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From Wisconsin to Kaohsiung: J. Henry’s First Steps Into TaiwanBy Cole Jensen, 8/10/2025 The Kaohsiung International Wine & Spirits Festival does not open quietly. Even before the doors swing wide, you can feel the hum. Down on the pier, trucks unload crates that smell faintly of oak and paperboard. Inside the Kaohsiung Exhibition Center, the air takes on that familiar show-floor mix of cork, polish, coffee from the vendor booths, and the faint sweetness of a hundred spirits vying for attention. It is four days of this, from morning crowds until the last call on Sunday evening, when the hall’s echo is the only thing left. In 2025, the festival marked its return with the same promise it has carried for years: Southern Taiwan’s most concentrated tasting opportunity, an international lineup of wine and spirits, and a meeting ground where importers, distributors, and enthusiasts stand shoulder to shoulder. It is a rare thing for this part of the island, which leans heavily on Taipei for large-scale events. In Kaohsiung, people come ready to taste, to learn, and if you give them something worth it, to buy. This year, one corner of the hall glowed with the warm amber of Wisconsin bourbon. It was the first time J. Henry & Sons had set foot on the island, and the debut was not by accident. Months of preparation had led to this moment: getting the right freight schedule, coordinating booth space with Larry Chou, lining up inventory so there would be enough to make a statement without overcommitting. And then, on day one, stepping into that corner of the show and watching the light catch on the bottles. |
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Greg's Broken Heart Bourbon Song of the Week |
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The Death of Bourbon Luxury: Ai and the End of Meaningful ExcessJuly 11, 2025 They say bourbon is America’s native spirit, but these days it’s feeling a little too native to the algorithm. Step into any high-end tasting room or whiskey expo and you’ll hear the same nervous buzz: Are we drinking craft, or are we drinking code? Over the past decade, bourbon has surged from humble local hero to international symbol of luxury excess. Limited releases from Pappy Van Winkle, Buffalo Trace Antique Collection, and Michter’s have become liquid gold, fetching thousands at auction and setting social media ablaze. But behind the velvet rope, a quieter force has been reshaping the market: Ai. Dynamic pricing tools now scan consumer behavior in real time, helping brands set bottle prices with surgical precision. Predictive models track which mashbills will light up Instagram and which tasting notes will thrill the review blogs. Even scarcity, that old magician’s trick of the luxury world, is no longer left to weather and wood; it’s a decision backed by predictive demand systems, with the illusion of rarity curated for maximum online frenzy. "We know what sells now, almost before we bottle it," admits Chris Comstock, Buffalo Trace’s bourbon marketing director. That is not bravado; it’s a data point. And it’s raising a deeper question. If bourbon’s magic once came from risk, patience, and the hand of the maker, what happens when those risks are flattened into algorithms? When a master distiller’s gut instinct is cross-checked by neural nets? When the thrill of the hunt is just a dopamine loop in an app? Some argue Ai can democratize bourbon, helping newcomers bypass the hype and find great bottles at fair prices. Others, like Maggie Kimberl of American Whiskey Magazine, warn that if tech “serves the seller, not the drinker,” the romance of the pour disappears. This is the landscape The Death of Bourbon Luxury explores. It is not a doomsday sermon, nor a nostalgic lament. It is a dispatch from the front line where craft meets code, where the old stories of bourbon collide with the cold calculations of machine learning. And it asks the one question no distillery chatbot can answer: What part of the experience still belongs to us? Welcome to the uneasy future of indulgence. Take a seat. Pour a glass. Let’s look at what’s in it. Fire in the Barrel, Signal in the SmokeWhen freedom gets templated, the bourbon still burns. by Charlie G. Peterson IV, 7/4/2025 Prologue: Spark, Interrupted It started with a bourbon bottle and an Instagram ad. Not the bottle itself. The timing. The way it appeared in my feed three