Clay Risen

Whiskey is in a renaissance around the world. It has a mystique and intrigue that draws in consumers from all walks of life. The American craft whiskey movement has been going strong for more than a decade, fueling this renewed curiosity in the spirit as the concept of American whiskey becomes more diverse than ever before.

Clay Risen is one of the most prominent voices in whiskey journalism. He has written two books on whiskey (American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s Favorite Spirit, and Single Malt: A Guide to the Whiskies of Scotland), with a third book on rye whiskey coming soon.

Clay began writing about spirits as a freelance writer for The Atlantic in 2008, before moving to work for The New York Times as an opinions editor in 2010. He has witnessed the American craft whiskey movement evolve from its infancy to where it is today, so we asked him his opinions on some of the most relevant trends that have shaped the movement, and where they may lead in the future. 

Clay grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, with America’s whiskey industry all around him as he watched his grandfather sip on great bourbons. Even after Clay moved away from Nashville, much of his family remained, so he would come back to visit often. The industry was different back in the early 2000s when Clay first started to get into whiskey. “Dusty hunting” as he puts it, wasn’t a thing. Liquor stores were packed to the gills with fantastic brands like A.H. Hirsch Reserve 16 year old bourbon, or the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection, that you could buy for a song. All that has changed. The revival of bourbon around the world caught everyone by surprise, including the largest bourbon distillers. Unable to match supply to demand, prices have skyrocketed, with retailers and the secondary market selling premium aged bourbon for hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. If you’re lucky enough to find one of these bottles that just two decades ago were lining the shelves, chances are you can’t afford them. 

As Clay got his feet wet, writing about spirits, the American craft distilling movement continued to grow. New distilleries popped up all over the country, thanks in large part to a loosening of state legislation nationwide. Despite these new laws easing the burden to obtain a distilling license, distilleries remain an expensive venture. With tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, going into commercial leases, equipment, utilities, not to mention grains and barrels, it is difficult to stay afloat in an industry where the product you make is expected to sit in a warehouse for years before you can sell it. Many distilleries turn to making vodka, gin, or even unaged whiskey to see some early returns, and while unaged whiskey can be an interesting product to offer early in a distilleries life cycle, Clay sees it more as a fad that will fade away with time. 

“This may be a little judgmental on my part, or a little unfair, but I don’t actually know a lot of people that like it. I don’t know a lot of marketers that like it. I don’t know a lot of bartenders that like it. I know there are some and everything has it’s fans, and that’s not a judgment on people that do like it... Now, that being said, I’ve had some fantastic, really well made, unaged whiskey, but I can never not think what it would taste like after it’s been in a barrel for a couple of years. It’s like cake batter before it’s been cooked. Cake batter is not disgusting, but no one is going out eating a lot of cake batter. They want it in a cake.”

Even when craft distilleries do start releasing aged whiskies, they are typically aged in small barrels, and usually for no more than a year or two. Distillers will assert that the smaller barrels allow for more spirit-to-barrel interaction over a shorter period of time. While this is true, and can help a whiskey gain more color and flavor from the oak more quickly, there is a certain quality and complexity to traditionally aged whiskey that is difficult to achieve on an abbreviated timeline. With this relatively recent idolization of premium aged bourbons, craft distillers have an uphill battle to climb and compete. A correlation began to arise between the word “craft” and the word “young,” and despite the fact that some craft distilleries have now been around for 10 years, or longer, and have come out with premium aged products of their own, this youthful scarlet letter still remains in the minds of many consumers as craft distilleries continue to spring up, unable to escape the financial pressure to get something out to market early.

However, it’s important to distinguish that young doesn’t have to mean bad. Despite early skepticism, Clay admits that a lot of craft distillers have been able to make some fantastic rye whiskies, and even a few good bourbons at a young age. An age that might make someone like Jimmy Russel at Wild Turkey choke on his Master’s Keep. 

“I think you find a lot of people who have really leaned into that young identity simply because it creates a different flavor profile that consumers actually like. I don’t particularly go in for the kind of raw, grain flavor that you typically get on a young whiskey, but I know people who do. I’ve also had some whiskey with that raw grain flavor that I’ll admit is pretty good. That’s not where we were 6 or 7 years ago. What was coming out of craft [then] was a mix of potential, occasional hits, and a lot of misses. Sometimes when I would say that, it would rub people the wrong way, but the point I was trying to make is that in any new industry, and in any industry that has tons of entrepreneurs getting into it, you’re going to have more failures than successes. That’s not a mark on the industry, and that’s certainly not a mark on the people who are doing it well...You had a lot of people getting into it, with a lot of different motives, a lot of different skill sets, a lot of different levels of resources. One of the things I’m sort of heartened by is, 7, 8, 10 years later, a number of those distilleries have really been killing it. They’ve been doing great stuff. By and large, it’s the ones that people knew from the beginning had their feet planted correctly, knew what they were doing, and were willing to be in it for the long haul, so I’m really excited about where craft is these days.”

