The Lexington Herald Leader reported on Thursday that Diageo-owned Bulleit Bourbon revealed a 7.3% slump in profits, signaling a rough road for the bourbon brand. The outlet reported that Diageo did not mention the major bourbon brand’s sales slump directly during its preliminary fiscal review for 2025.
The major beverage supplier behind iconic brands like Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, and Don Julio is far from the first spirits brand to be facing headwinds this year. Other power players like Macallan’s parent company, Edrington, saw a 26% slump in profits, and the firm cited the “global economic downturn” as a reason why.
When Diageo submitted its earnings report, the company shared it was gearing up to face additional blows of $200 million due to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which were slated to go into effect starting June 30.
Some might think that since Bulleit is an American-made bourbon brand, tariffs from the current presidential administration won’t adversely affect the company. Unfortunately, even American whiskey brands are not immune from the tariffs’ effects.
The BBC reported on Saturday in a piece titled “How Kentucky Bourbon Went From Boom to Bust,” that retaliatory tariffs from European countries pose significant harm to America’s native spirit. Not only that, but a lot of Canadian provinces have made the decision to stop importing American spirits as a retaliation to the tariffs. The choice made by our neighbors to the North is pretty catastrophic for the bourbon industry, according to the BBC. The outlet reported that profits from Canada make up 10% of Kentucky’s $9 billion whiskey industry.
Brown-Forman CEO Lawson Whiting shared his thoughts on the country’s decision to boycott bourbon, and he didn’t mince words.
“That’s worse than a tariff, because it’s literally taking your sales away, completely removing our products from the shelves,” said Whiting. After bemoaning the losses in revenue, Whiting called Canada’s response to the tariffs “disproportionate.”
As far as Bulleit Bourbon is concerned, the whiskey brand was founded in 1987, and for a time was considered one of the fastest-growing whiskey brands in America. Bulleit credited bartenders for its meteoric rise, and opened a state-of-the-art facility in Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 2017, the year of its 30th Anniversary.
Bulleit is no stranger to distinctive releases, and the brand added an American Single Malt to its portfolio in February 2024 and dropped a Bottled-In-Bond Bourbon expression one year later. On a brighter note, this September, we have some exciting news of our own as far as Bulleit Bourbon is concerned, so stay tuned…
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