days before the Fourth of July, perfectly lit, perfectly tagged, with language that sounded eerily familiar. I clicked. I read the tasting notes. They read like they'd been written by a marketing assistant trained by an Ai on 10,000 liquor reviews and one copy of The Federalist Papers. Then came the cigar list. Then the glitter cocktails. Then someone tried to tell me that a $16 Trader Joe’s bourbon was actually a secret handshake from Buffalo Trace. And the scary part wasn’t that they were wrong. The scary part was how comfortable it all felt. Familiar. Pre-packaged. Ritual, but synthetic. That’s when it hit me: Ai didn’t just change how we work. It changed how we celebrate. It didn’t just infiltrate our productivity. It quietly walked into our memories, dressed up in red, white, and blue, and started rearranging the furniture. This isn’t about bourbon. It’s about simulation. This isn’t about cigars. It’s about consent. And this isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about noticing when freedom starts tasting like an ad campaign. So I wrote this for the people who still remember when the Fourth of July wasn’t something you bought. It was something you lit on fire. Let’s get into it. Let the Spirit Speak: What Bourbon Tasting Still Knows That Ai Never Will In a world racing toward synthetic flavor and spectacle, the quiet act of tasting remains the last ritual worth protecting. By Cole Jensen, 6/27/2025 You ever ruin a bourbon tasting with lotion? I have. Not proud of it. I was new. Thought I smelled great. Walked into a room full of old men with serious glasses and wrinkled noses. I didn’t just embarrass myself. I obliterated the tasting notes of a fifteen-year single barrel with almond-scented hubris. That’s how I learned: you don’t bring yourself into a bourbon tasting. You bring your attention. How the LLM is Helping Sell Bourbon in TaiwanPrologue: Looking Ahead By Mason Bright, 6/20/2025 Three years from now, a bottle from a Midwestern farm might sit on a rooftop bar in Hanoi or a hotel in Osaka. By mid-2026, the American Spirit initiative includes three to five distillery partners, a multi-city tasting tour, and localized bourbon cocktail programs. Retail and club demand fluctuates with gifting seasons, but on-premise education matures the market. As Greg and Larry expand the model to include Vietnam, Hong Kong, or Japan, the same Ai-powered foundation scales with them, adapted to each country’s compliance, palate, and storytelling needs. A language model didn’t pour the whiskey, but it helped put the bottle on the shelf. The Velvet Rope in a Shot Glass: Why “Business Bourbon™” Misses the Entire Point of BourbonBy Cole Jensen, 5/16/2025 A new product has arrived calling itself The Difference® Business Bourbon™, launched with the ambition of "establishing a new category" of spirits and marketed as a pour reserved for “the rooms that matter.” It’s won awards, sure. It has the sleek packaging, the double-gold medals, and the right influencers lined up. But beneath the high-gloss brand language and invitation-only access lies a glaring contradiction: You cannot invent a new category of bourbon. And more than that, to frame bourbon as a tool of exclusivity is to betray its very roots. Let’s break this down. The Illusion of Category Creation The claim that Business Bourbon™ defines a “new spirits category” is, at best, a marketing flourish. According to the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), which regulates the labeling and classification of spirits in the United States, bourbon is already a protected and specific designation. A "bourbon whiskey" must be made from a mash of at least 51 percent corn, aged in new charred oak barrels, distilled to no more than 160 proof, and entered into the barrel at no more than 125 proof. It must be bottled at 80 proof or more. Ai Conversations and Bourbon: My Talks with Larry and How Business is ChangingBy Greg Walters, 3/13/2025 From Bureaucracy to Breakthroughs – How Ai is Reshaping Business I had two great conversations today about Ai, real business, and bourbon. One was with our transcriber, Lynn, who sat in to take notes. I passed the transcript along to Gabriella, who is crafting a 500-word article summing up the discussion. That piece will go live soon. The other conversation was with my colleague and friend, Larry, who lives in Taiwan. We’re working closely with a personal favorite bourbon distillery in Wisco, a state where drinking culture is not just a pastime but a perfected art. If you disagree, try walking into any bar in the Cheese State, order a Bloody Mary, and refuse the chaser. You FIB, you. |
