The History Behind Canadian Boycotts of American Whiskey

Yahoo

08-04-2025

A worker removes bottles of American-made Jack Daniel's whiskey from a shelf at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) Queen's Quay store in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. Credit - Christopher Katsarov Luna—Bloomberg/Getty Images
American whiskey is flying off of the shelves in Canada, although surely not for the reason American whiskey makers would like. In response to President Donald Trump's tariffs on Canadian imports to the U.S., many Canadians are boycotting American goods, particularly whiskey.
Viral videos show Canadian liquor store employees pushing carts with popular American whiskey brands like Jack Daniels and Maker's Mark into the back of stores, instead encouraging consumers to 'buy Canadian.'
While there are economic and political reasons for targeting whiskey in trying to retaliate against the U.S., there is an additional motive at play. Canadians are trying to damage an American industry that has long sought to position itself as central to the U.S.'s history and identity. For example, in 2011 Jack Daniels, the number one selling whiskey in the U.S., launched its 'As American As' advertising campaign. The ads depicted images of classic Americana—blue jeans, cowboy hats, and white picket fences—while a voiceover claimed: 'We're the creators of things born of an independent spirit.' Other popular American whiskey brands like Bulleit, 1792, and High West proclaim their association with the American frontier and perceived American values like individualism and perseverance.
Yet, despite this imagery, the whiskey industry has been shaped by global forces for close to a century. These forces helped it to grow in the post-World War II period as American cultural influence spread around the globe. Today, it leaves whiskey producers vulnerable to the sorts of boycotts now taking place in Canada.
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The history of American whiskey, its rise to global prominence, and its status as a symbol of American identity are rooted in a unique confluence of factors.
In the early 20th century, prohibition crippled the whiskey industry. Many distillers shuttered and those that survived did so by producing medicinal whiskey or pivoting to other industries. At the end of Prohibition in 1933, whiskey distilling boomed in the U.S. as restrictions against mass production ended. Nonetheless, producers faced an uphill battle. Whiskey retained an association with criminality and drunkenness—one that whiskey makers were desperate to break.
World War II again laid the industry low, as distilleries were repurposed to produce industrial alcohol for the war effort. As the war ended, it provided an unexpected boost to American whiskey production, albeit in two indirect ways.
The U.S. emerged as a dominant economic power, which led to rapid expansion of American industry, including whiskey production. Whiskey became a key export that followed the rise of American cultural and economic influence abroad. Additionally, the war introduced many American soldiers to whiskey, and as they returned home, they brought with them a taste for the spirit.
The postwar economic boom, coupled with rising disposable income and the expansion of consumer culture, fueled whiskey's golden age in the 1950s and 1960s. As global markets adjusted to America's economic expansion in this period, whiskey remained a staple of U.S. exports. The Bourbon Institute, a trade society formed in 1958, fought to lower trade restriction on American whiskey abroad, eventually removing almost all trade barriers in Europe.
The increasing demand for American goods abroad meant that the spirit, once primarily a domestic product, became a key player in international trade in the 1950s and 1960s. The Bourbon Institute framed this growth explicitly in cultural terms. In 1960, its president William J. Marshall, proclaimed, 'The bourbon industry feels that its product is a distinctively unique American product and that the sale of this product plays its part in the broader program of having American ways and products known throughout the world.'
This shift reinforced whiskey's role as a symbol of American craftsmanship, while also tying it to the country's broader economic influence on the world stage. Overseas, American advertising for whiskey retained the claims of Americana and frontier individualism that championed brands like Jack Daniels and Jim Beam as uniquely American even as they flooded foreign markets.
However, despite this branding, the whiskey industry was not immune to changing consumer preferences. By the 1970s, a new generation of American drinkers increasingly turned to vodka and lighter spirits, seeing them as more modern and fashionable, than whiskey. Especially given the linkage between vodka and the USSR in Cold War imagery, the spirit became cooly subversive in a way whiskey couldn't match. That left the whiskey industry, like so many other types of American manufacturers, to confront a period of decline, with sales dropping and many historic distilleries closing their doors. By the 1980s, fewer than 100 distilleries remained in operation in the U.S., a stark contrast to the postwar boom years.
As distilleries shuttered, it also sparked the consolidation of the industry. Over the ensuing decades, a handful of conglomerates came to dominate the American whiskey industry, acquiring smaller family-run distilleries at a rapid pace. Today, the spirit of individuality heralded in whiskey advertisements is not reflected in its production. By 2015, eight companies produced roughly 99% of all whiskey made in the U.S.
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In fact, many of America's most popular whiskey brands are currently owned by international conglomerates with enormous financial portfolios: Jim Beam (owned by the Japanese company Suntory Global Spirits), Bulleit (owned by the British company Diageo), and Wild Turkey (owned by the Italian company Campari Group) are but a few of the American-made brands currently part of a global network of capital.
This reality exposes how claims that whiskey is a uniquely American product—an industry rooted in the frontier, perseverance, and economic independence—are as much industry mythmaking as fact. The American whiskey industry has long been shaped by global forces, from the export and advertising of whiskey abroad to the increasing dominance of international conglomerates.
This history helps explain why Canadians have targeted American whiskey in their boycotts. Indeed, Bourbon, Tennessee Whiskey, and other American-made whiskeys come overwhelmingly from states that voted for Trump, especially Kentucky and Tennessee. Canadian politicians are leveraging this partisan divide. Last month, the Premier of British Columbia, David Eby directed British Columbia's state-run liquor stores to stop purchasing American liquor from 'red states.'
Canadians want to target the heart of a movement that sees itself as being about American identity and they see no better means than by boycotting an industry that still markets itself as distinctly American. Even 60 years later, Bourbon distillers still trumpet a 1964 congressional resolution declaring their spirit 'a distinctive product of the United States.' Writer Reid Mitenbuler recounts that American whiskey and bourbon distillers rely on 'the values implied by the frontier iconography found on countless bourbon bottles [which] are inherently American: individualism, self-sufficiency, practicality, and guts.'
American whiskey relies on these claims of authenticity and tradition to sell the industry's product. That may need to change for the industry to thrive at a moment when the U.S. is antagonizing many countries around the globe
This branding played a key role in elevating American whiskey around the globe in the post-war period when U.S. influence was burgeoning globally. Yet, the international marketplace that has shaped the whiskey industry for a century is susceptible to political forces. That means it isn't immune to the consequences of geopolitical disputes and shifting consumer preferences worldwide. Today, as the Trump administration courts opprobrium abroad, the industry's identity and branding leaves it uniquely exposed and vulnerable, as the Canadian boycott efforts spotlight.
E. Kyle Romero is an assistant professor at the University of North Florida. He studies the history of American foreign policy, immigration politics, and global consumer economics.
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