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I talk a lot of shit about guys who collect Blanton’s stoppers. And the thing is, they deserve it. It wasn’t too long ago that it felt impossible to buy Blanton’s or any decent bottle of mid-shelf bourbon. Call it whiskey mania, or the bourbon boom, or the tater takeover. Whatever you call it, brown liquor was absolutely flying off the shelves earlier this decade. The outsized demand gave rise to obnoxious consumer behavior, hilarious scams, and a veritable gold rush of investors into the segment. It couldn’t pan out, and it wouldn’t, even if the second Trump administration hadn’t taken a hot shit on the international market for American whiskey, which it did. Now, with the trade trying to tiptoe across a high wire without falling into a full blown glut, it’s worth taking stock of how we got here.

Joining The Fingers Podcast today to do just that is Clay Risen, a longtime New York Times staffer and the author of many books, including a few on American distilling. Having gotten his start reporting on the spirits industry in the late Aughts, the Nashville native has as good a perspective as anyone on how whiskey got hot, and why it’s cooled off. On this episode, we discussed the evolution of spirits media, the moment he realized the bourbon market had blown up, his upcoming history of the Whiskey Trust and its foes, plus much more. Tune in.

🎧 Listen to the episode

While the excerpts below are free, the full interview on The Fingers Podcast is exclusively for paying subscribers. Tnd there are two ways to listen:

I’m working on getting the The Fingers Podcast archive back online, too. There were some real bangers in there! More to come soon.

💡 A few highlights from the episode

The transcript excerpts below have been edited for length and clarity. This interview was recorded July 10th, 2026.

On how he wound up writing about whiskey…

Infante: I've been on this beat like a decade and a half. Probably a little less time than you. When did you first get into covering the booze business?

Risen: It was the late 2000s, and at the time, the amount of industry news that was online was pretty sparse. Honestly, the areas of the internet or places where you could actually learn about the bourbon industry specifically, or really any beverage-alcohol industry, were pretty thin. And so—

Infante: What was the go-to? Like, what was the forum everybody was on back then?

Risen: StraightBourbon.com. It was a very vibrant message board, and everyone was there. Chuck Cowdrey was there, Julian Van Winkle was there. They were dropping knowledge. Someone has archived everything, and it is amazing. You want to know the story behind this particular Willet release of you know like Doug's Green Ink? Well, Doug, the Doug, is there in the forum talking about the time that he was at this bourbon festival and he met up with the Willets and and just started talking and there next thing you knew they have Doug’s Green Ink. I was learning a lot there, and lot of my first couple years were just personally figuring it out, which I know sounds self-serving. So many of the books that were out there at that time were really good for the industry circa 1995. But even then, they weren't capturing a lot of what was starting to happen. What was Willet doing? What was Julian doing? What was Marci Palatella doing? There was a lot going on, but no one was talking about it, and no one really knew that this was going to be a thing, so it wasn't really being documented.

I was lucky to have an editor who, at this time, I was freelancing. I was actually writing for The Atlantic online. They had an editor, still do, who ran a food channel, and he was really interested in this emerging scene. He was aware of that, and so I was able to write really kind of base-hit stories, like profiles of distilleries that were as much about educating myself—

Infante: Right, like “Oh, what’s the angle?” I don’t know man, the angle is that it exists.

Risen: Right! Stuff like, “Let me tell you this crazy story because everyone who hears Four Roses today thinks it's garbage, but actually, it used to be great, and then it was garbage, but not in Japan. And then the Japanese bought it, and now it's awesome.” That kind of that kind of story that is also kind of a metaphor for the industry as a whole.

On when the whiskey boom really took off…

Infante: When do you when do you remember things starting to shift in the whiskey market?

Risen: I'd say 2011 is when I was really started to become fully aware of the scope of the craft movement. I'd been hearing about craft distilleries and visiting them for a while at that point, but that's when the critical mass really hit, where it was starting to generate its own heat. People started talking about craft whiskey outside of the circles of craft whiskey, and and you started to really hear about some big plans. This is about when Michter's really hit its stride. You know, started seeing bottles from distilleries that maybe I'd read about or I'd heard about online, and all of a sudden, here they are showing up in New York. There was just an energy that took over then. That’s one milestone.

Then another is probably 2014 or 2015. I knew a guy, as everyone knows a guy, who had a family liquor store. He was a whiskey guy and he had a lot more stuff upstairs, and we were up there kind of rooting around, and he said, "You know, I've got I've got the Weller 12 here. Do you want it? I can give it to you for 35 bucks.” And I was like, "Why would I want Weller 12? I already know Weller 12.” He said, “Things are changing really fast, and this is about to go through the roof.” But I had a wishlist, and that wasn’t on it. Lo and behold, within the next six months it was $120 on the shelf. I remember very specifically walking into a store, and just going, "Man, he was right. What the hell?!” It was that puzzle piece that made me suddenly realize the whole puzzle. It's like, wow, price taking is really happening, and the industry is has changed fundamentally.

And then you know the next milestone is probably COVID and just the the hyper-speed that things entered at that point. Those are my three milestones in the boom.

On the rise of limited-edition releases…

Risen: Sazerac is so good at it, for better or worse. IHate them, love them, but—

Infante: And plenty of people do both.

