Lost Lantern points to the U.K. industry as an inspiration for their business model. Photograph courtesy of Lost Lantern.
According to George Bernard Shaw, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” The same can be said about their takes on sourcing whiskey. Sourcing was a well-established part of the early history of American whiskey, and brands in both countries engage in the practice to this day. But over the past 20 years, it became quite controversial in the United States. What happened — and how did we move on?
An Early History of Sourcing
From the 1600s into the post-Revolutionary War period, most American distillers operated on a small scale. They distilled their excess grain for ease of storage and preservation. Distillate was easier to transport than grain and could be used to barter for goods and services. Stills were expensive at this time, so often only one person in an area owned one and other nearby farmers would use it to make their spirits after the harvest was completed.
By the 1830s, things had changed. Large-scale distilling emerged during the Industrial Revolution and now farmers sold their grain to distillers rather than crafting their own spirits. It no longer made the same economic sense to own and operate a still on a part-time basis.
In the decades before the Civil War, rectifiers — wholesalers who bought batches of whiskey, blended them to get a flavor they could reproduce, and sold the result under their own brand names — were a going concern in the United States.
Some of these rectifiers added color and fruit juice to vodka to create their “whiskey,” but many created quality blends of real whiskies. Some of these were sold under names that are still important in the industry today. For instance, I.W. Bernheim created the I. W. Harper brand and George Garvin Brown blended products from three different distilleries to create Old Forester. This is essentially the same process used to make blended whiskies in the U.K. to this day. Dewars, Chivas Regal, and Johnnie Walker are each an assortment of whiskies from different Scottish distilleries combined to make a spe cific blend.
So why did what was essentially the same practice become disreputable in one country while continuing to fuel expansion in others?
Thinning of the Ranks Before the Boom
Fast forward past World War I, Prohibition, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and another World War to stumble into the 1990s. Here is when whiskey starts to regain some of the popularity it lost in the 1970s and ‘80s. World events had upended whiskey’s normal cycle of boom and bust, with both the post-WWII whiskey boom and the 1970s bust lasting longer than normal. As a result, the 1990s found the business of whiskey in a strange place.
While whiskey as a category was slowly shaking off the dust, many of the old providers of sourced whiskey didn’t make it to the finish line. They had been mothballed, sold off for parts, or used as aging warehouses for the survivors. But since consumption was nowhere near what it was at its peak, and the market for uber-aged American whiskeys didn’t exist yet, a lot of those distilleries found themselves sitting on older stock and excess capacity. After years of struggling to stay afloat, these distilleries were quite happy to take any opportunity to put some cash back into their coffers. Selling old stock and “cooking” for other brands was easy money.
For me, here is where the divergence from the U.K. comes. Along with having a robust blending market, the U.K. also has well-established independent bottlers. These brands would bottle whisky from distilleries and clearly state the source, the age, when it was bottled, and so forth. Gordon & MacPhail, Berry Bros., and Signatory are just a few of the brands that have been doing this for decades or centuries. Their fans love them for showing a different side of their favorite distilleries. Independent bottlers being part and parcel of the whisky experience made sourcing commonplace for U.K. whisky fans — and a dearth of independent bottlers in the U.S. made sourcing seem nefarious, even when it wasn’t.
Independent Bottlers as a Bridge to Understanding
“I came into whiskey as a Scotch drinker, and in Scotch, there’s really no debate about ‘sourcing,’” says Susannah Skiver Barton, writer and spirits expert. “Independent bottlers are an established and respected part of the industry. Most of the time, independently bottled Scotch discloses the distillery source, but not always, and I never found that odd. It’s just the way things are.”
But for Americans, the practice of independent bottling isn’t widely understood. “I remember the first time I saw an independent bottling of Scotch on store shelves,” says Adam Polonski, spirits writer and co-founder of Lost Lantern. “It was a Gordon & MacPhail Highland Park, on the shelves at Astor Wines in New York. I hadn’t heard about independent bottlers yet, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I had lots of questions. Was this some weird variant of Highland Park? What was Gordon & MacPhail? Who actually made this? And that’s with a company that was fully transparent about what they were doing!”
Polonski’s early experiences were not uncommon. “As a consumer, we really weren’t exposed to the concept of sourcing” says Dave Schmier, the owner of Proof and Wood. “We did not have as much information available to us (no cell phones, forget about smartphones), so we relied on the mythology of spirits brands.”
