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Today's WSJ has a solid long feature on the struggles in the bourbon business. I'll put a pretty long extract here, given the fan base.

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—The beating heart of Kentucky’s bourbon country sits inside a towering building that bills itself as “The Hardest Working Still in America” in large white letters. It can churn out a barrel of Jim Beam whiskey roughly every 93 seconds.

Since January the 65-foot-tall still has been on a break. And that break is slated to last until at least 2027.

Across the roughly 430-acre campus south of Louisville, warehouses are jam-packed with barrels full of dark-brown liquor that may not have buyers. Distillery workers have been reassigned to bottling, and the company is experimenting with new ways to sell its bourbon, including pushing flavored varieties. Jim Beam, which predates the Civil War and weathered Prohibition—and is now owned by Japan’s Suntory Holdings—is fighting through another downturn....

The birthplace of bourbon is swimming in it. The rolling, forested hills of Kentucky’s bourbon country are ground zero for the slowdown afflicting the U.S. alcohol industry. Distilleries of all sizes have laid off staff, or shut down altogether. Even barrel suppliers are feeling it.

More Americans are joining the ranks of the sober-curious, and inflation has prompted some steady drinkers to cut back. GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are having the same effect. Cannabis and THC beverages are widely available, offering a hangover-free buzz. And the Trump administration’s trade wars have dented U.S. alcohol exports.

Most industry players didn’t see the collapse coming. It all started during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Americans heavily stocked their bar carts during lockdowns with bourbon and other spirits....

Kentucky is sitting on roughly 16.1 million barrels of bourbon—the equivalent of around 300 million cases —according to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. That’s the largest reserve ever, enough to last as much as 10 years, according to industry estimates....

The recent bourbon craze kicked off in 2010, when a resurgent cocktail culture helped elevate the Old Fashioned and craft drinks in bars from London to Los Angeles....

Craft bourbon brands built buzz in speakeasies like Louisville’s Hell or High Water, and whiskey influencers started popping up online....

Under U.S. law, bourbon must be distilled from a mix of grains containing at least 51% corn, and aged in new, charred barrels of oak. Kentucky bourbon must physically be aged in that state for at least a year.

Barrel making is a big business. But like distillers, some of the makers of those barrels are struggling to find buyers for their products.

The barrels that cooperages across the country produce for bourbon-makers no longer fetch the prices they once did. At the peak—in 2023 and 2024—distillers were paying upward of $285 per barrel. Since then, prices have dropped significantly, industry players say....

Woodford Reserve maker Brown-Forman is cutting back too . The company, which got its start as a distiller in 1870 in Louisville and is best known for its Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, said last year would lay off 12% of its 5,400-person workforce in response to weakening sales.

The cuts were supposed to yield $70 million to $80 million in savings. In a recent investor call, the company said that it was still feeling the pain of Americans pinching pennies, along with plummeting prices for barrels it sells to other spirit makers.

In Louisville, Brown-Forman closed the cooperage that made barrels to house its spirits, which also include Old Forester bourbon. The company said it planned to get more than $30 million from the sale of the cooperage.

Brown-Forman has also considered a more drastic measure: merging....

To weather the alcohol business’s current downturn, Jim Beam is taking a page from the Prohibition era.

During the U.S. government’s nearly 14-year federal ban on alcoholic beverages, James Beauregard Beam took a shot at coal mining and citrus production. With alcohol consumption ebbing again, the brand is now experimenting with a zero-alcohol citrus cocktail it calls Citrus Sin—in homage to Beam’s Prohibition-informed philosophy that not promoting agriculture and community employment was a sin.

Jim Beam is trialing the drinks at Formula One car races across the world. It is the first time since Prohibition that an alcohol-free product has carried the Jim Beam brand.

To help move its barrels of stored bourbon, Jim Beam encouraged folks to make their own bourbon-and-lemonade cocktails, recruiting comedian Kenan Thompson to pitch the products. Bottles of pineapple-infused bourbon have proved to be popular with younger tipplers....