Another side-effect of the industry’s high start-up costs means that craft spirits companies have an incentive to essentially operate in the manner of a tech start-up, hoping to either quickly establish a foothold in the market and get acquired by one of their larger competitors, or rapidly scale up to the national level. But if your craft spirit becomes a nationwide phenomenon, then you’re no longer the small-batch underdog you claim to be and instead find yourself in the position of trying to prevent the media from discovering your warehouse-sized bottling operation, which the people who run Tito’s Handmade Vodka tried and failed to do a few years ago.
When it comes to booze, you need a good myth, a rich history, or at the very least, a name that confers some sort of cultural significance upon your product. The South in particular has a rich history of producing small-batch, artisanal homemade spirits, and by that I mean moonshine that people cooked up in stills made out of car parts and stuff during Prohibition. There are places in the region that were literally shaped by bootleggers, who threw a bunch of pointless twists and turns into country roads to give themselves an edge whenever the cops came calling. Whether or not grain alcohol in particular is a net societal good is not for me to decide, but it certainly helped forge a mythology that rich idiots can tap into simply by setting up a distillery and pumping out a few cases of the hard stuff. As a general rule it’s good to buy local as often as you can, but just because you’re buying local doesn’t mean the local business isn’t making your town worse.
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