The United States is only now really tapping into that aspect of the whiskey industry. You can count on two hands the number of American companies that are independently bottling, showing their homework — i.e., where they got it — and taking credit for their picks while giving well-deserved praise to the distilleries they got their spirits from.
“Like most people, when I first started drinking whiskey before I was in the industry, I didn’t know about sourcing.” says Polonski. “In fact, I didn’t know much about where most whiskey came from at all. I think it’s easy for us in the industry to overestimate how much casual non-enthusiast drinkers know.”
Schmier was working in the industry during the sourcing panic, and he has a great take on why sourcing was such a touchy subject. “In the mid to late 2000s, we saw the growth and convergence of two things – the growth of craft distilleries and interest in classic cocktails and American spirits,” says Schmier. “That period started with a lack of knowledge of the past and a real inquisitiveness about ‘what is in my food and drink?’”
Schmier feels that most brands just focused on telling their own story at the expense of transparency, while others thought the idea of sourcing would confuse their customers. “Those customers were attaching faces and names to providers of craft goods,” says Schmier. “Once they found out that some of the people they thought were reviving distilleries were buying their whiskey elsewhere, there was suddenly a lot of skepticism about sourcing.”
That might explain the vitriol that greeted the revelation of sourcing by American brands. There are a lot of misconceptions about sourcing, and when it became known that some popular brands didn’t have distilleries, the lack of historical whiskey knowledge paired with the feeling of being deceived caused quite a reaction.
“When the kerfuffle around sourcing American whiskey kicked up, it seemed to be driven by companies that actively tried to conceal the fact that they did not distill their whiskey,” says Skiver Barton. “I did think that was shady. Why lie about it? Even if you can’t say who made it, you can say that it wasn’t you, but you’re bottling it for X and Y reasons (presumably because it’s good whiskey).”
When asked about the initial resistance to sourcing in the 2000s, Skiver Barton felt that “one or two bad actors got called out, and that made it hard for everyone else who was being honest about sourcing, because everyone got lumped together. It was the early days of people reading no further than the headline, so any nuance got lost in the mass outrage.”
Polonski agreed with her assessment. “I think the resistance to sourcing in the United States came about explicitly because of bad actors who engaged in deliberate deception. In the early days of the whiskey boom, a handful of widely known brands made explicit claims about the provenance of their whiskey that simply weren’t true. Once this came out, it left a bad taste in whiskey drinkers’ mouths — and not just against the specific brands that did this. In part, that’s because it was so hard to tell what was actually sourced and what wasn’t.”
Polonski thinks that the problem isn’t the sourcing of whiskey. For him, it’s lying about it. “The sourcing issue became a problem not because brands were sourcing, but because brands were sourcing while telling a very different story about the importance of their craft.”
Joshua Hatton, co-owner of Single Cask Nation and co-host of One Nation Under Whisky, thinks it comes down to education “We quite often hear from folk, ‘Why would a distillery sell you their good casks? They must keep all the best stuff for themselves.’ Historically speaking, distilleries were always set up to produce whisky for blends or various non-distiller brand owners and the idea of a distillery having its own bottlings is actually a newer concept.”
Consumer Acceptance
Today, however, there’s been a change in consumer sentiment. “I think the resistance to sourcing has largely evaporated,” says Polonski. “The issue now is usually more about pricing and the age of whiskey rather than the fact that it was sourced”
Skiver Barton feels this change had to come. “Bourbon drinkers continuously want something novel and only a few distilleries in the U.S. can supply a steady stream of new products. But there’s a seemingly endless train of brand creators and marketers who can feed that desire for novelty with designs, barrel finishes, and other tweaks. Once brands learned that you shouldn’t lie to consumers, many have stepped up and touted their sources openly, and that has even become a selling point.”
“People are starting to understand the history behind the industry and have begun coming around to the idea that sourced or independently bottled whiskey should be celebrated,” says Hatton. “We need to understand that good whisky is good whisky no matter who bottles it. We should stop with all the ‘great granddad’s recipe’ stuff and focus on telling people, ‘This whisky was sourced from ABC distillery, and we bottled it because of XYZ.’”
Polonski hopes that people will continue to ask where their whiskey comes from, and that brands will disclose their sources. “It’s only fair to whiskey lovers to celebrate the people who actually make what you’re drinking.”
Sourcing is not new or novel. It has been an important part of the spirits industry for centuries, and it will continue to shape the spirits landscape as long as people drink alcoholic spirits. The important thing is to ask questions, know where your whiskey is coming from, and remember that sourcing isn’t a sin — but lying about it is.
