Jim Beam is halting whiskey production at its historic Clermont, Kentucky, facility for most of 2026 in a major pullback that shows just how badly the bourbon business has soured. The distillery, which opened in 1935, will keep bottling what it has already made and let existing barrels age, but it won’t be producing any new bourbon, marking a complete reversal for an industry that bet big on continued growth. Export sales have tanked as a result of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, with Canadian purchases falling by as much as 85 percent during recent trade fights. The trouble is that bourbon takes years to age, so distilleries ramped up production based on previously rosy forecasts that didn’t pan out. Now they’re stuck with huge inventories of barrels in storage, and still paying fees and state taxes on whiskey nobody is buying. Jim Beam has plenty of company in its misery. AM Scott Distillery, a boutique bourbon maker in Ohio, filed for bankruptcy last week, while Brown-Forman, the maker of Jack Daniel’s, which has been around since 1866, laid off 12 percent of its workers in January 2025. Several Kentucky distillers have shut down completely, knocked out by a perfect storm of changing consumer habits and a trade war that killed overseas demand just as American sales started sliding.
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