Risen: Oh, right. There are people who love to hate them, and people who hate to love them. They they line up for their stuff even though they know they shouldn't. Sazerac is very very good at it, and the other distilleries figured it out. Heaven Hill is pretty good at it. Many of the small distilleries are good at it. I one of the things I did a big profile of Dixon Dedman right when he and Mark Carter sold Kentucky Owl to to Stoli. That was huge deal in the industry. That was also a turning point. I remember he was very, very open about the both the shock of when he went out to market with those first bottles of Kentucky Owl, and maybe not really realizing that he had organically created a tater bottle without really—I mean, I think he knew, but he also was surprised at how dramatic the demand was. How it took off. Suddenly it was going for $300 when he had originally thought, “Maybe I can get $50 or $60.”

For a follow-up story, a couple years later, I remember, Dixon had some great quote where he’s like “$90 is the new $60” This was like 2022. There had been a huge sea change, and bottles that you normally would think would max out at $60… they're not even special bottles. They're just special enough.

🗣️ Previously on The Fingers Interview…

Since starting The Fingers Interview series back up, I’ve spoken with:

• Isabella Cueto (STAT) on the MAHA movement's mysterious disinterest in alcohol 🎧

• Kate Bernot (Feel Goods Insights) on how demographic and workforce shifts are rocking the booze business 🎧

• Ferron Salniker (BevNET) and Kevin McGee (attorney) on how Uncle Nearest wound up in dire straits 🎧

• Christopher Lackner (Hemp Beverage Alliance) on the road to redemption on Capitol Hill and much more 🎧

• Lisa Jacobson (UC Santa Barbara) on the booze industry's post-Repeal redemption 🎧

• Senator Tina Smith on how opponents "snuck" the ban into law, shady brands' "bullshit" products, and the industry's paths to redemption

• Ned Resnikoff (PUBLIC COMMENT) on optimizing cities for fewer cars and more corner bars

• Bourcard Nesin (Rabobank) on the myth that Gen Z isn’t drinking

• Kate Bernot (Sightlines) on the battles the wine industry should and shouldn’t be fighting

Before I wound it down, I spoke with a bunch of very interesting folks from inside the booze business, and beyond it. Including:

• Michael Graham (Austin Beerworks) on running a brewery in a boomtown

• Jerard Fagerberg (journalist-at-large) on on Minnesota's THC seltzer "gold rush"

• Mary Guiver (Whole Foods) on hard milk, good stories, and scouting booze trends

• Dan Ozzi (Sellout) on the music industry, the stigma of “selling out,” and more

• Allyson Brantley, Ph.D., (University of La Verne) on the historic Coors boycott, the pitfalls of consumer activism without endpoints, and more

• Benjamin Lorr (The Secret Life of Groceries, Hell-Bent) on supermarkets, marketing, fearsome power of commodity, and more

• Jason Diamond (The Sprawl, Searching for John Hughes) on “The Swimmer” and getting drunk in the suburbs

And probably a few more that I missed as I navigated the depths of the archives.

Editor’s note: Sorry for the delayed edition. I spent the first half of last week attending and speaking at the Florida Brewers Conference (thanks for having me, folks!) and I’m still catching up on everything. Thanks for your patience!—Dave.

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Welcome to The Fingers Weekender, a Sunday digest exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers featuring the independent journalism about drinking in America you love, optimized for hungover scrolling. In today’s edition:

• Tilray Brands posted a net loss of “only” $150 million last year;

• Silicon Valley Bank finds more haves/have-nots bifurcation in US wine sales;

• Campari dumped Sammy Hagar’s also-ran tequila brand;

• Total Wine is spamming non-THC customers with its “brotest” campaign;

And much more. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

For the first time in Fingers’ history, our Buzzwords of The Week this week are actually in the form of an illustration. Specifically, this vertigo-inducing vortex from page 17 of Republic National Distributing Company’s main Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing:

As Bluesky user @boozepoodle put it, “This is a madness rune for LinkedIn.” And boy, is it. Much like the sun itself, you shouldn’t stare directly at it, so instead, I’ve transcribed the copy from this flywhy-wheel chart into the business-brain beat poetry below:

Absolutely harrowing stuff. Gaze too long into the RNDC Scaleability Vortex™️ and the RNDC Scaleability Vortex™️ will gaze into you. With charts like these, it’s truly a mystery how this company wound up bankrupt.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🤝 Consider upgrading to a paid subscription!

Buzzwords of The Week is free, but most of Fingers’ award-winning independent journalism about drinking in America is not. For the full experience, become a Friend of Fingers today:

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Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.

It’s crunch time for THC. With just a few months left to go before the Trump administration’s de facto federal ban on intoxicating hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol products takes effect, and legislative relief still looking like a long shot, firms in the space are scrambling for ways to stay, or at least delay, the death penalty. Having already embraced THC drinks as a growth opportunity to backfill uneven demand for beverage alcohol, Total Wine & More has been in this fight for a minute on Capitol Hill. But this week, the country’s largest standalone wine retailer is taking its case directly to its customers.

Yesterday, multiple tipsters forwarded me a marketing email from Total Wine. The subject line read “Act Now! Legalize THC-Infused Beverages,” and the body of the email includes a banner exhorting customers to fill out a petition to “urge Congress to keep THC beverages legal.” My sources, who had shopped at Total Wine before, couldn’t recall getting a dispatch like this from the retailer in the past, about THC drinks or anything else. The Maryland-based company boasts almost 300 locations in 30 states, and I’ve heard from people on both coasts who got one. Total Wines did not immediately return an inquiry about the scope, timeline, or strategy of this political call-to-action campaign.

