World Faces Shocking Crisis of Having Too Much Whisky

EDINBURGH — For centuries, humanity’s main whisky problem was not having enough of it. That era is over. Distillers around the world are now facing the opposite, and nobody has the faintest idea how to cope.

From Kentucky to Kilkenny, producers are pausing production and leaving their copper stills idle while bottles sit on shelves. In Scotland, the unsold surplus has grown large enough to earn its own geographical feature: the “whisky loch”, the spirits industry’s answer to the wine lake.

“We tried drinking it ourselves,” said one entirely fictional distillery manager. “It’s not a scalable solution.”

The pandemic hangover

Industry analysts blame several factors, the most painful being that people bought a lot of whisky during lockdown and have only recently noticed it’s still in the cupboard. Others are drinking less for their health, which the industry regards as a deeply unsporting thing to do.

Whisky makes this harder than most products, because it can’t be made to order. Scotch has to sit in an oak cask for at least three years, and the good stuff can stay there for decades. That means today’s distillers are making decisions about what people will want to drink in 2036, a year about which nobody, including the people who will be drinking in it, has any information.

Diageo, meanwhile, is building warehouses to hold almost 3 million casks of Scotch at a former opencast coal mine in Fife, which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you have a loch and need a bigger loch.

Tasmania braces

In Tasmania, home to a third of Australia’s whisky distilleries, producers say this is the toughest stretch since colonial-era law made distilling illegal in 1839. At the time, the governor’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, reportedly said she would “prefer barley be fed to pigs” than turned into spirits. Today’s distillers are still not sure whether she won.

This section is satire. The quotes are invented. The facts below are real.

What actually happened

ABC News reports that a global whisky downturn is hitting distillers “from Kentucky to Kilkenny”, with industry giants pausing production and laying off staff. Jim Beam’s main Kentucky distillery is dormant for all of 2026. Tasmania hosts a third of Australia’s whisky distilleries, and the downturn is the biggest challenge for the local industry in generations, according to the ABC.

The Guardian reported last month that demand for Scotch has slumped worldwide after a 15-year boom, with distilleries across Scotland pausing production to avoid adding to the “whisky loch”. It cites a 15% fall in Scotch exports to the US after the April 2025 tariffs, falling demand in France and a market in China that never took off, though exports to India have surged. Holyrood Distillery co-founder Rob Carpenter told the paper the industry may be producing about a third of its normal level. Just Drinks confirmed Holyrood has paused whisky production but is not closing.

The Spirits Business reports the community-owned GlenWyvis Distillery has entered administration with no further production planned. The Lane Report says Brown-Forman paused its Slane Irish whiskey distillery in June, adding to earlier pauses by Diageo and Pernod Ricard.

The Daily Snark is a satire and commentary site. Facts are sourced from the reporting linked above.