s Mark, the reigning Kentucky favorite. Blanton’s won repeatedly, until Maker’s Mark called foul. Evidently, the bottle of Maker’s Mark used was selected at random from a liquor store shelf, whereas the Blanton’s was taken from an exceptionally high-quality barrel and bottled for the occasion and, thus, not representative of what consumers would be buying.
The competition came to an end, but not before Age International had achieved its purpose—establishing the idea of a single-barrel bourbon and the Blanton’s brand in consumers’ minds in a way that traditional advertising could not. In time Age International introduced several other single-barrel offerings, and other distilleries would follow suit.
The Japanese economy, which had grown at an outstanding rate in the 1960s and 1970s and continued to do so in the 1980s, also paved the way for bourbon’s comeback. Along with such best-selling brands as Early Times, Four Roses, Maker’s Mark, and Jim Beam, Blanton’s caught on in the Japanese market, selling for a very high price, and making Age International a nice profit. But the favorite was I. W. Harper. It sold so well that Schenley pulled it from the American market in order to circumvent its profits being funneled off by the gray market—trade through channels that, while legal, are unofficial, unauthorized, and unintended by the original manufacturer (e.g., buying in bulk on the American market and reselling at a profit on the Japanese market).
The profits brought in by single-barrel brands—which sold for over $100 a bottle in Japan, a price unheard of for bourbon in the United States—spurred the development of other superpremium bourbons. Next on the scene were the so-called small-batch bourbons, mixtures of select barrels produced in limited amounts. These were the brainchild of Booker Noe, Jim Beam’s master distiller. Noe had for a number of years been bottling small amounts of bourbon at barrel proof and unfiltered, first for his personal use, and later for use as gifts for industry insiders. So, when the single-barrel bourbon phenomenon caught on, all the distillery had to do was look no further than the Booker’s bourbon it was already bottling.1
Jim Beam introduced its small-batch collection in 1992. The collection consisted of four bourbons, each with a very different flavor profile: Booker’s, Basil Hayden, Baker’s, and Knob Creek. Booker’s is bottled at barrel proof (usually 125 or higher) and is unfiltered, allowing all the original flavor to come through, but leaving the bourbon with the unfortunate tendency to cloud when ice is added owing to the presence of vegetable oils. Basil Hayden is bottled at 80 proof and has a light flavor designed to attracted drinkers of Canadian whiskey. Baker’s is bottled at 107 proof and appeals to those who like a heavy-bodied, high-proof bourbon. Knob Creek is bottled at 100 proof and at nine years old and appeals to those who prefer extra-aged bourbon.
Jim Beam supported the launch of its small-batch collection with an aggressive advertising campaign and even created a club for fans of these bourbons, the Kentucky Bourbon Circle. It also sent Booker Noe and the whiskey writer Paul Pacult on a nationwide tour hosting tasting events aimed at bourbon collectors. The concept caught on, and other small-batch distillers followed suit. Master distillers soon achieved rock-star status as popular spokesmen for their products.
The final category of superpremium bourbons is the extra-aged products. Older bourbons had, of course, been on the market since the nineteenth century, but it was only in the early 1990s that they really took hold in the market. Their resurgence can be attributed to the foresight of Julian Van Winkle III, the grandson of Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle of the old Stitzel-Weller Distillery. He joined his father in the business in 1977 and, after Julian Jr.’s death in 1981, added Old Rip Van Winkle, ten years old and at 90 and 107 proofs, to his portfolio of brands. Old Rip Van Winkle was made mostly with whiskey purchased from the old Stitzel-Weller Distillery, but Julian also purchased whiskey on the open market from other distilleries. One of these whiskeys was a twenty-year-old bourbon that was the last of the whiskey in the warehouses of the Old Boone Distillery in Jefferson County, from which Julian created the brand Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve, bottled at 90.4 proof.2 The brand immediately won acclaim and was followed by a twenty-three-year-old version. Other companies noticed the popularity of the aged bourbons and soon started to add older products to their portfolios.
Not only were these superpremium brands popular in themselves, but they also helped increase the popularity of bourbon generally by creating a trickle-down effect. Consumers started giving the standard brands another look, and bourbon sales began to stabilize. The market shares of the more expensive brands even began to increase. And the effect was not just in Japan and other overseas markets (including those of the newly opened Eastern European countries) but also in the United States.
The industry was caught somewhat off guard by these developments. Whiskey was coming back faster than had been expected, and supply was having trouble keeping up with demand. To make matters worse, Heaven Hill, Wild Turkey, and Jim Beam would lose warehouses—and a significant amount of aging whiskey—to fires around the turn of the century. The result was an even greater tightening of the market.
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, whiskey had been receiving ever-increasing media exposure. An important milestone was Michael Jackson’s World Guide to Whiskey (1987), one of the first books to focus on whiskey tasting and heritage, which included a section on the American whiskeys, including bourbon, rye, and Tennessee. Books focusing exclusively on American whiskeys soon followed, including Mark Waymack and James Harris’s The Book of Classic American Whiskeys (1995), Gary and Mardee Regan’s The Book of Bourbon and Other Fine American Whiskeys (1995) and The Bourbon Companion: A Connoisseur’s Guide (1998), and Jim Murray’s Classic Bourbon, Tennessee and Rye Whiskey (1998).