The top of the 7/28 email. | Total Wine

The petition linked in the email. | Total Wine

That Total Wine has jumped into the fray with a consumer-facing influence campaign is notable because of its sheer size and its institutional credibility, the latter of which the THC industry desperately needs more of as it pleads for Congressional clemency. (Also notable: its cofounder, David Trone, was until recently one of Maryland’s representatives in the House.) Still, there’s precedent here. Some THC drinks brands with smaller bullhorns and much more to lose have already been shouting from the rooftops about the existential threat to the booming, multi-billion-dollar sector. It’s not clear whether this sort of customer-focused political organizing—”brotesting,” in the parlance of the rideshare wars of the 2010s—can turn the tide for THC on such a short timeline. But as more recent history shows us, the practice carries political risk, too.

Editor’s note: On Tuesday, I’ll be delivering the keynote speech at the Florida Brewers Guild’s annual conference in Jacksonville. If you’ll be there, get in touch. Let’s try to meet up!—Dave.

Welcome to The Fingers Weekender, a Sunday digest exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers featuring the independent journalism about drinking in America you love, optimized for hungover scrolling. In today’s edition:

• The Teamsters target Modelo;

• Stop trying to make “blouge” happen;

• Diageo’s bold new criteria for hiring board members;

• Behold the TH(C)ree-tier system;

• More Trump tariffs, mo’ problems;

And much more. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

The World Cup is over, and—spoiler alert—Spain won. You know who lost? Besides Argentina, I mean? The beer industry. The hoped-for fútbol boost never materialized at scale; off-premise sales even slid a smidge even over the Fourth of July weekend, and against weak comps at that. Woof. Still, there were some bright spots for what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “beer away from home.” Which, sure, yeah, that tracks. As analytics platform BeerBoard put it in its post-tournament report:

Translation: people do be drinking at their neighborhood bars and restaurants when the game is on.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🗳️ Don’t forget to cast your ballot for Buzzwords of The Week of Q2 2026!

Voting is underway for the winner (loser) from the past three months. Do your civic boozeletter duty, and help select the schlockiest phrase from this year’s second quarter; it’ll eventually go on to compete against all the other quarterly selections for Buzzwords of The Week of The Year (dis)honors!

🤝 Consider upgrading to a paid subscription!

Buzzwords of The Week is free, but most of Fingers’ award-winning independent journalism about drinking in America is not. For the full experience, become a Friend of Fingers today:

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Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.

Not long ago, the corporate leaders of the United States’ beverage-alcohol industry had four very scary horsemen of the alco-pocalypse on which to blame their companies’ ongoing sales woes.

There were zealots of temperance working under the guise of legitimate public-health institutions like the World Health Organization to achieve “neo-prohibitionism.” There were inscrutable zoomers turning their backs on millennia of drinking tradition in favor of trendy “sober-curiosity.” The Youths’ vexing rejection of alcohol, boardroom wisdom held, had been abetted by the ongoing legalization, mainstreaming, and diversification of cannabinoids like weed proper and its hemp-based frenemy, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Finally, there were GLP-1 medications (Ozempic, Wegovy…), new super-drugs that seemed to be curbing patients’ thirst at the psycho-chemical level.

The trade’s top brass got an enormous amount of mileage out of these industrial-strength bogeymen, trotting them out in earnings calls and friendly press appearances as the source of the malaise that has gripped the beverage-alcohol industry since pandemic pantry-stocking subsided. It’s a good gambit, and it has bought Big Booze crucial time from shareholders wondering what happened to those sweet, sweet returns. But lately, a problem has emerged. Credulous Wall Street analysts and mainstream-media journalists are finally starting to realize the four horsemen of the alco-pocalypse are, well, kinda horseshit. Which means the c-suiters of the beleaguered beverage-alcohol business are running out of excuses.

In lieu of The Fingers Weekender, today is a special edition—this year’s second installation of Buzzwords of The Week of The Quarter. But before we get to that, be sure to check out:

• My column last week at VinePair about the politics of Maine Beer Co.’s would-be Senator Lunch;

• This new video touting some of the incredible testimonials I’ve received from paying Friends of Fingers;

• The latest installment of Buzzwords of The Week;

And that’s about it. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

The booze industry has been captured by LinkedIn-brained perverts. Allow me to explain.

Used to be, beverage-alcohol executives were a real mixed bag. Some were domineering forces of nature, like August Busch III, or colorfully self-destructive cads that had no business running a business, like August Busch IV. Of course, there are other examples outside the Busch family brood, which is not to be confused with The Busch Family Brewed for reasons that instantly became obvious to anybody brave enough to click that link. But my point here is that people that trafficked drink in this country used to be cranks, geniuses, gangsters, and more. They were what people in my business call “good copy.”

Not no mo’. Part of the reason Fingers has covered the shit out of chaotic figures like Bang Energy’s Jack Owoc and Uncle Nearest’s Fawn Weaver over the years is because their voluminous propensity for public prevarication and self-congratulation is relatively rare. That type of shoot-from-the-hip messaging has been mostly beaten out of the executive corps of the drinks business. That might be good for business, but it is deeply boring for me. Good thing I launched Buzzwords of The Week a few years ago to turn tracking the trade’s media-trained gormlessness into a game. Otherwise I think I would go insane reading shit like this on the regular.

Buzzwords of The Week of Q1 2026 voting was crazy close.

