How “Single Malt” spurred Bourbon Boom

How Single Malt Scotch sparked a Bourbon Boom

As a longtime Bourbon Guide, I’ve been asked “what caused this Bourbon boom” more times than I can count. It’s a reasonable question. We’ve been making corn-based, barrel-aged Bourbon whiskey in Kentucky for 200 years, so why only recently did this stuff become so trendy?

I’ve responded to that question in different ways since I began guiding and driving tours in 2011. I had been a newspaper reporter prior to that, and most stories I’d written mentioning distilleries included some negative mention of a spill, a fire or fungus.

A lot has changed since then, including my response. Early on, I’d infer the Bourbon Boom was spurred by simple things like:

“A renaissance in whiskey cocktails and curious mixologists,” or the “1999 launch of the “Official Kentucky Bourbon Trail.”

The rise of Social Media outlets was as much a contributor to the Bourbon Boom as either of those factors.

My responses all sufficed at one point for the average Bourbon Tourist, but none offered a thorough answer to the, “why now” question.

The real answer takes a far deeper dive into history than all of those answers combined. Once again, we’ve been making this stuff for more than two centuries, so why now?

To get to the boom, we need to go back to the Bourbon Bust.

Consistency in flavor had always been the goal for the bourbon biz.

Today’s bottle needed to taste like the previous and the next one a consumer would purchase.

With each aging barrel tasting a bit differently from its neighbor, combining enough barrels for a consistent product took talent and work, and lots of barrels.

That had always been the mission – consistency.

But consistency just wasn’t doing it for consumers of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. It seemed that generation wanted nothing like what their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed. They were too hip. Bourbon sales decreased and was in an all-out tailspin as we headed into the 1980s. Times were tough and distilleries and their brands began to fade away. The Bourbon Dark Ages were upon us. Making things even more painful for Kentucky Distillers was the unforeseen rise of Single Malt Scotch whisky. How did that happen? Kentucky makes of yummy barrel-aged, corn-based, Kentucky Straight Bourbon and, suddenly, a 100% barley whiskey made at a single distillery in Europe was suddenly the new kid on the block!

This was hard to accept, so the Bourbon industry needed to react. Consistency hadn’t been doing it, so distilleries began thinking outside that box. Hmm, SINGLE MALT SCOTCH is, popular, so let’s try a SINGLE something in the Bourbon World… In 1984 the lead distiller at Ancient Age Distillery in Frankfort launched the first SINGLE BARREL Bourbon Label – Blanton’s.

It was named for Elmer Lee’s predecessor – Albert Bacon Blanton. While today, this is a popular brand, originally it was heckled by the old-timers and industry experts. “If you bottle only one barrel at a time, you’re guaranteed no consistency.”

That was the sentiment and it took 40 years before Blanton’s took off to become the sought-after label it is today.

With SINGLE BARREL not spurring interests, distillers continued to think outside the box (consistency). Five years later, in 1989, Heaven Hill tapped into a new marketing phrase that struck a chord – Small Batch Bourbon.

That’s when 12-year-Old Elijah Craig Small Batch Bourbon was released.

I was still in high school at the time, but I remember the new marketing for Small Batch - and I believed it all.

Heaven Hill wasn’t just using any old barrels for its new 12-year, Small Batch, Elijah Craig label.

No way. Parker Beam and his helpers at America’s largest family-owned distillery were selecting the best barrels for the new label. That was their story. I’m sticking to it. I wasn’t the only one to buy into the Small Batch phrase. Just two years later, Jim Beam released four new labels for its Small Batch Collection.

There was something for everyone, too. For lighter palates, 80-proof Basil Hayden was an easy sipper. Packaged to resemble a monk’s frock, the low- proof Bourbon was named for he who led 25 Catholic Families into Central Kentucky, including the Beams. Their 100-proof flagship: Knob Creek was named for the place Abe Lincoln spent his first 6 years of life along. For more experienced drinkers, there was 107-proof Baker’s – named for longtime plant manager Baker Beam, who still resides next to the Clermont plant. For barrel-proof lovers, there was Booker’s – named for Baker’s cousin, Booker Noe. It was uncut, just like it was straight from the barrel.

Like Heaven Hill’s Elijah Craig, these new labels sold for at least twice the price of each distillery’s original brand.

Every other Kentucky distiller followed suit shortly thereafter - releasing their own version of small batch, limited, reserve and single barrel labels. In 1992, Louisville’s Brown-Forman Corporation rebranded some of its best barrels of Old Forester to introduce Woodford Reserve.

Shortly thereafter, Barton released 1792. The “kickin’ chicken” – Wild Turkey - released Russell’s and Rare Breed. And so on… And so on… Kentucky began making better tasting, and pricier labels, but things were still a bit shaky in the 1990s.

Graduating high school in 1992, I’ll not forget the closure of Louisville’s Stitzel-Weller Distillery - the birthplace of wheated bourbons!

Finer labels didn’t mean an immediate Bourbon Boom. A few years later, the half-dozen or so big distilleries remaining in Kentucky came together to create the Kentucky Bourbon Trail in 1999.

It was the beginning of a tourism effort to mimic something similar to Napa, or Sonoma. There was no template for whiskey tourism. It took five years, in fact, for the first distiller open a visitor center. Once again, it was Heaven Hill to lead the effort, when they opened the Bourbon Heritage Center in 2004. It was like a museum. Without cellphones and social media outlets, this Bourbon Trail took a while to take off.

I was a newspaper reporter in those days, but the few mentions of “bourbon” I wrote about were negative: about spills, fires and fungus. Newspapers died, so in 2011 I took a job with Mint Julep Tours in Louisville as a Bourbon Tour guide. I fell in love with this budding new industry – Bourbon Tourism. I could talk about my home state and bourbon. How cool was that? There were but 9 distilleries on the Official Kentucky Bourbon Trail in 2011, and roughly 300 labels bearing the word “Bourbon.”

I wasted no time in sampling them all. It was doable in 2011. Good luck doing that today, with some 6,000-plus labels touting “Bourbon” inside. Also today, Kentucky has about 100 distilleries from Paducah to Pikeville – with the vast majority being but a decade old or younger, relying on sourced inventory. The past 20 years have boomed for the Bourbon industry, and related tourism.

So why the Bourbon Boom? That was the original question. After hitting rock bottom, and seeing foreign whiskies take over, the industry rebounded in the 1990s and 2010s to a Bourbon Boom like never before. It’s been so crazy over the past two-decades, that we likely have more distilleries than can be sustained, with too many brands. Some will lose. Some brands will disappear. Those distillers here when the boom took off will ride the storms, and surf the waves just like they’ve done before.

And some sites will continue to ride a wave of a site’s history and elegance, rather than what’s going on today. The average tourist won’t notice such details, so long as the bar is good, the gift shop has plenty of swag and the STORY is nicely presented. The telling of stories has been as much a part of the Bourbon Boom as the new products.

And I’m happy to do my part. Cheers!