Bourbon and scotch makers find a common enemy in tariffs

Ask Aaron Willett what the future of bourbon looks like, and he’ll take you out onto the floor of Speyside Cooperage’s outpost in Shepherdsville, Ky. There, on a recent winter day, what you’d have seen was a phalanx of 450-liter (119-gallon) Armagnac casks stacked two high. The brandy had been drained. But the oak barrels imported from France were now about to embark on a new phase of their life, poised to lend flavor to a generation of Kentucky’s finest.

Bourbon, the most American of spirits, has for decades been governed by a 1964 congressional resolution requiring that corn make up at least 51% of the mash from which it’s distilled, that it be made in the U.S., and that it be aged in virgin American oak barrels with a charred interior. And through history that’s what Kentucky distillers have done, leaving their bourbons to mature through hot summers and damp winters in warehouses filled with tens of thousands of barrels.

Now a whiskey boom and a new generation of artisanal distillers looking to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded market is changing the business. Tradition and American oak still live strong. But these days a growing number of bourbon makers are following the example set by Scotch distillers and adding an extra step—transferring their whiskeys from those congressionally mandated charred oak barrels to imported brandy, sherry, and port casks that add undertones to the vanilla and caramel notes that bourbon drinkers have traditionally prized.

This new trend in bourbon-making is part of the long march of globalization in the world of whiskey. Near the Armagnac barrels in the workshop that Willett oversees are oak sherry casks from Spain and a stack of cachaça barrels from Brazil made out of a native Brazilian hardwood. Distillers are marketing premium whiskeys finished in barrels that once bore Napa Valley cabernets or Caribbean rum. Entire craft brands with names such as Angel’s Envy and Blood Oath have been born out of barrel-finished whiskeys. “We’re seeing everything in this new age of bourbon,” says whiskey historian Fred Minnick.

Like others that have flirted with globalization, the whiskey industry is facing its own trade troubles. In 2018 the European Union’s trade warriors retaliated against U.S. tariffs on steel by zeroing in on bourbon, slyly trolling U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose home state happens to be Kentucky. Last year, when the Trump administration sought to whack the EU over a long-running dispute between planemakers Airbus SE and Boeing Co., it put Scotch on the tariff hit list.

All this weaponizing of those duties isn’t just irritating bourbon and Scotch drinkers. It’s crashing headlong into the interwoven realities of global trade.

To understand the global economy today, how it’s evolving, and how trade wars have unintended consequences, pour yourself a whiskey—or whisky, as the Scots prefer. Whiskey doesn’t exist without the barrel, so it’s worth starting your meditation there.

A whiskey barrel is almost always either from somewhere else or headed someplace else. From its birth out of white oak from the Ozarks to a middle age holding Scotch in musty warehouses to a late life holding tequila, wine, or craft beer, the 53-gallon American standard barrel has a productive working life that can stretch over five decades and multiple continents. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but the industry consensus is that about 90% of all Scotch begins its life in bourbon barrels offloaded by Kentucky distillers.

Trade measures driven by national interests also collide with another reality: A wave of international consolidation in the spirits industry in recent decades means the corporate owners of plenty of bourbon brands own Scotch labels as well. And vice versa. A bourbon such as Jim Beam may be rooted in Kentucky soil and generations of master distillers drawn from a single family, but the brand is owned by Japan’s Suntory Beverage & Food Ltd., whose subsidiary Beam Suntory Inc. also owns Maker’s Mark bourbon and history-steeped Scotch single malts Laphroaig and Bowmore.

Louisville-based Brown-Forman Corp. owns the world’s best-selling whiskey, Tennessee-made Jack Daniel’s, but it also has bourbon brands such as Woodford Reserve and Old Forester along with GlenDronach and BenRiach, Scotch single malts. Sip Wild Turkey, and you’re drinking a bourbon owned by Italy’s Campari Group. Make it a Bulleit, and you’ve entered a suite of brands controlled by London-based Diageo Plc, owner of Johnnie Walker.

The barrel business is equally multinational. Speyside Cooperage started life as a family business in 1947 in Craigellachie, Scotland, where it assembled American oak barrels for Scotch distilleries. In 2008 it was taken over by France’s TFF Group, which was born of a family business that made barrels for winemakers in Burgundy and has grown into a publicly listed company that now owns wine- and whiskey-barrel makers from the Napa Valley to South Africa’s Stellenbosch region.

In 2010, TFF hired Willett to set up and run the Kentucky operation, buying and selling used and reconditioned bourbon barrels that end up mostly in Scotland. Since then it’s invested millions of dollars more, building a factory in Ohio in 2016 to supply the growing U.S. whiskey business—and the increasingly sophisticated consumer’s appetite for what oak lends to a drink. “It’s definitely a flavor component that the human enjoys,” Willett says.

