Gregg Snyder urges whiskey lovers to not panic when it comes to the perceived downturn in the market. 

The whiskey industry veteran, currently Master Distiller for Four Branches Bourbon, acknowledges that he sees plenty of “gloom and doom” in industry outlooks and reporting – and he urges patience.

“I’ve been in this business for 47 years and, quite honestly I think the bourbon industry as a whole is very strong,” Snyder, formerly Master Distillery at Chicken Cock Whiskey, told FredMinnick.com. “What’s happening is the growth has tailed off.”

And there was a LOT of growth.

What gets bounced around is that the younger generations aren’t drinking as much, and that’s driving the downward trend. Snyder isn’t buying it, saying this gets bandied about with every generation when a certain spirit declines in popularity.

“When it took off, the big distilleries got caught with their pants down, so to speak,” Snyder said. “As you know, you can’t just whip up a batch of 8-year-old bourbon. All this growth caught the industry by surprise, and then they scrambled. Then it just leveled off. As result, all these distilleries produced way more bourbon than they needed.”

Consider the case of Buffalo Trace Distillery and the Blanton’s boom. People were chasing and hoarding what not long before had been a pretty easy to acquire $50 bottle. Suddenly, bottles of Blanton’s were being sold for five times that price and were nearly impossible to find at retail.

Heck, even the distillery’s base brand, Buffalo Trace, disappeared from shelves for a while and started commanding something resembling allocated bourbon prices. In response, the distillery, starting in the mid- to late 2010s, spent $1.2 billion in expansions and increased production by 50%.

Snyder said he was talking during the bourbon upswing with the late Steve Thompson, co-founder of Kentucky Artisan Distillery, about the ramifications of the bourbon boom.

“He said, ‘When’s all this going to hit a head?’” Thompson started looking at the numbers, compared the production to the sales forecasts, and he predicted exactly what is happening now.

“He was right,” Snyder said. “We knew it was going to happen. There’s a lot of aged bourbon on the market now. Prices have come down, distilleries are trying to adjust.”

Snyder urges bourbon enthusiasts and investors to compare today’s situation with what happened to bourbon in the 1980s – people turned to lighter spirits, and bourbon became almost an afterthought. He was always a bourbon drinker, but he watched the shift happen in real time. The rebound was as emphatic as the initial fall-off.

“If you look back at history, I don’t care if it’s gin, vodka, bourbon, rum, whatever, it’s all cyclical,” Snyder said. “My generation was coming of age to drink – most of my friends shifted to the lighter spirits. I saw it bottom out in the 1980s, then in the 1990s there was an upward tick. It just took off over the last 12 to 15 years. 

“It’s not crashing by any means. If it does show a downward trend, it’s going to be a long, slow trend.”

-Kevin Gibson

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