Old Crow

He'll be receiving its Roll of Honor Distinction for Journalism and Communication.

His latest book, Bottom Shelf: How a Forgotten Brand of Bourbon Saved One Man's Life, blends memoir with the history of Old Crow and chronicles how whiskey tastes in a decades-long obsession with a forgotten bourbon helped him find purpose after returning home from the Iraq War.

It's my man, Fred Minnick.

Dan, good to see you.

Tell us a little bit about it and how it, you know, how it differs from what you've done before in, in past books.

Yeah.

So I, I really wanted to write a book about Old Crow and, you know, and I, I was talking to my, to my agent about it, and he just was like, "Hey look, dude, nobody gives a shit about Old Crow.

Nobody wants, nobody, nobody wants a history on Old Crow." And you know, you know agents.

I really take a massive, massive deep dive on the, uh, folklore in Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey, in which I kinda debunk a lot of the folklore, like Elijah Craig inventing bourbon and some of the ideas of where the new charred oak barrel kinda came from.

And then in my new book, Bottom Shelf, um, I really dive into Old Crow and some of the stories there and kinda what really happened to Old Crow and, you know, the fact that the Old Crow I fell in love with, which, spoiler alert, was not even Old Crow.

I'm still not over that one, but if you haven't read my book, go check that out c- so you can see where I, you know, feel like an idiot.

Anyway, so Jamie, this, this basically is, like, the, the culture of American whiskey, for whatever reason, has always been to, like, make up a story, make up something, uh, to be more, um, out there than it really is.

And, uh, it just, there is so much BS out there, but the real stories are also incredibly good.

You know, like, Ulysses S.

Grant drinking Old Crow during the Civil War and winning battles.

Um, you know, Grover Cleveland signing the Bottle and Bond Act, and that being the country's very first consumer legislation act.

But as you're going through, if you lose a whole year, you can't make that up, you know? And it's, it's, it's incredible when you think about losing a whole year in a bourbon the size or distilling the size of a vanilla, what they have to do to make up for that, you know, as you go forward.

The other thing I always tell Nick is it's pretty funny is When the bourbon business had declined and you had brands like Old Crow that used to be a three million case brand and all of a sudden it's doing 300,000.

We had Old Crow, we had Old Granddad who's a million and a half, two million cases and it's doing 500,000.

We had all this old whiskey.

And there was a time that I used to tell people the best value whiskey you could buy was Old Crow 175s in California in plastic bottles for $8.99. And the whiskey in that bottle was 11 years old.

It was incredible.

The whiskey was so good.

The one thing about Beam that when my dad was working on the forecasting versus now is they had four master bills then.

All right, moving on.

Uh, Suntory Holdings, uh, so we talk about them because they own a substantial American whiskey portfolio that includes Beam, Maker's Mark, Knob Creek, Basil Hayden, Booker's, Baker's, Little Book, Hardens Creek, Legion, Old Grand-Dad, Old Crow, Old Tub, and Old Overholt, and I'm sure there's more brands than that.

Uh, for the first six months of 2026, Suntory reported company-wide revenue excluding liquor taxes of 1.551 trillion yen, or approximately $9.8 billion, an increase of 6.5% from the same period last year.

Operating income declined 2.6% to approximately 797 million, while profit attributable to the company's owners fell 19.2% to approximately 304 million.