Freddie Noe is standing over 43,000 gallons of sour mash burbling away in a stainless-steel vessel and thinking of his late grandfather, legendary Jim Beam distiller Booker Noe. “This one here is extremely hot. It’s really active,” says Noe, 32. Known in childhood as “Little Book,” he’s an eighth-generation distiller in the Beam family. “My granddad would say, ‘Go ahead and stick your nose in there and get a big ol’ whiff of it.’ But what would happen was you might fall over because it takes all your air away.”

Times are good at the Jim Beam distillery in Clermont, Ky. Sales are growing, and executives are hatching expansion plans. Four warehouses, each holding almost 60,000 barrels, were added in 2019. There’s a research center, and next door a new experimental still is being built to develop whiskeys.

What’s happening at Jim Beam is emblematic of a broader boom, one that’s been a long time coming. American consumers lost their taste for homegrown whiskeys in the 1970s and ’80s as clear spirits such as gin and vodka took over. That left the Japanese pretty much “the only people drinking bourbon on a large scale in the 1980s,” Minnick says.

Fortunately for the bourbon industry, the Japanese also were behind its comeback, says Minnick, author of Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey. The Japanese taste for high-end bourbons encouraged distillers, including Beam’s Booker Noe, to develop small-batch whiskeys for connoisseurs. That in turn raised bourbon’s game at home and helped create the current surge. In 2019, for the first time since the late ’60s, Kentucky distillers sat on a lucrative stockpile of more than 9 million barrels, according to Eric Gregory, president of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association.

That’s partly because of fashion. Bourbon-making has surged recently thanks to the confluence of Mad Men and a hipster culture that’s seen a craving for soul, authenticity, and history. But it’s also because of globalization. Suntory acquired Jim Beam and its brands in 2014 in a $16 billion deal that was part of a series of acquisitions by new investors in Kentucky whiskey. An additional $2.3 billion in capital investment has poured into the industry in the state over the past decade, according to Gregory. That in turn spurred modernization and a push into overseas markets from Europe to China.

Then along came the tariff wars. Those duties haven’t killed bourbon exports. They have, though, killed growth in demand in Europe, which accounted for more than a third of the bourbon exported from Kentucky in 2018. Prior to 2019, exports to the EU grew 38% a year on average, according to Gregory. During the first eight months of last year, they declined 1%.

“We traipse all over the world, and every warehouse we walk into I can see Jack Daniel’s barrels and Brown-Forman barrels everywhere we look”

The history of American whiskey is soaked in taxes, tariffs, and other government interventions. Alexander Hamilton’s excise tax on spirits brought the 1790s Whiskey Rebellion. It also, according to one version of history, pushed distillers to head west and farther into a Kentucky frontier where they could escape the taxman. Bourbon’s modern history is tied to Prohibition, which dealt a death blow to many distilleries. Even the 1964 congressional declaration that bourbon is a “distinctive product of the U.S.” stemmed from an elaborate industry lobbying campaign to help crack the European market and lower tariffs there by getting special recognition for a whiskey other than Scotch.

The 2018-19 tariffs have rallied the global industry in opposition, Gregory says, and raised fears not just of an end to the bourbon boom but also blows to Scotch and Irish whiskeys. “It was like putting the brakes on a freight train. It has been a very frustrating 18 months,” he says. Now it’s time for politicians to fix what’s broken, he says: “We don’t care whose whiskey it is—whether you spell it ‘-ey’ or ‘-y’— just pour yourself a glass of whiskey and get this done.”

Rackhouse K on Beam’s Clermont campus is the spiritual home of Knob Creek, the company’s niche brand named after the stream nearby that Abraham Lincoln reputedly grew up on. It’s an aging building that rises nine stories and holds 20,000 or so barrels that work their magic by sucking whiskey into the wood and through the deep black char and layer of sugars just behind it during cold winters, expelling it again when hot summers set in.

But that’s just the beginning of the story. Beyond the magic of American oak and the flavors it lends, there’s a simple economic explanation for why bourbon barrels have become such a staple of the global whiskey industry: The 1964 congressional statute, which, thanks to lobbying at the time by big timber-producing states, stipulates that bourbon be aged at least in part in new barrels. Kentucky alone spat out more than 2 million used barrels last year. Without another market for them, such a large barrel surplus would be an environmental nightmare.

But there’s another market, a big one. Many of the barrels end up overseas, making Kentucky the world’s biggest source of readily available barrels, according to Andrew Russell, who oversees Speyside Cooperage’s global barrel businesses from Scotland. “You have that great law that means you can use them only once,” he says. Distilling giants such as Beam Suntory and Brown-Forman have whole units dedicated to the used-barrel trade.