In mid-April, Fingers held its first quarterly runoff of the year to elect the best (worst) instance of this mind-numbing corporatespeak. Our Q1 winner was outgoing Heineken chief executive Dolf Van den Brink, whose “operationalizing and double-clicking on the priorities” pulled out a squeaker against “hybrid vertical-horizontal model” and “degree of cleanliness opportunity.”

Now, we turn our attention to Q2’s offenses against plain speech. Voting for Buzzwords of The Week of Q2 2026 starts now. Because if we don’t laugh at the booze industry’s most LinkedIn-brained perverts, who will?

🗳️ Cast your vote for The Buzzwords of The Week of Q2 2026

As a reminder, Buzzwords of The Week are now free to read each Friday, with or without a subscription. But only paying Friends of Fingers are eligible to cast their ballots for the entry they believe most deserving quarterly recognition/ridicule. At the end of the year, each Buzzwords of The Week of The Quarter winner will go on to compete in a final vote to crown the successor to “a lot of concern about the whole immigration question” as Fingers’ Buzzwords of The Week of 2026.

On a procedural note, the polling function on Fingers’ publishing platform only allows for 10 options in a given poll, and there were 13 BoTW entries in Q2. I culled the three least remarkable from the running for the sake of expedience. Is this electioneering? Yes, I guess. Sorry? To the poll:

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🤦🏻‍♂️ Get reacquainted with all last quarter’s corniest corporatespeak

Because the only thing I cherish more than my deleterious Summer of Loko is an informed participatory democracy, I’ve linked each of the nine Buzzwords of The Week entries from the previous three months for your review. Reappraise thyself of the florid rhetoric and bloodless boardroom equivocation below.

Again, Buzzwords of The Week are now free for all to read, and publish each Friday on the site. Read the archive here.

Earlier this week, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits published one of the worst corporate marketing videos I’ve ever seen to LinkedIn. I actually ripped a copy of it in case somebody at the mega-wholesaler realizes that it’s not ideal to have an executive on tape bragging “a lot of places do kinda give us full loyalty, you can kinda quote-unquote own a bar” after two years’-worth of still-ongoing litigation with the Federal Trade Commission over anticompetitive price-fixing practices. Incredible scenes. Mostly, though, the video is terrible because every SGWS employee in it seems either unreasonably chipper about all the #synergy, or annoyed at being taken hostage by its marketing team. The latter is how Gregg Quadrini, the vice-president and general manager of Massachusetts beer division comes off explaining why drinkers want drinks across different categories. He says:

Needless to say, they do not call it “zebra.” They call it “zebra-striping,” and really, I don’t think anybody actually uses that term outside of the drinks industry and corresponding media. But lucky for us, Gregg Quadrini doesn’t know that, because he has uttered a phrase that I will be muttering on my deathbed.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🤝 Consider upgrading to a paid subscription!

Buzzwords of The Week is free, but most of Fingers’ award-winning independent journalism about drinking in America is not. For the full experience, become a Friend of Fingers today:

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Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.

A tipster recently reached out to let me know that Phusion Projects, the parent company of Four Loko, had posted a job listing for a community manager role. Today, I’m humbly throwing my hat in the ring.

Why? Well, for one thing, the media industry is in a state of accelerated collapse, and ditto the written word writ large. More than half of American adults read below a sixth-grade level these days, man. Not great! I also have a deep and enduring personal connection with Four Loko, having come up through the heady days of the late Aughts with its caffeinated formula coursing through my 20-something veins. Most importantly, though, the brand is a #whitespace innovator, a marketing juggernaut, and a malt-liquor comeback story the likes of which the beverage-alcohol industry has never seen. As I wrote in early 2023 (emphasis added throughout):

This may not sound like your cup of tea. And it shouldn’t, really, because it’s not tea at all. It’s artificially flavored riot punch packed into radioactively labeled cans found in the flickering cooler at the back of every casually cleaned gas-station in the country. But don’t get it twisted: Loko is lucrative. It closed out 2025 as the 14th-largest “beer” supplier in the country in the off-premise universe tracked by market-research firm Circana, even though it only really does serious volume in the c-store; through mid-June, the candy-camo “brand family” is up 5.9% dollars and 4.5% volume in that channel alone, racking up more than $75 million. (Overall beer is +1.2% and -0.8% respectively over the same period.) In other words, behind the high-octane malt liquor and low-brow shitposts stands a serious business.

Now, Phusion Projects—which recently licensed the brand out to a company called Chuck It LLC (lol) for a THC-infused nonalcoholic extension called Nine Loko (lmao)—is hiring for a community manager to be:

Does this sound like a nightmare? Yes, a little bit. But when you think about it, aren’t nightmares just dreams that need to be reformulated to achieve broader market acceptance? Exactly. I can do this. I’ve recovered from getting rejected for White Claw’s marketing lead, and am ready for broader job market acceptance. To demonstrate my self-starting work ethic, disdain for pencil-necked frivolities like “norms” and “processes,” and middle-aged white-man confidence, I’ve bypassed the application portal in favor of openly posting my cover letter to co-founder and chief executive officer Jaisen Freeman below. Resume available upon request. Hire me, Four Loko.

[Urgent - Please Read - Attention Required] Hire me, Four Loko

To: Jaisen Freeman, co-founder and chief executive officer
CC: Phusion Projects recruiting team
Date: July 15th, 2026

Jaisen,

What’s good, king? I hear Phusion Projects is on the hunt for a new community-management maestro. Well, you can cancel the search, Jaybone, because I’m your huckleberry.