As technology continues to evolve and improve, so too will the process of making whiskey. Clay believes the impact of the advancements can be grouped into two broad categories. The first is progressive innovation within the parameters of whiskey production as we already know it to exist. With new developments in barrel making allowing distillers to hone in on particular compounds in the oak, to unique yeast strains and grain varietals lending new flavors and aromas, these advancements will help traditional distillers gain greater control over new and distinctive products. The second category of innovation Clay reserves for people who are interested in bucking tradition and making whiskey in a new way all together. Cleveland Whiskey (Cleveland, OH), for example, uses a proprietary process that allows them to rapidly age their products in about a week. Others have attempted to build a whiskey molecule by molecule in a lab. The promise of overnight whiskey is not new, and while these modern innovators are making more high quality, legitimate products than the rectifiers of the 1800s, they still tend to fall a bit short of conventional whiskey. Perhaps one day that won’t be true, but in the meantime that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a market for it. 

“I have yet to try a rapidly aged spirit that comes anything close to what I think whiskey should taste like. I think they’re going for a different game. It’s either for the very uninformed consumer, and most of that is in the export market. Markets that are not traditionally whiskey markets. It’s also for the ready to drink market, where you’re selling whiskey cocktails premade. It’s for flavored whiskey. If you’re making a cinnamon whiskey, the underlying whiskey doesn’t have to be that great, and it’s going to be masked anyway. I do wonder if in the long run that creates two whiskey markets. A whole lot of imitation whiskey and then people pay a premium for traditionally aged spirits.”

No matter your approach, the most important thing that a craft distiller can do is educate people on what makes their brand unique. Why should a consumer spend $60-70 on a bottle of craft, versus a $20 bottle of Four Roses? For many in craft, this is the only way forward, and winning your own backyard can build a foundation for your brand that allows you to grow. Regionality is a tool many craft distilleries use to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Some go as far as using the word terroir, which is more commonly used in wine. Terroir is a french word deriving from the word “terre,” meaning earth. In wine, terroir is attributed to specific aromas and flavors that are the result of the environment in which the wine was produced, such as the soil and climate. It is a hot button word in the world of whiskey, with brands on the one hand touting its importance in their distinct flavor profiles, and skeptics on the other hand who believe that the manufacturing process of distillation removes any ability to ascribe specific aromas or flavors to a place. Since the word is so problematic, Clay tries his best to avoid using it, but he doesn’t discredit the idea that whiskey can have a sense of place. 

Far North Spirits (Hallock, MN) conducted an experiment where they sowed and grew multiple varietals of rye grain from scratch in the same plot of land. They processed, distilled and aged those grains in the exact same manner, and the end result were whiskies with dramatic differences in flavor, lending credence to the idea that the specific grains you use in your process does have an effect on the final product. Wigle Whiskey (Pittsburgh, PA) and High Wire Distilling (Charleston, SC) have also done experiments along these same lines with similar results. But for Clay, it’s not just about the soil, climate and grains. It also has to do with style.

“It’s about people, and cultures, and when it comes to Kentucky, really about entrenched knowledge and communities. You can’t underestimate the power of a place to influence its local products, when not only has it been made by the same families going back generations, but those families all know each other. You get this interweaving, and they help each other, they talk to each other, and they develop ideas together, even as they compete. Out of that comes something that can’t not be influenced by that community. That to me is the most important part of terroir, and it’s why I hesitate to use that term, because most people don’t think of that culture as being part of terroir, and yet, when what we’re talking about is what makes this spirit, made in this place, unique to this place, you can’t discount culture.”

This concept of terroir in spirits, while contentious, is also still in its infancy insofar as our understanding of it’s impact on flavor. Despite that, craft distilleries across the country cling to it. So, does terroir provide more value to the product or to the branding? Maybe it’s a little bit of both. In the short term, it may be nothing more than an effective marketing strategy. A rallying cry for local consumers to support small upstart brands, and who’s to say there is anything wrong with that? But over time, maybe the balance shifts and it becomes easier or more apparent for consumers to pick up on nuances in spirits based on where it was made. 

