Ashley Scoby

Sep 9, 2024 | uknow.uky.edu | Ashley Scoby

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Sept. 9, 2024) — Mowing the lawn was one of the least strenuous things Howard Galbreath enjoyed doing. He may have been 81, but that hadn’t slowed Galbreath from cutting down trees, chopping firewood and other active work on the Owenton, Kentucky, farm he shares with his daughter, son-in-law and grandson. So, on a sunny June morning in 2022, he didn’t think twice about jumping on his mower to get an early start on the grass.

Sep 3, 2024 | vinepair.com | Ashley Scoby

When Bespoken Spirits founder Martin Janousek asked Jordan Spitzer to come try some whiskey out of his garage, Spitzer wasn’t sure what to expect. Janousek told him that instead of aging whiskey for years in barrels, he had tested using “microstaves” — small pieces of wood dropped inside whiskey to increase extraction and speed up the maturation timeline. When Spitzer took a sip from a batch, Janousek prompted him for tasting notes. “You want my honest opinion?” Spitzer asked.

Jun 11, 2024 | vinepair.com | Ashley Scoby

When the numbers dropped for this year’s most watched Super Bowl ads, it wasn’t a usual suspect, like Doritos or Bud Light, at the top. Instead, flashy craft soda brand Poppi reached more households (29.1 million) than any other ad that night.

Feb 27, 2024 | vinepair.com | Ashley Scoby

In May of 1964, Congress famously declared bourbon a “distinctive product” of the U.S. By that point, America’s “native spirit” had been produced — both legally and illicitly — for two centuries. And nowhere did the spirit have more of an impact than Kentucky, where bourbon is now a $9 billion industry, and where (according to a much-repeated, unverified estimate) more than 90 percent of the world’s supply is produced.

Jan 2, 2024 | vinepair.com | Ashley Scoby

Two days after listing their craft agave spirit, Rancho del Sol, for sale online, the leaders at Shelter Distilling in Mammoth Lakes, Calif. started to sweat a little. “We have to take this thing down and stop selling,” they told themselves. There was a Margarita festival the next day. And the distillery was perilously close to running out of bottles. That particular spirit — made from six agave varieties, all grown in California — was special.