I have developed a strange reflex over the past year. Every time I get an alert from one of the news apps on my phone, I duck. It’s almost a like a fight-or-flight response from my reptilian brain. Though I suppose, if pressured, I’d have to admit that there isn’t much fight in it at all. It’s an impulsive, irrational, and, of course, completely feeble and useless attempt to flee the unceasing gale-force news cycle.

Once upon a time, it would have seemed impossible — comic, even — to make that statement about drinks news exclusively. Even 10 years ago, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to have asked: is there even enough “news” to fill a cycle? But in this modern era of globalisation and international trade, viral memes, trickle-down trends, reciprocal tariffs (and then also no tariffs), AI, tax burdens, and more, here we are.

It’s so noisy. Call it what you will, but I have heard these days described as chaotic and tumultuous, unprecedented, and, simply, unbelievable. In recent months, my conversations with distillery owners and bartenders and brand owners and industry types of all sorts have frequently ended up in some moment of shared head-shaking. It feels as though there’s a collective mood of resignation, and yet, it’s become pretty clear that nobody is resigning anything. I am delighted to report that on the American side of the pond, the spirits industry is all fight, nobody’s taking flight.

At the end of March, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a trade organisation, held its annual conference and this year it was in Washington DC. An industry facing untold headwinds met at a hotel barely a mile from the Capitol building from which those headwinds emanate. And the industry folks confronted those headwinds straight on — with constituents from around the country meeting with their legislators to discuss everything from the then-impending tariffs to direct-to-consumer sales and all the other issues that affect the financial health of communities around the US.

Tariffs are only one spike in the international commerce pitchfork aimed at the spirits industry right now. And what businesses have been doing to brace themselves for impact is pretty much as ruinous as the impact itself. In April, the news agency AFP reported that global glass manufacturer O-I announced it was cutting 320 jobs in France, or 15 per cent of the company’s workforce. This news holds echoes of Brown-Forman’s January announcement that it would shutter its famous Louisville cooperage in April, part of the company’s axe-swinging measure to reduce its global workforce by 12 per cent and deliver up to US$80 million in cost savings.

It feels like cheating to comfort ourselves by saying “everything’s a cycle,” but we know that if the US recovered from the Great Depression and Prohibition, we’ll come out of this at some point, too. And we’ll
have our AI therapists to thank for talking us off the ledge. And, as is often the case in moments of upheaval, creativity and innovation will reshape the industry, and it might lead to more efficient ways of operating and a
more exciting marketplace than what we’ve known so far. I am still seeing start-up brands make their debut. And young companies introduce attention-getting products. This self-correcting moment is giving producers time to play with things like heritage grains and unique barrels.

Perhaps the most interesting trend is the arrival of more third-party distillers, companies that remind me of the food incubators that have become popular in American cities in recent years, where entrepreneurs have freedom to play and experiment with expensive equipment and access to expert guidance without being burdened by pricey overhead investments and such.

The drinks industry, while of course competitive, is arguably better known for its unity. Few craft distillers can credit their own brand’s success to the individual product alone. That’s why regional distillers’ guilds and policy-based alliances like Responsibility.org have become forces of influence. And those friendships are more valuable to an industry than any investment.