Editor’s note: Sorry for the delay on today’s edition. I’ve been sick for the past few days, and that put me way behind. Thanks for your patience.—Dave.

Welcome to The Fingers Weekender, a Sunday digest exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers featuring the independent journalism about drinking in America you love, optimized for hungover scrolling. In today’s edition:

• World Cup’s first week a mixed bag for beer;

• More layoffs at RNDC and SGWS;

• Brown-Forman has a legit hit with New Mix;

• Former Trump official does some THC red-baiting;

And much more. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

It is one of the universe’s great mysteries that there can be no good way, and yet many bad ways, to lay someone off. One bad way to do it is to put out a press release so larded with gibberish that the layoffs seem like an afterthought, which is what Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits—a mega-wholesaler soon to be known as Southern Glazer’s Beverage Company, but NOT YET, ALRIGHT?!—did earlier this week. Some 300 words after the firm explained that it…

…it got around to mentioning that it “expect[s] these efforts to result in a net reduction of approximately one percent of our U.S. workforce.” That works out to around 240 workers tossed out on their asses. Sorry, sorry: refined out on their asses.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🤝 Consider upgrading to a paid subscription!

Buzzwords of The Week is free, but most of Fingers’ award-winning independent journalism about drinking in America is not. For the full experience, become a Friend of Fingers today:

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Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.

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Last week, Bloomberg published a real talker from staffer Ben Steverman about what it termed the United States’ “fun shortage.” The upshot is that leisure activities—going out, vacations, fucking bowling, etc.—have gotten obscenely expensive in this country, and the trend that’s “making America miserable.” I can think of some other proximate causes for the national malaise [gestures wildly in the general direction of Washington, DC] that went unmentioned in the piece. But on balance, I think the report is an accurate assessment of the problem, especially as it pertains to drinking. On the solution… well, here’s Steverman (emphasis mine throughout):

Hmm. HMM. Let’s take this in two parts, yeah? It is Fingers’ considered editorial position that American bar culture is a) deficient and b) worth improving for all sorts of social and political reasons. So I’m with Steverman on the first half. The second half, though, is semi-substantiated #abundance wishcasting that won’t solve the very-real problem of vanishing neighborhood bars and may well ensure this civically vital trade’s continued decline.

Luckily, deregulation is not the only solution for correcting market failures, even if it is the only one Bloomberg can countenance. Bars are too important to the sociopolitical, mental, and even physical health of the American body politic to leave their survival to the vagaries of the profit motive. Which is why we should subsidize them.

Constellation Brands’ new chief executive, Nick Fink, has some big shoes to fill, given his predecessor took home the prestigious Buzzwords of The Week of The Year for 2025. But the young(er) turk is wasting no time promulgating pap. After notching his first BotW recognition in April 2026, Fink followed up this past week with another notable quotable, telling analysts on the Modelo maker’s second-quarter earnings call that Knicks mania in New York and World Cup matches across the country had…

…again after a tough 2025. Credit to Jessica Infante at Brewbound for pulling that truly tremendous gibberish out of the transcript. You, a rube: “I’m gonna drink a beer.” Me, an aristocrat: “I’m going to engage in that beer occasion.” Fingers foresees a bright Buzzwords future for florid Mister Fink.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🤝 Consider upgrading to a paid subscription!

Buzzwords of The Week is free, but most of Fingers’ award-winning independent journalism about drinking in America is not. For the full experience, become a Friend of Fingers today:

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Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. It was most recently updated at 3:20pm ET on 7/3/26. If you have tips about what’s going on at Diageo, please get in touch by emailing me (dave@dinfontay.com) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

Late last month, Diageo conducted extensive layoffs and told its remaining employees to adopt a “‘Bigger, Better, Fewer’ mindset.” It still isn’t clear what that means for the spirits conglomerate’s loaded brand portfolio. But internal organizational charts obtained by Fingers shed more light on what it means for the structure of the new firm, which has struggled through the industry's post-pandemic hangover and drinkers’ pivot to canned cocktails and other ready-to-drink products (RTDs.)

“Diageo knows it missed the boat on RTDs and all data points to RTDs being the biggest category in spirits soon so they are desperate to catch up,” said the current Diageo employee that shared the org charts with Fingers earlier this week. I have independently verified their identity, and have granted them anonymity to speak freely without fear of retaliation. A second Diageo employee, also granted anonymity for the same reason, corroborated the validity of the documents by cross-referencing them with materials accessible through a corporate share drive. Diageo did not respond to a request for comment.

The charts offer more granular detail to Lewis’ vision for Diageo, which he first laid out to employees on June 23rd—the same day he laid many of them off. Slides from internal presentations that day obtained by Fingers showed an orientation around “Four category groups, aligned globally.” The new groups are: ”Whiskey,” “Tequila & Vodka,” “Rum, Gin, Liquors, and Non Alc,” and “Guinness.” (Despite the beer’s remarkable success in a down market, the president of Diageo Beer Company, which oversees the brand, was laid off last month, Beer Marketer’s Insights reported.) A slide advised employees that the new framework will enable Diageo to “buil[d] competitive advantage with brand building and innovation.”

While each of the new charts provided to Fingers—”Whisk(e)y,” “Gin, Rum, Liqueurs & NA,” “Tequila + Vodka,” and “Marketing Operations & MarTech"—name team leaders, the rest of the roles are identified only by title. Several high-level jobs, like Marketing Operations’ vice-president of “brands in culture” and the leads for both Crown Royal and Smirnoff are listed as “OPEN.”

