American Whiskey

lose my eyes and I can still picture it: It was the summer of 2010, and I was drinking whiskey in Brooklyn. The bartenders’ suspenders were snappy, our Chucks were tied tight, but not too tight, and the Edison bulbs glowed just so, beckoning an eternal aesthetic twilight across the barrooms of Williamsburg. 

American whiskey was the unrivaled star of it all, from bourbon picklebacks at the Bushwick Country Club to the heaving backbar at the Hotel Delmano, lousy with rye and ennui. I danced yrself clean over a plastic cup Old-Fashioned at the Union Pool, then narrowly avoided getting mugged for my iPhone 4 walking back to the Lorimer L stop. 

(OK, Grandpa, let’s get you to bed.)

It goes without saying that times have changed. Bourbon’s zeitgeist capture of the millennial drinking ascendency reached a crescendo moment somewhere around the second Obama term, roughly around the time it became necessary to replace all those fussy lightbulbs. Market forces are at least partially to blame, but so too are changing tastes. Prices increased, scarcity took hold, and a roaring secondary market has driven American whiskey into a niche cult of appreciation, fervent and faithful but very much outside of the mainstream. 

Meanwhile, new modes of drinking captured the popular boozesphere, from natural wine to arcane distillates to upscale Martini revivals to zero-waste locavore cocktail labs to the hypermodern mezcalería. Everything stopped looking like an imagined version of Brooklyn or Copenhagen and started looking like an imagined version of Miami—moody shadows and blue-pink lighting, Monstera plants and Deco sconces, clubby soundtracks and maximalist $25 cocktails. Call it a vibe shift, call it the Sartrean arc of a trend, that never-ending daisy chain of sociocultural phenomenology in which things thus dubbed “cool” have said coolness revoked. In 2010, I could not imagine anything cooler than drinking hip, rare bourbon in a neo-speakeasy. Today, the modern top-tier bar looks very different, from the World’s 50 Best to Punch’s own top new bars of 2023.

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