Do American regional cultures still exist? There are times when I wonder. Within a 15-minute walk from my house in Portland, Oregon, I can obtain Philly cheesesteaks, Maine lobster rolls, Detroit pizza, and Tex-Mex barbecue tacos, many served from within those same boxy, glass-fronted, five-story mixed-use buildings that now line streets from Sacramento to Tampa. We all stream the same TV shows and consume the same handful of national news sources while local media withers.
Yet every time I’m tempted to bemoan the cultural flattening of modern American life, I think of the sad confusion on the face of a friend from the South when I told her I planned to “barbecue zucchini” — a routine weeknight dish where I grew up in Seattle (at least when it wasn’t raining too hard to get to the Weber). Monoculture can feel inescapable, but our world’s not entirely flat yet.
Craft distillers have long been fighting back against that flattening impulse. Take Garrison Brothers in Hye, Texas. Since the business was founded in 2005, founder Dan Garrison and his team have been fierce advocates for regional identity in craft spirits. They’re not just proud of the qualities that make Texas bourbon different — higher proof, oakier, more flavorful — they’ve actually led the way to create the Certified Texas Whiskey Program. That’s one reason ADI was proud to award Garrison Brothers its Distillery of the Year award at the 20th anniversary 2023 ADI conference in Las Vegas earlier this year.
In this issue, Christopher Null profiles Garrison Brothers, uncovering how it’s managed to cultivate unshakeable brand loyalty among its legions of superfans. Scott Thomas Anderson also investigates regionalization in a feature about craft gins inspired by plants that grow around the distillery, from the gardens of Michigan to the California Sierras. And Daniel Stewart digs deep into the regional palette provided by American peat in Washington State, Virginia, and many places in between.
Like so many hospitality businesses, craft distillers — no matter where they are — are also navigating a tough business environment. Inflation, competition, high interest rates, and continued distributor consolidation mean fewer distilleries are starting up, and the pace of distillery closures seems to have increased. In this issue, Susannah Skiver-Barton spoke with distillers who recently decided to close or sell their businesses to hear what they’d do differently if they could start all over again.
As Barton found, there’s no magic, one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing distillers. But I like to think that building on a foundation of regionalism, of capturing what makes a place special, is a sturdy place to build from. Big brands might always be able to out-market, out-advertise, and out-incentivize smaller producers — but they’ll never be able to out-Texas Garrison Brothers.