Fingers asked the current Diageo employee to contrast the new organizational structure with the one that it’s replacing at the firm. “Way smaller,” they texted back.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. If you have tips about what’s going on at Uncle Nearest, please get in touch by emailing me (dave@dinfontay.com) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

In late June, Uncle Nearest cofounder took to Instagram to let her 300,000+ followers know she’d be taking a break from posting to work on a book project. Anybody who has watched Fawn Weaver’s spectacular rise over the past decade, as she launched the Tennessee firm in homage to the unsung Black distiller that taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey, then grew it into a mainstream-media darling before the loans came due, can attest to just how much she used social media, and may have suspected there was more to the story of her self-suspension from it.

It looks like there was: according to a filing by Weaver’s new attorney Wednesday with Judge Charles Atchley of the Eastern District of Tennessee, Uncle Nearest’s court-appointed receiver has “terminated” her in advance of a pending sale.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. If you have tips about what’s going on at Diageo, please get in touch by emailing me (dave@dinfontay.com) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

In May 2025, after I reported that Diageo was moving production of Aviation Gin out of the brand’s sleek new digs in Portland, Oregon, a spokesperson for the conglomerate insisted in an emailed statement it wasn’t really goodbye (emphasis mine throughout):

Roughly one year later, it’s really goodbye.

A spokesperson from the mega-distiller confirmed to Fingers today that it has fully cut bait on the 32,000-square-foot facility, which opened in 2022 to much fanfare. The official statement goes:

Programming note: Due to the holiday, Fingers will not publish a Weekender this Sunday. I’m taking some time off to relax, hope you’re able to do likewise. Regular publishing resumes next week.—Dave.

The beverage-alcohol industry loves a boogeyman to blame for its woes. THC. Ozempic. Those fucking Zoomers. You know: the usual suspects. Since the dawn of the second Trump administration and the ascent of Robert “Flesh” Kennedy, Jr. (that’s what the F. stands for; few know this) to a controlling position over America’s once-exemplary public-health establishment, the trade hasn’t been as vocal about one of its favorite scapegoats for soft sales. But it’s still out there. Lurking. Neo-prohibitionism! Those lab-coated nincompoops and nanny-state bureaucrats trying to do Temperance 2.0! Those shadowy sober forces pulling the strings from behind the World Health Organization’s veneer of liberal legitimacy!

Ahem. Sorry. Lost my cool there for a moment. Today on The Fingers Podcast I’m joined by Isabella Cueto, a chronic disease reporter at STAT, an award-winning news outlet now celebrating 10 years of covering health and medicine in the United States. Since the pandemic, she’s been digging into the relationship between the bev-alc industry and public-health institutions like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Now, Isabella is not, in fact, a neo-prohibitionist. She drinks, as do I. But she’s also keen to explicate the power dynamics that surround booze-related policymaking in this country, and to understand how they shape the science on booze-related health risks, as am I. Isabella’s recent reporting suggests there’s so much more to those important stories that what the mainstream media—speaking of shadowy forces—has yet mustered the interest to explore. On this episode, we explore it, from ICCPUD, to Emily Oster, to the Trump administration’s remarkable disinterest in “the deadliest drug,” and beyond.

🎧 Listen to the episode

The Fingers Podcast is exclusively for paying subscribers, and there are two ways to listen:

I’m working on getting the The Fingers Podcast archive back online, too. I’ve already salvaged and re-uploaded three old episodes; keep an eye on the archive for more as I’m able to dig them up! More to come soon.

💡 A few highlights from the episode

The transcript excerpts below have been edited for length and clarity. This interview was recorded June 12th, 2026.

On investigating MAHA’s mysterious blindspot for booze…

Cueto: I've been paying a lot of attention to Make America Healthy Again, RFK Jr's whole movement. As part of that, you hear people talking about the dangers in the grocery store, and how people need to stay away from ultra-processed foods and seed oils. But there is this very clear exclusion of alcohol, which is, as far as public-health risks go, pretty low-hanging fruit, in there with tobacco. We spent the majority of this year actually digging into how the Trump administration is thinking about alcohol, and why it seems like alcohol is completely left out of MAHA, looking at all these different angles. And let me clarify that our focus is on like heavy drinking and excessive drinking. There's so much debate around low to moderate, right? Which—

Infante: That's right, baby. All you gotta do is “drink moderately.” What does that mean? Fuck you, don’t ask that question! Next question!

Cueto: So we're like, well, everyone can agree that heavy and excess drinking is bad, and like, we know that that's a problem. So why does it seem like even that is not talked about? So that has led us down this rabbit hole.

On how the Trump administration is hamstringing alcohol research…

Cueto: You take that Dietary Guidelines for Americans change, you take Dr. Oz, who is now the head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid—

Infante: Doesn't read Fingers, by the way.

Cueto: Yeah, I don't think he reads Fingers.

Infante: Not yet. He doesn’t read Fingers yet, Isabella.

Cueto: Right. Future Fingers reader Dr. Oz—question mark—during the rollout said that basically the takeaway from the DGA is don't have alcohol for breakfast, and then follow it up the next day on X, and said “Brunch is obviously different than breakfast.” There was this sort of lighthearted tone in the rollout.

Infante: We’re having fun! We’re telling jokes!

