The Tariff and the Leopards Eating the Faces
By 
A reasonably comprehensive look at the impact of Trump tariff policy on the bourbon industry:
Trump had campaigned on raising tariffs to boost American manufacturing. But for Kentucky’s bourbon industry, that policy has had the opposite effect — similar to Trump’s first administration. When he took office, Trump immediately began putting wide-ranging tariffs on several key trade partners. Since then, he has frequently imposed and then suspended tariffs on spirits, sometimes threatening new ones. The legality has been challenged, and the Supreme Court is expected to rule some time this year. The overall climate continues to be uncertain. Canada was among the hardest hit, and provincial governors wasted no time striking back, ordering stores to stop selling American spirits. When Canada began boycotting American whiskey in March 2025, Brown-Forman CEO Lawson Whiting said seeing spirits pulled off the shelves was worse than any tariff. And he’s been proven right: In December, the company’s mid-year profits were down 14%, or nearly $60 million, from the same time period in 2024, before Trump took office.
The politics are rough for companies that are physically based in rural and exurban Kentucky:
Kentucky bourbon companies are sitting on a glut of whiskey, and they’d love to sell it into overseas market they have spent decades cultivating. Kentucky distillers are sitting on a record 16 million barrels but production has slowed as the export market has plunged in the last year under President Trump’s trade war. An economic impact study of the industry released recently by the Kentucky Distillers’ Association found that the state’s now-$10.6 billion industry is facing “mounting headwinds. Foreign demand, a major driver of past expansion and success, has been curtailed by retaliatory tariffs and other trade policy countermeasures imposed in 2018 and 2025.” Those policy “countermeasures” came during Trump’s two administrations. But like others in the spirits industry, the KDA seems reluctant to call the president out directly, relying instead on statements of support for Trump’s overall agenda of boosting American manufacturing while pointing out how that agenda is having the opposite impact of their own products.
The issue isn’t simply the tariff; it’s uncertainty that makes it difficult to establish long-term export relationships at stable prices… something that is extremely important for a product with ready substitutes and a relatively long production lead time. This means that bouncing tariffs all over the board for reasons understood only in Trump’s malignant brain is Extremely Bad for bourbon.
And there is no doubt that it is: “The industry must maintain existing markets and develop new international markets to grow. Given the heightened level of volatility associated with recent trade policy, making investments in foreign markets has become increasingly uncertain. This could have a cooling effect on potential investments and slow future growth in one of Kentucky’s signature industries,” the economists wrote. “Looking forward, these challenges could cause distilleries to reduce employment and postpone planned investments over the coming year. It could also result in some distilleries leaving the market.” How many Kentucky jobs could be impacted How bad could things get? Employment, the Kentucky economists said, already has plateaued. Job losses at Brown-Forman and Independent Stave have been offset by gains elsewhere. But that could change. According to economists, if the decline in exports continues at the current rate, it will translate to a 30% decrease for the year — a $225 million drop in annual sales. “This level of output supports a total of 778 jobs and $65.6 million in labor income” in distilling industry and related fields including cooperages, transportation and corn growers, the economists said. “These are jobs that could potentially be at risk if the mid-year decline in exports were to persist,” according to the report.
None of this is going to result in lower prices. The industry is extremely sensitive to price points and loathe to let prices drift. Flooding the market could do substantial long-term damage to the brand. At the same time, bourbon doesn’t store in barrels forever; at a loss rate of about 2% a year bourbon kept for too long in barrels simply goes away. So a lot of bourbon is either going to waste away, going to get buried (and then waste away) or going to get burned. Damn shame, especially for the smaller experimental distilleries.