“I think the test will be, some day in the future, if you can get master whiskey tasters who can sit down with a flight of whiskies and say, ‘that’s a Kentucky bourbon, and that is a Texas bourbon, and I will tell you why’ in the same way you can do with wine … We’re not there with whiskey, but the answer to that question will be do we ever get to that point? … I think that over time that balance will change, because you will start to see people, in a really substantive, honest, deep way, embrace what it means to make a whiskey in their particular place ... I don’t think it will ever be the way wine regionalization works in France, or even the US, because distillers are just not going to embrace the kind of regulations that are necessary. You’re not going to get a bunch of Texas distillers to agree that ‘from now on we have to have a minimum of 70% corn, and we always have to use rye as our second grain.’ And why would you? But that would be the kind of thing that would be necessary … and any comparison to regionalization of terroir in France has to understand that they’ve been making wine with regulations for a thousand years … We have not been making whiskey that long.”

While we wait to see how the idea of terroir in spirits develops in the future, the American Single Malt movement, in many ways, is the most interesting thing happening in American whiskey today, with a wide range of interpretations leading to a vast array of flavor profiles. There are American single malts that borrow heavily from scotch, using 100% malted barley and aging in used cooperage. Others take those scotch traditions and put an American twist on them, like using new barrels for aging, or smoking their malted barley in unique ways as we discovered with Hamilton Distillers (Tucson, AZ). Some are forging their own path, forgoing barley and using common American grains like 100% rye malt or 100% wheat malt to make their whiskies. This open field of exploration is possible in large part due to the fact that “American single malt” is not recognized as a category by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), and therefore is not a regulated spirit. The American Single Malt Commission, a group of distilleries that make American single malts, have been lobbying the TTB to define the spirit so they can continue to grow the movement. But will regulation stifle the kind of unbridled experimentation that has made it so special?

“There are benefits that come with definitions. If you can get the TTB to say, ‘here is what American single malt is,’ that elevates it as a category. Right now it’s not a category as far as regulators are concerned. There are a lot of benefits to that, but with the right TTB definition it can elevate it without constraining it. It would be terrible if it specified malted barley, for example. It would really hurt it if it said it had to be aged in used barrels, or new barrels. That would be a shame. That said, that’s what it looks like with other categories, so I hope that whatever comes out is a little groundbreaking in that regard.”

Westland Distillery (Seattle, WA) is one of the most successful craft distilleries in the country and a leader in the American single malt movement. They have been smart in building a brand around their products, and through continual innovation and a proper approach to scaling up, they have proven that they are in it for the long haul. Clay attributes their success to a combination of factors that he believes any craft brand needs to thrive. The first is a deep understanding of what it takes to create a whiskey brand. He singles out Paul Hletko (Few Spirits, Evanston, Il), a skilled distiller and former patent lawyer, as someone who understood that it is one thing to make good whiskey once, but to sustain a high level of quality and standards, and get that product to market required an investment in people, and the physical plan necessary to make it happen. This is a business, first and foremost, and that all has to be baked in from the beginning. 

The second factor is understanding what it means to be in the whiskey business specifically. Unlike beer or unaged spirits, whiskey takes time to mature and oftentimes, even after years of aging in a barrel, those early batches reveal that there is still a lot of room for improvement. You can’t be looking to shock the world in a year or two, you have to have the patience and dedication to take the long road to glory. Now, at least a decade into the American craft whiskey boom, that composure from some of the older craft distilleries has paid off. Clay highlights Colin Spoelman and David Haskell (Kings County Distillery, Brooklyn NY) for making whiskey that showed a lot of promise right from the start, but had a ways to go. There was never a doubt in his mind that they had the proper commitment, stamina and headspace to make those improvements, and now, he believes the whiskey they are making is “killer.”

The final factor that has helped lead a handful of craft distilleries to success is finding something unique and individualized that separates them from the pack, like Wigle Whiskey (Pittsburgh, PA) who has dug into the rich history of whiskey distilling in their region of Western Pennsylvania, and leaned heavily into innovation as a way to present exciting products to consumers. Products that truly feel like a representation of their community. 

Following the repeal of prohibition, the spirits industry in America was consolidated among a handful of distilleries who spent the rest of the century dictating what it meant to be American whiskey. Now there are over 2000 distilleries in this country, with at least one in every single state. It’s important to pay attention to how and why this idea of American whiskey is changing and how it could continue to change. Not just the way it’s being made, but who the people are that are making it. It’s exciting to see what long term impacts a sense of place will have on a spirit and what new discoveries are waiting along the path on the long road to glory. It’s crucial that we support small local distilleries and give them the same patience and dedication that they bring to their whiskies, so they can have a chance to shock the world. As a country and as a planet, we find ourselves in a unique position in history, with challenges that speak to the very core of who we are. As has always been the case, whiskey, and in particular craft whiskey, will undoubtedly play a role in either shaping or being shaped by the future that we build moving forward.