According to a recent article in The New York Times American craft distilleries numbered in the dozens no more than five years ago and have now exploded to more than 600 at last count. What, you ask, is a craft distillery? Or a micro-distillery? Or a boutique distillery?  For starters, they’re smaller. A lot smaller. Whiskey writer Chuck Cowdery puts it into perspective by explaining that the Distilled Spirits Council offers a small-distiller membership to distillers producing no more than 40,000 cases a year. The two Kentucky distilleries that make Jim Beam produce 28,000 cases a day and Jack Daniel’s is on track to ship 13,000,000 cases this year.

The American Distilling Institute defines craft spirits as the products of an independently-owned distillery with maximum annual sales of 52,000 cases where the product is physically distilled and bottled on-site. This definition bars quite a few craft distillers from membership – that would be the ones that buy their spirits already distilled and aged, then simply bottle and label them on-site. The labels usually extol the virtue of handcrafting, of small batching, of using local resources but that may or may not describe what’s actually in the bottle.

The Daily Beast posted a story on July 28, 2014 by Eric Felten that names a massive distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana that “cranks out mega-industrial quantities of beverage-grade alcohol” as the go-to place for marketers who want to bottle their own brands without having to actually buy and operate a still. According to Felten, MGP (Midwest Grain Products) sells bulk vodka and gin, wheated and rye bourbons – all well-made, just not what one thinks of as artisanal. But then, the big distilleries tend to advertise their products as “handcrafted” and “old time” so, in a way, this is nothing new. To my mind, if it tastes good, then what’s in the bottle is what you want – regardless of provenance or size of distillery. The problem seems to be that we expect more from an artisanal product therefore we don’t mind paying more, because we assume it required more time and expertise in the making. And nobody likes to be hoodwinked. Still. If it tastes good….

A case in point is published in the September 2014 Atlantic, written by Wayne Curtis and titled “How Rye Came Back.” Curtis writes that we’re in a “new golden age” of rye because of the craft movement. He writes that “what few people know, however, is that an awful lot of the craft whiskey found in these different bottles traces back to a single distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana – and it wasn’t originally intended to be bottled as rye at all.” But these barrels of rye from Indiana are being hailed as the best in the history of rye. Seems they were originally distilled by Seagram’s, who sold the distillery to MGP in 2011, and not intended to be consumed as rye but to be used as a component for Seagram’s blended whiskeys.

To make a long story short, Seagram’s went belly up and sold off the rye. Curtis writes that some was sold to Diageo, which branded it as Bulleit rye; some went to independent bottlers “who blended it with other whiskeys or aged it further and then slapped their own labels on it. You’ll find this ur-rye in bottles of Templeton, High West, Redemption, Willett, and Old Scout, among others.”

Curtis interviewed the former Seagram’s distiller who explained they had been researching and experimenting with their rye for a while when they bumped into a breakthrough with a shipment of rye grain from Sweden. He recalled that “this was some of the sweetest-smelling rye grain and made some of the best rye whiskey we had ever produced.” That sounds a little bit artisanal although the distillery was, and is, not.

The point is, all good whiskeys don’t necessarily start small nor do all bad whiskeys necessarily start big. Most craft distillers pride themselves on making – or bottling – a distinctive product. If it tastes good, then drink it, whether its provenance be small or huge, local or global. Just don’t believe everything you read on the label.