How a good old-fashioned boycott got Canada to trade Kentucky bourbon for
It’s been a long time since many Canadians have felt the burn. That familiar aromatic, spicy and sometimes smoky flavour of a smooth, Kentucky bourbon has been but a memory for consumers in this country for much of the past year.
Ever since U.S. President Donald Trump launched his tariff war and began threatening to make Canada the “51st state,” angry consumers and lawmakers have united behind a “Buy Canadian” movement and bourbon was caught in the crossfire.
“People didn’t want to to lose their bourbon and neither did I,” said Ottawa-based whisky expert Davin de Kergommeaux. But he, like so many other consumers, supports the boycotts of American products in favour of Canadian alternatives.
Canada had been a key market for the bourbon industry and major brands like Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark for quite some time. But despite his desire to see bourbon back on shelves and behind the bar, de Kergommeaux — who literally wrote the book of Canadian Whisky — believes the liquor landscape here may have changed for good.
Retaliatory tariffs are hitting Kentucky bourbon hard, and the governor has implored Canadian leaders to reconsider. CBC’s Katie Simpson meets a bourbon maker who shows her hate mail he’s getting from Canadians.
Souring on American whiskey
Bourbon really began to boom in Canada a little over a decade ago, de Kergommeaux says, thanks to aggressive marketing campaigns and consumers looking for something a little different from what they were used to.
“It doesn’t taste like traditional Canadian whisky at all,” de Kergomeaux said. “It’s a big, bold whisky, and quite bright, quite sweet.”
Craig Peters, founder and CEO of Maverick Distillery in Oakville, Ont., says what makes bourbon unique is that it’s distilled and aged in new oak barrels that are only used once, which is what gives the liquor its darker colour and rich caramel and vanilla flavours.
In addition to the oak barrels, for bourbon to be called that, it has to be made using at least 51 per cent corn mash and, most importantly, experts say, it has to be produced in the U.S.
But Peters says it still “holds its own special place with consumers” in Canada, either sipped neat or on the rocks, or mixed into cocktails like Manhattans, paper planes and the classic old fashioned.
But as a result of the cross-border animosity, exports of bourbon to Canada from January to September dropped about 60 per cent compared with a year earlier, going from 41.3 million to 16.4 million units according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United…
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