Regardless of whether you lean to the left of the political spectrum or to the right, or whether you root for Manchester United or give a fluttering horse feather about sports at all, there is one thing that everyone across this increasingly polarised, always-poised-to-argue society can agree on: it’s been quite a year. And it’s not even over.
Every few weeks when I sit down to write this column, I pledge to myself to keep it light. I’ll write about a captivating stranger I met in a bar, like Ricky, the tugboat captain hanging out at a timeworn dive in Brooklyn. He’d travelled there by sea from Texas, docked mere hours before, and all he wanted to do that night was shoot pool with his crew. Or, I’ll think, I’ll share something about a Hot New Trend that’s worthy of your attention — and cash, like the tranche of pumpkin ales from American craft brewers.
But then I open any one of the several daily industry newsletters that await me in my inbox every morning like some posse of small-town sheriffs whose sole duty is to remind me that I don’t deserve to have fun. And my list of things to potentially write about starts to look like some kind of existential memo from the Department of Grievances, an alarmist’s lamentation, an elegy to pleasure, a bingo card of doom.
A recent sampling runs from unnerving to tragic to downright chilling: “Jack Daniel’s scraps partnership with farmers in this Tennessee county, local livestock operations left scrambling”; “The Alton Distillery files for bankruptcy protection”; “Moët Hennessy tight-lipped on 1,200 job cuts”; “Thieves steal $1M worth in craft whiskey from Washington distillery”; “Whisky maker loses Scotch down the drain after machine error.”
As any sociologist or anthropologist will tell you, in moments of need and distress, we turn to people who believe what we believe to uphold us. It was with great urgency, then, that I travelled to San Antonio in August for the American Distilling Institute’s annual conference. I’ll admit to being slightly worried on my flight. The financial grimness of the industry is not subjective, it’s data. The slowdown in consumption is not conjecture, it’s fact. All that’s to say nothing about the politics that hang overhead like a wet paper bag of bricks.
Needless to say, three days in the company of spirit makers, innovators, branding pros, designers, artists, and people I’d only ever met on Instagram was healing. I listened to a deeply explanatory, engineering-heavy seminar about the history and forthcoming glories of the old-school three-chamber still and found joy. I was absolutely floored when I tasted through samples of rums and whiskies aged in a vessel made by Modern Cooperage, a California company that has created a way for producers to custom-design the ageing process. A patented carousel inside the barrel-shaped container allows for 20 different staves to be inserted. A handle rotates it so you agitate the liquid and get a deeper infusion and integration of flavours into the base spirit. It sounded like a gimmick. It is not. Within creativity lies deliverance.
And I experienced the joy of discovery at a very compact distillery on a main drag of San Antonio, next to a cowboy-hat shop — because Texas. Maverick Distilling was founded by Kenneth Maverick, the fourth-generation descendant of Sam Maverick, a landowner, political influencer, and defender of the Alamo. He was famously more concerned with his land than his cattle, so he let them roam free. The unbranded beasts would wander off and, thanks to the lack of identification, locals knew where to return them. As such, “maverick” traditionally refers to unbranded cattle and, in modern parlance, it’s another word for “unorthodox”.
The distillery, which boasts a 550-gallon still and a mill for its grains, sits on Sam’s original homestead. He made whisky from local grains, and Kenneth and his team have come up with their own interpretation for what Sam’s whisky might have been. Just a bunch of mavericks toiling away, as I think we can all agree.
