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The craft spirits movement transformed what gets poured at serious bars. Tom Callahan examines how small distillers reshaped the industry and which.
The short answer
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The craft spirits movement did not begin with marketing. It began with a handful of people who were dissatisfied with what the major distillers were producing and decided to do it themselves, in small batches, from locally sourced grain, in buildings that were not designed to be distilleries. What they produced was, at first, uneven. What they built, over two decades of iteration and failure and occasional brilliance, was a complete re-education of the bar industry in what spirits can be.
We have been following the craft spirits movement closely since its early days, and the picture in 2024 is more complicated and more interesting than the original story. The pioneers have matured. Some have been acquired. A new generation has entered with better equipment, better knowledge, and the benefit of twenty years of proof that this can work.
The regulatory groundwork was laid in the US in the early 2000s, when a series of state-level licensing changes made it economically viable for small producers to distil and sell directly. The craft beer movement had already demonstrated that there was a market for locally produced, flavour-forward alternatives to mass-market products. The distilling world took note.
The early craft gin wave is where most people locate the beginning of the movement's commercial success. London-based distillers like Sacred and Sipsmith — both operating from residential or light-industrial premises with minuscule pot stills — demonstrated that you could produce gin of genuine quality outside the major distillery infrastructure. The Scotch whisky industry was watching and, eventually, adapting.