Whisky became the most popular spirit because of copying. Copying is hard-wired evolutionary behaviour in the animal kingdom. By mimicking the behaviour of a high-status member of the group, unranked members obtain information, seek social approval, and engender a favourable self-concept. Social mimicry is at the heart of our species’ success, as it builds social rapport and accumulates cultural dividends, a prerequisite to developing civilisations.
Distilled malt spirits as proto-whisky started as a social beverage during Elizabethan times. The first social trendsetters were the apex influencers: royalty and aristocrats. Following the Tudor period, the pyramid of influencers widened to include high-status people, signifying social prestige, power, and wealth. As printed communications arrived, influencers expanded to famous adventurers, military heroes, and others worthy of admiration and emulation. By the 20th century, multimedia celebrities, cultural producers, entertainers, and sports people fragmented the base, precipitating the 21st century’s tsunami of social media influencers reaching the screens of 5.2 billion social media users.
Before Gaelic whisky became popular in Great Britain, the Dutch Prince of Orange led the English gin craze after he became King William III of Great Britain in 1689. He incited the first mass copying of distilling spirits that lasted 200 years in England. Genever, called ‘Hollands’ in England, was the favourite spirit of the king and his Dutch subjects. Hollands became highly fashionable as English aristocrats copied the king’s habits at court. Dutch distillers followed James to England, joining 16th-century Flemish refugee distillers escaping from the southern Low Countries because of the Eight Years War and the 112-year Spanish distilling ban from 1601. In 1680, England distilled half a million gallons of malt-based aqua vitae, mostly flavoured with aniseed. Sixty years later, juniper-flavoured genever, anglicised to ‘gin’ by 1726, totalled 8.2 million gallons.
At the start of the 19th century, whisky persisted as a Scottish and Irish provincial spirit. Exports of Scotch to England were limited, prohibited, or under restrictive licences. The dismantling of legislative barriers opened Scotch exports to England, notably the 1848 Warehousing Act, the 1858 Equalisation Tax, which made excise duties uniform throughout the United Kingdom, and the 1860 Excise Act, which permitted blending in bond stores to formulate more palatable and affordable blended whisky. The 1861 Single Bottle Act made buying portable units economical and convenient for home consumption. Whisky was ready to conquer the non-Gaelic world.
The transformation of Scotch into a British emblem and the Scots into a more romantic caricature in the 19th century is an extraordinary story of the reimagining of Scotland. Highlanders and island Scots were Gaelic-speaking, and construed as “wild and uncouth men”. In contrast, the predominantly English-speaking Lowlanders inhabited the intellectual centres of the Scottish Enlightenment Movement.
In the early 19th century, Sir Walter Scott, who changed the image of Scotland, was the country’s venerable literary influencer. A famed historical novelist, Scott had reanimated Scotland’s Jacobean period with heroic Highlanders as “picturesque, romantic, loyal and hive of industry and inventiveness”. Later, Stuart Kelly, literary editor of The Scotsman, said he had invented “a great simulacrum, he invented the image of the country”. Scott was known as the Wizard of the North for casting transformational spells over Caledonian culture.
Scott was appointed master of ceremonies for King George IV’s theatrical pageant when the king visited Edinburgh in August 1822. Scott was inspired by the success and adoration of the monarch’s 1821 London coronation — a spectacle of invented rituals and traditions designed to copy and outdo that of Napoleon. In Edinburgh, the king paraded in flamboyant kilted attire, costing £1,358.18 (in 2024 that would be £216,260), the streets filled with the sounds of bagpipes as the regent revelled through his two-week Great Jaunt. As clansmen paraded through the city in new tartan regalia, Scott stage-managed the public with an etiquette booklet on how the Scots should behave. The effect was to galvanise Highlanders and Lowlands into a modern constructed identity as they paid fealty to their English king.
On the king’s ship, moored at Leith, a liquid seed was planted for England’s future relationship with whisky. While George IV preferred cherry brandy, tasting Irish whiskey punch during his 1821 visit to Ireland, he was keen to try Scotch. Scott secured illicit stock from the Glenlivet district, where, in the early 1820s, more than 200 unregistered stills operated. The king toasted Scott’s health, likely drinking a whisky toddy. It would be another two decades before George’s niece, Queen Victoria, made whisky the new drink of England.