Cueto: Onlookers, especially in the public-health space, were sort of horrified at that, given everything we know about alcohol-related harms. Fast forward to the sweeping cuts that the Trump administration made at HHS. As part of those cuts, the CDC program devoted to alcohol was completely—all the staff are gone, basically, from that program. There were plenty of cuts to other agencies that also handle alcohol-related tracking, research, and prevention work. There are several databases that are used to follow this problem that have been impeded, or, you know, basically are in limbo as a result of Trump actions. These various things make you wonder: Is this actually a problem they're taking seriously? Earlier this year, Kennedy unveiled the Great American Recovery Initiative, which is an addiction-focused project that's meant to coordinate the government's response to addiction, but it largely focuses on opioids and on people with substance-use disorders who are also homeless, and therefore alcohol is once again not really a central piece of that.

On the difference between “neo-Prohibitionism” and consumer education…

Cueto: A lot of public-health people are like, “We're not saying ‘ban alcohol.’ We're not trying to go back to Prohibition. But if alcohol is basically going to be on every corner, in every store, there has to be some way to measure, to follow, to give people the information they need to be smart consumers.” I think that's a key sticking point, especially in the era of MAHA. Yet with alcohol, there's very little nutrition information, there's very few disclosures on the actual containers, people have a very loose sense of, like, how much they're drinking, how much they should be drinking, what—

Infante: What a “drink” even is. Like what the unit is.

Cueto: Exactly. And then you also get into, the healthcare system itself. Most of us may be asked about our drinking in sort of a vague, superficial sense at our annual checkup, but there's really bad follow-up. There's very little referral to treatment. There's very little advice that providers are giving their patients when they do flag that they're drinking a bit too much. And then we get into the actual addiction-treatment landscape, and that's a mess of its own. We're just like basically throwing people into a choose-your-own-adventure when they have an alcohol-use disorder.

🗣️ Previously on The Fingers Interview…

Since starting The Fingers Interview series back up, I’ve spoken with:

• Kate Bernot (Feel Goods Insights) on how demographic and workforce shifts are rocking the booze business 🎧

• Ferron Salniker (BevNET) and Kevin McGee (attorney) on how Uncle Nearest wound up in dire straits 🎧

• Christopher Lackner (Hemp Beverage Alliance) on the road to redemption on Capitol Hill and much more 🎧

• Lisa Jacobson (UC Santa Barbara) on the booze industry's post-Repeal redemption 🎧

• Senator Tina Smith on how opponents "snuck" the ban into law, shady brands' "bullshit" products, and the industry's paths to redemption

• Ned Resnikoff (PUBLIC COMMENT) on optimizing cities for fewer cars and more corner bars

• Bourcard Nesin (Rabobank) on the myth that Gen Z isn’t drinking

• Kate Bernot (Sightlines) on the battles the wine industry should and shouldn’t be fighting

Before I wound it down, I spoke with a bunch of very interesting folks from inside the booze business, and beyond it. Including:

• Michael Graham (Austin Beerworks) on running a brewery in a boomtown

• Jerard Fagerberg (journalist-at-large) on on Minnesota's THC seltzer "gold rush"

• Mary Guiver (Whole Foods) on hard milk, good stories, and scouting booze trends

• Dan Ozzi (Sellout) on the music industry, the stigma of “selling out,” and more

• Allyson Brantley, Ph.D., (University of La Verne) on the historic Coors boycott, the pitfalls of consumer activism without endpoints, and more

• Benjamin Lorr (The Secret Life of Groceries, Hell-Bent) on supermarkets, marketing, fearsome power of commodity, and more

• Jason Diamond (The Sprawl, Searching for John Hughes) on “The Swimmer” and getting drunk in the suburbs

And probably a few more that I missed as I navigated the depths of the archives.

Welcome to The Fingers Weekender, a Sunday digest exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers featuring the independent journalism about drinking in America you love, optimized for hungover scrolling. In today’s edition:

• Heineken has a new head honcho;

• bw166 has a bleak new wine projection;

• Diageo has a new “mindset”;

• THC has some powerful new supporters;

And much more. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

🍺 BEER

There’s a showdown brewing between Anchor’s old workers and its new owner. The Willy Wonka angle is hard to miss in Anchor Brewing Company’s anxiously awaited revival, but when its enigmatic billionaire owner reopens the sadly idled icon, it won’t be Oompa-Loompas working the copper kettles. But who will it be? In my column last week at VinePair I made the case for the loyal local labor Sapporo unceremoniously cut loose nearly three years ago.

Other key stories:

• Heineken has a new head honcho from outside the industry whose day-one priority will presumably be a full post-mortem on its goofy World Cup ketchup collab with Heinz. (Reuters / me for VinePair)

• Diageo Beer Company, whose Guinness line is one of the mega-firm’s only bright spots at the moment, reportedly lost its president in the latest cuts. (Beer Marketer’s Insights)

• Boston Beer Co. settled those dismal non-compete lawsuits with two of its former sales reps. (Brewbound / me for VinePair)

• One-time national brewpub empire Rock Bottom nears rock bottom itself, with the closure of its Denver flagship last week leaving just five locations still in business. (Westword)

🍷 WINE

New research shows wine labels designed to appeal to women do in fact appeal to women. A new paper from an Auburn business professor published in conjunction with colleagues at Washington State University in the International Journal of Hospitality Management earlier this year found that when a bottle’s branding signals female vineyard ownership and/or female winemakers behind it, female customers respond more positively to it both on the shelf and in the glass. Women over-index on wine purchases in the United States, accounting for some 60% of the national spend, but the researchers found that masculine branding cues still dominate the languishing category’s labeling. Sadly it would be woke and therefore illegal for wine marketers to do anything with this information. Keep those Stag’s Leaps, 19 Crimes, and Prisoners coming, boys!

