Has the Chase for Bourbon Turned Into a Subscription?

This is The Cut.

Copper and Kings opened a bottle club this week — you commit to a year of quarterly releases, sight unseen, and in return you get first access to things nobody else can have. It is the fourth thing this week that asks you to sign up before you taste. Has the chase turned into a subscription?

I'm John from Chasing the Unicorn Podcast. These came out of the brief this morning, and I've kept the ones that are genuinely contested.

The people who like it call it the honest version. Think about what the old chase actually is. You build a relationship with a store manager, you take the calls, you buy things you don't want so you're on the list for the thing you do, you drive two hours on a rumour. That is a subscription — you're just paying it in time, favours and bottles you didn't need, and nobody ever tells you the odds. A club at least puts the deal on paper, and a deal on paper is a deal you can read before you agree to it.

The people who hate it say you've just invented a whiskey timeshare. You are paying in advance for something you cannot taste, from a producer with every incentive to put its best work where it will earn attention rather than where it is already sold. The whole pleasure of the chase is that you can walk away. A committed year is a year you cannot walk away, and the moment the third release disappoints you're not a hunter any more, you're a customer with a contract.

I think it's the honest version, and I think most people will hate that. The old system was never a meritocracy — it rewarded proximity, free time and knowing somebody, and we called that dedication because the alternative was admitting it was luck and geography. A club says the quiet part out loud: access is a product, and here is what it costs. You are allowed to dislike that. Just don't pretend the thing it replaced was fairer.

Has the chase turned into a subscription?

I want a straight answer in the comments — would you sign up for a year of bottles you haven't tasted, yes or no.

Second question. Jack Daniel's is taking its American single malt national. Hundred percent malted barley, new American oak, finished in oloroso sherry — that's the dry, nutty kind — and run through the Lincoln County Process, which is the charcoal filtering that makes Tennessee whiskey Tennessee whiskey. It moves from a duty-free curiosity to an annual release everywhere. Their core range shifts something like four and a half million cases a year in this country. Does the biggest name in American whiskey entering single malt validate the category, or flatten it?

The validation argument is about shelf space. American single malt only became its own federal category recently — before that it was a craft oddity with no agreed definition and no home in a store. A brand with that kind of distribution doesn't just add a bottle, it creates a section. Once a retailer builds a single malt shelf, every small producer who was previously filed under miscellaneous has somewhere to sit.

The flattening argument is about what people will assume the category tastes like. There are dozens of American single malts and they are wildly different — smoky, delicate, sherried, huge. If the first one most drinkers ever try is made by the company that also makes the most famous whiskey in the world, then Jack Daniel's house character becomes the reference point for a category it just joined. Small producers don't get crowded off the shelf. They get compared to something they were never trying to be, by people who think they now know what the category is.

I land on validation, and the reason is the word itself. American single malt is now a legal definition — a hundred percent malted barley, distilled at one American distillery, aged in oak. That is the same kind of word as blended, which we went through on Tuesday: a rule about how it was made, saying nothing at all about whether it's any good. A category with a legal definition and a giant behind it is a category that survives. What it tastes like is then an argument, and arguments are healthy. Not having a shelf at all is not.

Now, I could be wrong, and I'll make the case against myself. Every craft producer who has watched a big name enter their category has heard exactly this speech about a rising tide, and quite often the tide arrived and the small boats sank anyway. Validation is a comfortable word for people who aren't the ones being validated.

Does the biggest name in American whiskey entering single malt validate the category, or flatten it?

Comments. And if you make single malt for a living, I especially want yours.

Third question. Michter's was just named the world's most admired whiskey for the fourth year running, voted by buyers, bartenders, journalists and industry people across more than twenty-five countries. Does a ranking like that mean anything to somebody standing in a shop?

Some say yes, and they're not being naive about it. That panel isn't a popularity contest among enthusiasts — it's people who taste professionally and buy professionally, across dozens of markets, and four years in a row is not an accident. Consistency at scale is genuinely hard, and admiration from the trade is a decent proxy for a company that doesn't cut corners when nobody's looking.

Others say it measures the wrong thing entirely. Most admired is a reputation award. It rewards brand management, hospitality, consistency of story — all real, none of them the liquid. A bartender in Singapore admiring a distillery says very little about whether the bottle in front of you at your budget is better than the one beside it.

The second lot are closer to right, and here's what nobody in the trade will say out loud: an award like that measures how a company behaves toward the industry, not how a bottle behaves toward you. That's not a scandal, it's just a different question. Michter's earning it four times means they run a serious operation. It does not mean their bottle beats the one next to it on your shelf, and it was never designed to.

Does a ranking like that mean anything to somebody standing in a shop?

Last one. Tell me in the comments whether an award on a bottle has ever actually changed what you bought.

There are five different ways into a bottle laid out in the brief right now — a raffle, two distillery-only releases, a club and an allocation window — with the odds, the specs and what I'd chase and what I'd let go. Everything I argued this morning is sourced in there beside it. If one of these calls looks soft to you, that's where you'd go and take it apart.

That's The Cut. Follow the show wherever you listen, so the next one finds you first. The full American Whiskey Industry Brief is free every morning at chasingtheunicornpodcast.com. I'm John Schuster. Thanks for joining me. Your unicorn is out there.