Queen Victoria was a devoted whisky drinker since her coronation in 1838. In 1842, she fell in love with the Scottish Highlands, describing it as the “finest country in the world”. She acquired property in Scotland, including Balmoral Castle, and adopted Scottish customs and artefacts, making whisky fashionable in England. In 1837, she made Glenury distillery ‘Distiller to Her Majesty’. Her uncle, King William IV, had bestowed a royal warrant upon Brackla’s King’s Own Whisky in 1833. Other distillers that were given the honour include: Lochnagar in 1848; Ireland’s Newry in 1892; Dewar’s in 1893; and Ballantine’s in 1895. In 1843 Chivas Bros was given a warrant as grocers, and its whiskies Glendee and Strathythan received the honour in the 1860s.
The upper-class English copied the royals by holidaying at and buying Scottish estates to hunt and fish. There they discovered whisky as a bracing outdoor drink. It soon became the parlour and bar substitute for brandy, rum, and sherry when they returned to England. Whisky became respectable in London, a flavoursome and affordable brown spirit. Served with soda water from the newly invented seltzer syphon, a new whisky ritual started. The rising middle class emulated the habits and manners of the upper class, followed by the working class, as cheaper blended whisky became affordable.
Meanwhile, in 1776, America’s old-world social code was violently cleaved by the Revolutionary War, initially provoked by the 1737 Molasses and 1764 Sugar Acts, which affected domestic rum production, increasing duties on imported molasses from British colonies in the West Indies. In the 18th century, rum distillation was the country’s second-largest manufacturing industry. Not only was British rule personified by the king, but rum also earned odious social associations with imperialism compared with domestic grain and locally made whisky.
The transition from rum consumption to whisky was swift, from 66 per cent of spirits consumed in 1791 to less than 10 per cent by 1810. Paradoxically, the new republic’s first civil revolt over a new spirit tax threatened the survival of the United States in 1794; the Whiskey Rebellion forced President George Washington to take 13,000 troops to Pennsylvania to suppress it.
Instead of the European class system, revolutionary America sought new social ideals, replacing admiration and copying of Old-World high-rankers with domestic pack leaders and idealised folk heroes, notably pioneers, inventors, cowboys, gunfighters, and outlaws. The first of the new high-status people was America’s first ‘superstar’, President Washington, who also owned one of the country’s largest whisky distilleries.
The power of mass media in the 20th century delivered entertainment and sport into people’s lives via print, cinema, and TV, creating a new set of archetypes and modern celebrities. In the 21st century, digital access via social media invites of keyboard influencers to post to their attentive followers.
This year, data company Statista reported that 20 per cent of consumers bought products promoted by celebrities and influencers. The economic power of these advocates is significant. In 2024, IWSR reported that celebrity-backed brands for whisky grew four times more than the global whisky category. And WorldMetric reported that influencers are twice as likely to persuade consumers to buy than media celebrities.
However, the most significant influencer who introduces the novice to whisky is someone closer to home: a parent, family member, friend, or close peer. Once the novice ventures into the whisky world, celebrities and influencers consciously or unconsciously affect brand choices and consumption trends.
Queen Victoria and American whiskey
King William IV issued the first whisky warrant. After being given Brackla Highland malt whisky in London in the early 1830s, he liked it so much that in 1833 he ordered 900 gallons from the distillery. He granted royal permission to ship the first whisky from Inverness into England directly to St James Palace. That December he issued a warrant to the distillery. In 1838, 18 months after his death, 19-year-old Queen Victoria renewed it, having discovered — and enjoyed — her uncle’s stash after her coronation. Victoria proved an outstanding advocate and lifelong consumer of Scotch whisky and Irish whiskey. But not American whiskey.
Edmund H Taylor Jr, the maestro of American whiskey marketing, and setter of world standards for modern bourbon, attempted to ingratiate his whiskey upon the Queen. At all 12 of his Kentucky distilleries he operated faithfully to James Crow’s principles. Taylor would not call his Kentucky whiskey ‘bourbon’, as he deemed that product poorly made and inferior; instead, he labelled all whiskeys ‘Copper distilled, sour mash whiskey’.
In 1881, Taylor sent a barrel of whiskey to Queen Victoria. It would have been OFC whiskey — the acronym for Old Fashioned Copper — made in Frankfort, Kentucky. He warehoused whisky barrels in Liverpool to return to the US after years of ageing to minimise tax. Victoria declined to receive what Taylor described as “the best distilled water of Kentucky”. He dared to call it Victoria whiskey to gain publicity from her acceptance. The Crown must have had long memories of the American Rebellion: Queen Victoria had “no wish her name forwarded for posterity as a symbol of the strong water that makes Americans mad”.