Many of Jim Beam’s barrels eventually end up under the control of Ron Welsh, the master blender who oversees Beam Suntory’s Scotch brands in Scotland. Since the early 1900s, according to Welsh, Laphroaig’s master distillers have used barrels from the bourbon distillery that now turns out Maker’s Mark. Half of the spirit produced by Bowmore is aged in Jim Beam barrels with much of the remainder resting in Spanish sherry casks. And so on.

While there’s still plenty of flavor-packing chemical components including vanillin and lactone in the wood, Welsh says a few years soaking in bourbon takes some of the tannins out of oak, tannins being the chemical compounds that give wines their “dryness.” The key is that unlike bourbon, Scotch is often aged in a variety of barrels over time. A barrel that might have spent only four years in a Kentucky warehouse can be used five or six more times in Scotland and spend decades in service to a new whisky.

As with oil, this particular barrel business is at the mercy of the laws of supply and demand and goes through its own peculiar crises. Beginning in the late 2000s, the subprime mortgage crisis, the financial meltdown, and the Great Recession triggered events—a collapse in construction industry demand for wood, a slowdown in logging—that would ripple through the barrel business. That meant less wood for whiskey casks. By 2015 the price of a used barrel, now about $100, rose as high as $200.

“We’re going to see something similar five years from now,” says Liz Braun. She oversees the sale of the almost 1 million used barrels that Brown-Forman generates each year from the distilleries that turn out brands including Jack Daniel’s and Woodford Reserve. A “remarkably wet” 2019 has kept loggers out of many U.S. forests, she says. “Everyone will have seen a dip in the amount of wood available.”

That may have global consequences. “The irony is that all of the people we would consider to be competitors on the liquid side are customers when it comes to used barrels,” Braun says. Before Christmas she was talking to new clients in China. Brown-Forman already sells its barrels to breweries, wineries, and distilleries all over the world—from Australia, Chile, Japan, and Myanmar to traditional whiskey powerhouses such as Scotland and Ireland. “We traipse all over the world, and every warehouse we walk into I can see Jack Daniel’s barrels and Brown-Forman barrels everywhere we look,” she says.

One of the places where Brown-Forman barrels have been finding what Braun calls their “beautiful afterlife” is a tiny windswept island that’s part of the Inner Hebrides archipelago off the northwest coast of mainland Scotland: the Isle of Raasay, home to 161 people and a lone distillery.

The island’s volcanic geological roots mean that the Isle of Raasay Distillery’s water, emanating from a Celtic-era source known as “the well of the pale cow,” is heavy in minerals and myth, both of which are prerequisites when it comes to Scotch. The result is a lightly peated whisky no one knows quite what to make of—yet. The distillery first went into operation in late 2017, and its inaugural batch of single malt won’t be shipped until later this year.

In the meantime, you can buy a bottle of While We Wait made by Raasay’s parent company, R&B Distilling Ltd., invest £5,000 ($6,500) in a cask that’s still maturing, or spend £69 to buy a bottle from Cask 18/433, a former Four Roses bourbon barrel scheduled for bottling in November 2031.

If the future of bourbon lies in Willett’s Armagnac casks stacked up in Kentucky, what’s happening on Raasay may presage the destiny of Scotch. The release, scheduled ahead of Christmas 2020, was distilled from September to November 2017. It then rested in bourbon barrels for two years before being transferred to Bordeaux casks for a final year. As complicated as that sounds, it’s an effort to speed up the making of a single malt, which in many cases takes at least 10 years. “We want to get a depth and complexity—the different flavors—into a whisky of a younger age,” says Alasdair Day, co-founder of the Isle of Raasay Distillery.

What motivates Day and his Scottish peers is not that different from what’s driving new-style bourbon distilleries and even storied ones in the U.S.

At Jim Beam’s Clermont campus, Freddie Noe is excited by the new still being built. It will allow him to experiment with grain recipes to see how they interact with the strain of yeast his family has used since after Prohibition (he keeps a jar of the wet yeast starter in his fridge at home in case of calamity).

Although Willett has relatives who run an independent bourbon distillery, his professional life is invested in barrels, more than 300,000 of which leave Speyside’s Kentucky operation every year packed in 40-foot shipping containers.

He has good reason to be confident that investment in bourbon barrels will pay. A passing trade war may knock the global whiskey cycle off-stride, but it’s not going to kill it. “When you go to a bar or a liquor store and you see a shelf of brown spirits,” Willett says, “I would be pretty confident everything’s got a bit of bourbon in it.