Because American Whiskey is Black Whiskey

The history of America is the history of our favored spirits, and the history of American distilling is rooted in slavery. Every one of those white guys posing heroically in the origin story of a lauded label is obscuring your view of the enslaved master distiller who developed the whiskey and did all the work. Recently the most successful whisky on earth, Jack Fucking Daniels, publicly acknowledged this in their corporate history which now includes the slave who taught Jack Daniels how to make whiskey: Nathan Green, also known as Uncle Nearest.

Name any historic American whiskey, and it was most likely made by slaves.

George Washington’s whiskey? Made by slaves. James Anderson, a Scot, encouraged Washington, who helped him see the potential. It was an ambitious distillery, and Anderson was in charge. But they staffed it with slaves.

Elijah Craig? Owned 32 people. Brown-Forman acknowledges the role of slavery in the origins of their distillation site in Kentucky, where the Pepper Family made whiskey and owned slaves. Catherine Spears Frye, whose recipes for sweet mash and sour mash whiskey are the oldest known, made a good living selling her spirits, undoubtedly assisted by her slave, “Little Bob,” valued in the tax records at $350.

Black Owned Whiskey Brands are helping fuel the whiskey boom.

This is why I’ve written this article. Our editorial policy is blunt: we don’t tag distillers for age, gender, ethnicity, sexual proclivities, favorite football teams, or how you take your whiskey or race. We believe inclusion starts with disregarding the personal aspects for which someone may be excluded. We don’t have a section called women in whiskey, and we weren’t going to write this article until we looked at the details of our SEO and discovered A LOT of people were finding our site by searching for “black-owned distilleries”. Which is weird, because this is the first time we’ve written those words in an article. So we’re not sure what search terms they landed on here. 

But our data tells a story: people are looking for black owned whiskey brands

I think about 40% of those searches are from white writers trying to keep up, but the rest are from mobile phones and tablets. In other words, they are from a person walking around a liquor store looking to buy some whiskey from a black-owned whiskey brand.

Which kind of means our editorial policy is only half-right

Writing about whiskey culture to whiskey culture means writing to people interested in black-owned whiskey brands. Not doing so means we’re not serving a trending section of our market. That would be a massive fuck-up we’d rather avoid. We want to be on the right side of editorial inclusion and people’s happiness in drinking whiskey. We’re here to help.

So here is our comprehensive list of Black Owned Whiskey Brands.

As of October 2021. We’ll revisit this article every six months to add, subtract, expand, and generally curate this list so stay tuned, stick around, share like crazy, and let us know what you think about the All American Whiskey list of Black-Owned Whiskey Brands