Spirits at the Border: How Whiskey Became a Proxy for Power, Culture, and CashWhiskey isn’t just crossing borders—it’s redrawing them. by Greg Walters, 5/30/2025 The global bourbon map doesn’t look like it used to. Once confined to Kentucky pride and the occasional Japanese collector’s cabinet, whiskey is now a litmus test for everything from national identity to investment strategy. This week’s headlines make it clear: bourbon is no longer just a drink. It’s a symbol. A stake. And increasingly, a line in the sand. Start in Saudi Arabia. For months, rumors whispered through luxury hotels and diplomatic circles that the Kingdom was preparing to relax its alcohol laws, an unspoken pivot in a desert of dry policy. Western news outlets jumped on it. Tourism speculators did what they do best. But then came the denial: “incorrect and misleading,” a government official told The Drinks Business. No change. No concessions. The mirage vanished. And yet, that brief flicker of possibility reveals something telling: alcohol policy, once rigid and ignored by most outside observers, has become a bellwether for openness, modernity, and control. While Saudi Arabia held the line, China went on offense. Bourbon: Microbes, Marketing, and the Myth of Masteryby Cole Jensen, 5/23/2025 Fermentation doesn’t get a label. No script across the neck of the bottle. No gold foil. No Instagram reels shot in amber light. But it’s the beginning of everything. Before oak, before proof, before the barrel rolls into the rickhouse and picks up the scent of 13 summers, there’s a mash bubbling with yeast and bacteria doing things no influencer can pronounce. It’s the real work. And almost nobody talks about it. That’s because most drinkers don’t want bourbon. They want a story they can pour. A brag in a bottle. Something that says: I know what I’m doing. So we chase age statements, bottle shapes, and sourced juice with an LLC. We memorize rickhouses like sports stats and make sure our guests know the mashbill. But the truth? Most bourbon drinkers couldn’t identify the fermentation profile in a blind tasting if it smacked them in the palate. “I’d say 80% of a bourbon’s flavor starts in fermentation,” said whiskey historian Chuck Cowdery in an interview with The Brindiamo Group. “But nobody’s asking about the yeast. Nobody’s writing songs about sour mash.” He’s right. Fermentation is the part we skip past. It’s wet grain and invisible activity. It doesn’t look good on a back bar. It can’t be bottled. And it doesn’t play well in the age of premium branding. But let’s be clear: yeast is doing the heavy lifting long before the charred oak gets its flowers. It’s converting sugars, throwing off heat, and giving birth to the esters and congeners that form bourbon’s future personality. Without this controlled chaos, the rest of the process is just glorified water management. We forget this because fermentation isn’t romantic. It’s industrial. It’s science. And science doesn’t pair well with faux leather coasters and $180 price tags. The marketing machine prefers something easier to glamorize. State of the Flow: Whiskey’s Existential Barrel RollInside the Tariffs, Tech, and Turmoil of 2026 By Greg Walters, 4/11/2025 If you’re watching this industry from a warehouse floor, a tasting room, or behind a spreadsheet, you already feel it. Bourbon’s not broken, but the ground is shifting. The bourbon industry isn’t in a rut. It’s in a loop. A slow, spiraling loop that smells like charred oak and supply chain anxiety. One week we’re riding high on cask-strength confidence. The next we’re watching award-winning distilleries file for Chapter 11 while the cooperages whisper about deforestation. There’s no signal anymore. Only noise, flavored with panache and panic, distilled into headlines no one enjoys reading. In 2026, the whiskey market operates in a state best described as sclerotic. There’s motion, but it’s stiff. Growth still exists, but it flows like molasses uphill. On one side, you have the hardcore drinker who demands verité in every pour. No additives. No gimmicks. Just grain and flame. On the other side, you've got consumers who toss bourbon in the freezer, sip through silicone straws, and then ask why it tastes like disappointment. |
