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Jan 27, 2025

We’re Not Drinking Enough Bourbon

Is the “Brown Liquor” Going Dark?

By Ed Goldman

You’d think the state of the world—or in my case, just the state of California, which now has a fifth annual season, Fire—would have us drinking more. Ah, but you’d think wrong. 

Bourbon, the brown liquor favored by world leaders including President Ulysses S. Grant, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Light Baritone Frank Sinatra, has been losing both global market share and supermarket shelf space.

Edgy Cartoon

A glasnost half-full?

While you might think the culprit is the latest medical buzz about alcohol being as bad for us as unfiltered Camel cigarettes and Whoopi Goldberg’s unfiltered “wisdom,” neither is apparently the scapegoat. 

It may instead be a post-pandemic “adjustment.” This is the word economists like to use when the stock market dives deep enough to rattle the residents of Middle Earth. 

During the COVID years, bourbon sales had seriously spiked, as had Netflix orders and baby production. “Liquor sales soared during the pandemic as Americans flush with cash splashed out on booze, making cocktails at home and drinking more frequently,” according to a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal.

But once the somewhat-clear signal was sounded, drinkers started “cutting back, plowing through bottles they accrued in recent years and trading down to cheaper brands.” 

I’m not terribly affected by this, just as the pandemic’s edict that everyone should start working at home did little to change my life. I’ve just never been a big fan of bourbon or scotch. I prefer vodka, possibly because its being a clear liquid lulls me into thinking it has fewer calories. (No one was more surprised than I was to find out this is actually true.) Vodka is also said to have almost no scent on one’s breath but I’m not about to drive while drunk to test the theory.

Gin, on the other hand, despite its also being clear, is quite detectable. I enjoy it on occasion but always feel that if the bartender substituted Brylcream I’d be none the wiser. (For me, the same thing goes for most beers and their identical aroma as horse urine.) 

Then, too, gin seems to have more behavior-altering dimensions than vodka. As Roger Angell, the wonderful essayist for the New Yorker magazine wrote in his book, “Let me Finish,” “(I)n time, my wife and I shifted from gin to vodka, which was less argumentative.” 

I acknowledge that some of my favorite celebrities—including writers Mark Twain and William Faulkner, and movie stars Ava Gardner, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart—were into bourbon. I think that knowing this could ignite the danger of transference, leading a suggestible individual into thinking, “If I drink enough bourbon, I’ll write a reboot of ‘Huckleberry Finn.'” Well, dream on, Boogaloo. After a few swigs of Johnny Walker, you’ll be lucky to write an episode of “Huckleberry Hound.” 

Here’s something from that Journal article which surprised me, though not a great deal: “The growing popularity of anti-obesity drugs, cannabis and low- and no-alcohol drinks is increasingly hurting sales, too.”

This means that Ozempic, pot and mocktails have leveled the playing field. While mocktails aren’t really drugs (though sugar addiction is a real thing), Ozempic and pot are. I know two guys in my general age group who went on Ozempic and got sick as dogs until they went off Ozempic, which the manufacturers say can reverse the effects of your weight loss, diabetes alleviation or, I don’t know, X-ray vision. I really need to do more research. Each proudly told me how much weight he’d lost while on it, however—and for the life of me, I couldn’t tell. They’d been morbidly hefty to begin with and were still what I’d charitably call quite stout. Maybe they were backlit when I spoke to them. I hear that adds 20 pounds to most people. 

No, wait. That’s what TV cameras are alleged to do. But if they do, then all of the trim news anchors I watch are possibly cadaverous off the set. I may need a drink. 

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).