The Kentucky Bourbon Trail
In 1999, inspired by the growing tourism trade in California’s wine country, the Kentucky Distillers’ Association (KDA) created the Kentucky Bourbon Trail distillery tour, meant to encourage visitors to come to Kentucky. In 2007, the KDA developed an incentive program whereby tourists received “passports” that are to be stamped after their tour of a KDA-member distillery. When the passport has been stamped by every KDA-member distillery, it can be mailed to KDA headquarters and exchanged for a free T-shirt.
From modest beginnings in 1999, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail tour has become one of the state’s most popular and unique attractions, with more than 1.7 million visitors during the period 2005–2009. In 2010, more than six thousand completed passports were mailed in from forty-nine states and twelve countries to be exchanged for T-shirts, more than doubling the previous year’s record total.
The periodical press also took increased notice of the American whiskey industry. For example, 1992 saw the inaugural issue of John Hansell’s Malt Advocate magazine, which was, and still is, mostly focused on beer and malt whiskeys but does occasionally cover American whiskeys, as does the Scotch whiskey–oriented Whisky Magazine, which debuted in 1999. But it was the Bourbon Country Reader, Chuck Cowdery’s self-published newsletter, that was the first publication to be devoted exclusively to American whiskey. Before launching the Reader, Cowdery had written, produced, and directed the PBS documentary Made and Bottled in Kentucky (1992), which generated enough interest to convince Cowdery that the time was ripe to launch his newsletter. Both projects proved popular with the whiskey-drinking public, and the Reader continues to be published today. The Bourbon Review followed a number of years later, created in 2009 by four young men from Kentucky who saw a need for a Malt Advocate–type magazine dedicated to bourbon.
This period also saw the rise of bourbon tourism. The trend began among the Japanese, but the growth of “whiskey events” targeting tourists generated interest at home as well as abroad. The first big whiskey event was the 1992 Bardstown–Nelson County Tourist and Convention Commission–sponsored Kentucky Bourbon Festival. The festival grew quickly but failed to do much to either educate people about or promote bourbon, evolving into what is now largely a street party for the locals. Still, reporters from around the world are routinely in attendance. Then, in 1998, Malt Advocate entered the fray, sponsoring a one-day tasting called WhiskyFest. Master distillers from around the world were in attendance, promoting their products: single-malt and blended Scotch, Irish, Japanese, American, and Canadian whiskeys. WhiskyFest proved so popular that it is now held three times a year in three different locations: Chicago, San Francisco, and New York City.
Anchoring the bourbon tourism industry is the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History in Bardstown. Oscar Getz, the owner of the Barton Distillery, spent fifty years amassing a collection of rare artifacts and documents—dating from the precolonial period to the post-Prohibition period—concerning the American whiskey industry. In the 1960s, he opened a small museum on the grounds of his distillery. On his death in 1983, his widow donated his collection to the city of Bardstown, which opened the Getz Museum in 1984.
The Urban Bourbon Trail
Unable to offer a distillery tour of Louisville, but with so much other bourbon heritage to exploit in the city, in 2006 the Louisville Convention and Visitors Bureau launched a marketing initiative promoting the city as the “Gateway to Bourbon Country.” In 2007, it opened a new visitors’ center, which included an exhibit by the Kentucky Distillers’ Association promoting the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. It began to host events such as bourbon-themed dinners at local restaurants and, in 2008, after canvassing the many bars in the city that offered wide selections of bourbon, launched the Urban Bourbon Trail. As with the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, passports are issued that can be stamped at participating bars. (To participate, bars must keep at least fifty different bourbons in stock and employ staff members knowledgeable about bourbon.) Completed passports can be exchanged for a T-shirt. By 2011, thousands of people from around the world had completed their passports.
By far the most significant exposure that whiskey would receive, however, would be via the Internet. Surprisingly, the distilling industry was slow to capitalize on it, and the very first websites devoted to whiskey were created by fans, who offered such content as commentary on their own collections and descriptions of their experiences touring distilleries. These early sites were not interactive, and the flow of information went only one way: from the site owner to the site user. This changed in 1999 when Straightbourbon.com, which had been founded two years earlier, added a discussion feature allowing users to post and discuss questions on an ever-increasing number of topics. Other independent forums—such as Bourbonenthusiast.com and Bourbondrinker .com—followed, as, finally, did official websites for the various distilleries. Bourbon marketing had fully embraced twenty-first-century technology.
The first decade of the twenty-first century brought to the distilling industry an exciting idea—that of the “craft distiller” who, working with a small still, would make his own spirits for sale in the market. By May 2010 over seven hundred licenses had been granted to small distilleries in the United States alone. The artisan distillers that ran them were making everything from vodka to rum to malt, rye, and bourbon whiskeys. The Willett Distillery in Bardstown, for example, was established with the idea of crafting bourbon to individual customers’ needs. Other companies experimented with bourbon styles. Buffalo Trace introduced several barrel-strength, unfiltered whiskeys as well as its Experimental Collection, 375-milliliter bottles at premium prices. Brown-Forman started bottling a yearly edition of Old Forester Birthday Bourbon (commemorating George Garvin Brown’s birthday in September), the yearly batches picked because they highlighted a flavor found in Old Forester. And Jim Beam and other distilleries experimented with finishing bourbon in wine barrels.
The hope is that these craft distillers can do for the distilling industry what the microbreweries did for the American beer industry and renew interest in fine whiskeys with robust tastes.
