Consistently, my experience with market consolidation has been lower quality products for more money so I can susidize the wealth of merger consultants.
If consolidation has such a prior, why would I expect beer consolidation to end differently?
Similarly, I disagree about whiskey: distilleries from my state consistently provide a better and cheaper product than large firms, and are basically dead to me when they sell these days, after a few bad experiences.
Name the distilleries you like. Let's see if they even sell their own whiskey, rather than MGPI. There are very few independent "distilleries" selling real product, and the ones that do are pretty notable, and open about their limitations.
Reliably making Very Old Barton or Old Forester or Four Roses is extremely difficult.
OOLA is the only one that springs to mind -- but I could be mistaken, I'm partly relying on their marketing. (Which I mention in hopes you will correct me if I am.)
Edit:
Dry Fly used to be smaller and ship some of their stuff from the other side of the state over, so I also count them. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong!
Dry Fly's "Process" page, by the way, has the hallmarks of a distiller that actually distills their product; they're way too specific and making way too many falsifiable claims for it to be rational for them to lie. They even call out the process of augmenting a distiller's own make with NDP product.
That's respectable! It's neat that companies like these exist and I'm happy they do.
But that doesn't make their products better than Four Roses or Woodford Reserve. They almost certainly aren't. The major whiskey distilleries have huge advantages accruing to quality that small distillers don't.
Even simple stuff like volume works in their favor. Sazerac did an experiment where they the same product in 5, 10, 15, and the standard 53 gallon barrels. Indie distillers use smaller barrels both because it suits their production needs and because it "accelerates" aging, ostensibly due to the different surface area to volume ratio. The smaller barrels produce off flavors (presumably, they're extracting more and different chemicals from the wood in the same aging time).
You can do a bunch of things to counteract this, just like you can do a bunch of things to mitigate the fact that new distillers by necessity have to sell young whiskey (and probably will long after their first barrels hit a reasonably full maturation, because they're learning as they go, and each learning cycle costs them another several years!). But all those things impact quality and flavor and consistency.
Dry Fly's going to charge you between 35 and 75 dollars for a bottle of whiskey. Not only is Dry Fly not the best whiskey you can buy for $35, but there are better whiskies at that price point in big city supermarkets. At $75, Dry Fly is competing with Buffalo Antiques (at least their list prices). Come on.
I mostly just want to thank you for a detailed reply -- you clearly know more about this than I do and I've learned a bit.
In the interest of science, do you have some $35 bottles you'd recommend as better? It seems more productive to get a suggestion and try it than argue all night. (:
People seem to like them. But OOLA is mostly a clear spirit distiller. Keep in mind that it is way easier to distill vodka, gin, and rum than it is to start up and reliably produce whiskey. When you read OOLA's material, note that they are super specific about the grain and process they use for their vodka, but not as much for Waitsburg Bourbon.
The way they market, my guess is that they distill their own whiskey? Note that there are distillers that distill some whiskey, but then round out the supply with MGPI whiskey, which would allow them to talk about locally sourcing corn and barley while still relying on someone else's product.
That said, I don't know them well, and maybe they're like Few Spirits, a local distillery in Chicago that got started selling vodka and gin and gradually expanded into doing a whiskey. Few is not bad. I like Few. But I don't think a lot of people drink Few and tell themselves, "I'm drinking this because it is categorically better than Buffalo Trace".
Copperworks in Seattle is complete end-to-end whiskey. They brew their own wash (the co-owner Jason Parker was the first brewer at Pike in the late 80s/early 90s), distill and age everything in-house. It's all their product.
I really like Copperworks & think their stuff is super interesting but you are paying a huuuuge premium over equivalently aged whiskeys and I don’t think you are getting better quality.
You are getting novelty which is a fine thing to pay for, but it’s not the same as quality.
Oola sources “some” of there blend. They are at least upfront that they do it if not how much.
[edit] just looked at a newer bottle & they’ve removed the sourcing statement from the older bottles I remember. Either they don’t source or they no longer admit it. Bottle also doesn’t use any of the protected phrases I know of so could be anything.
If consolidation has such a prior, why would I expect beer consolidation to end differently?
Similarly, I disagree about whiskey: distilleries from my state consistently provide a better and cheaper product than large firms, and are basically dead to me when they sell these days, after a few bad experiences.