Other key stories:

• bw166’s data don Jon Moramarco last week projected a worst-case (wine pun!) scenario that would have US consumption falling 50% by 2036. (Wine Business)

• That nice-idea/not-gonna-help bill in California’s legislature to tighten labeling requirements on “American” wine made with foreign fruit stalled out last week. (Sacramento Business Journal)

• Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits Beverage Co. is on the verge of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in its ongoing price-discrimination case. (Bloomberg Law)

🥃 SPIRITS

At Diageo, more cuts reveal the "drastic" reorganization. On Monday, the spirits conglomerate underwent another substantial round of layoffs that appear to have been focused on its struggling North American unit. (There are also cuts coming in Ireland, and possibly elsewhere.) Materials presented in advance of the pink-slipping, obtained by Fingers via a soon-to-be-exited employee, give a better sense for how new-ish chief exec “Drastic” Dave Lewis plans to bust the mega-firm's recent malaise. The turnaround strategy includes adopting what slides refer to as a "'Bigger, Better, Fewer' mindset." As always, if you know more about the situation at Diageo, please submit tips to dave@dinfontay.com or dinfontay.11 on Signal. Anonymity available.

Other key stories:

• The Canadian couple that sold NÜTRL to Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2020 is taking another shot at spirits with a pan-American investment in tequila brand Los Sundays. (BevNET)

• WhistlePig finally cashed out of its controversial, fungi-fostering distillery in upstate New York, selling the plant for $17 million. (WCAX / Inc.)

• Uncle Nearest’s poster-in-chief and semi-ousted #PeoplesCEO announced she was taking a break from social media… on Instagram. (me on Bluesky)

👀 RELATEDLY

Nine Loko offers more than twice the Loko of the leading Loko on the market. I guess? Does anybody know the conversion rate between malt liquor and hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol? Because the latter is the intoxicating ingredient in the newly launched Nine Loko, which Brewbound reported is being manufactured not by Four Loko parent company Phusion Projects but a third-party licensee named—lol—Chuck It LLC. Sure, yep, that tracks. Obviously, it rules that the brand best known for blacking out entire college campuses during the first Obama administration is now fronting a THC spinoff mere months before the substance is slated to be banned by the second Trump administration. Then again, laws are fake here in the twilight of the republic, so it might pan out anyway: the White House last week made a direct appeal to Congress for new legislation to avert the looming THC death sentence this November… which, of course, President Deals himself just signed into law last November. Loko, indeed.

Other key stories:

• New research on post-Covid data further discredits the trade’s “aLcOhOl iS tHe NeW tObaCcO” excuse for sales slumps. (Feel Goods Insights / The New Consumer)

• Starbucks Workers United just won its 700th union election earlier this month, an astonishing total in just five years. (NLRB Edge / me on Bluesky)

• The powerful, conservative National Restaurant Association—aka ”the other NRA”—threw its weight behind hemp-derived THC drinks in a letter to Congress last week. (BevNET)

• Also on the “twilight of the republic” beat, the Supreme Court last week ruled that Roundup owner Bayer couldn’t be sued at the state level for failing to warn people the product caused cancer. (CNBC)

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💬 BUZZWORDS OF THE WEEK

Has moved! I’m testing out Buzzwords of The Week as a web-only feature on Fridays, open to free and paid subscribers alike and promoted on social. I’ll include a link to it in Weekenders as well, so it doesn’t just disappear on you. We’ll see what happens! Here’s this week’s installation:

"Brings clarity, confidence and talkability to the ready-to-drink range"

It's your Fingers Buzzwords of The Week!

Fingers • Dave Infante

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🔗 VIRGIN LINKS

Editor’s note: The (🎁) indicates the link is a gift link. I get these on Bluesky—there’s an entire feed of them. Pretty cool!

• The Machine Breaks Down in New York (The American Prospect)

• The Nationwide Backlash Against Cameras Watching Your Car (The Wall Street Journal 🎁)

• Where Did All The Right-Wing YouTubers Go? (Garbage Day)

• The Tokenpocalypse Is Here (404 Media)

The market for pre-packaged shooters exists somewhere between the gas-station pork rind display and the bulletproof glass in front of the cash register. This is not a good place to find Buzzwords of The Week; in fact, it’s not a good place generally. But! That’s nothing a little lofty language can’t fix, right?! (No.) A tipster turned me onto this LinkedIn post from a design agency called BrandMe touting its work on Twisted Shotz, a novelty line owned for some reason by Asahi’s subsidiary in the United States. The firm says its new “design system”…

…which, yes, is a pretentious and purple way to talk about the labels you designed for the packaging of 20%-ABV flavored liqueur slurries in plastic shot glasses that your client markets to big-ass fans of Big Ass Fans. But to be fair, they’re clearly very talkable!

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🤝 Consider upgrading to a paid subscription!

Buzzwords of The Week is free, but most of Fingers’ award-winning independent journalism about drinking in America is not. For the full experience, become a Friend of Fingers today:

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Fingers is 100% reader-supported and AI-free. Your paid subscription directly funds more coverage and commentary like this. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall!—Dave.