On this week’s episode we had Arthur Motley, former buyer for the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, later Purchasing & Sales Director, then Managing Director at Royal Mile Whiskies.
When someone’s been in the game for over 20 years, you listen. Trends, cycles, daft ideas that seemed clever at the time, Arthur’s seen the lot.
We got into the challenges facing whisky right now.
Whisky boomed through Covid: people bought more, producers made more, retailers sold more. Then, as Arthur put it, “we shouldn’t be surprised that the thing everyone said was going to happen, happened.”
Arthur has a deep passion for history. He co-hosts The Liquid Antiquarian on YouTube with Dave Broom. Looking at whisky’s cycles over decades (and centuries), he’s fond of the line: history doesn’t repeat, “but it rhymes.” The rhyme he hears before closures and mothballing? Overconfidence.
Money floods in through cask schemes, distillery expansions, and speculative secondary market buys. Prices inflate, and a false sense of security takes hold.
“Everyone plowed in,” Arthur said. “By that, I mean general consumers as well, and suppliers had the confidence to bring out far too many releases, some of them pretty ill-conceived.”
Now we’re seeing a levelling off: too many bottles on auction sites, softer hammer prices, nerves kicking in.
There are green shoots. Some brands whisper that it’s not as bleak as the headlines, which tend to focus on the big players’ chunky write-downs. Still, Arthur warns there’ll be job losses, production cutbacks, and a rough patch for those caught out by how quickly the turn arrived.
The core truth remains: people still drink whisky. This summer plenty of folk walked into Royal Mile Whiskies and bought bottles. The whisky core community’s bigger than it was 15 years ago. We’re thriving, and we want good whisky at good value.
That might be a solid supermarket dram, an indy bottler gem, or a special bottle in the thousands. But brands will have to work harder. Overpriced bottles will gather dust.
Kev at Diggers knows what sells across his bar. Hector McLean at Jeffrey St knows what a well-chosen indy Linkwood 12 should retail at. And the drinker knows what value looks and tastes like.
With the liquid being offered up to Indy Bottlers and brands working harder to sell us their whisky, this could be a golden age for the whisky drinker.
Whether you call it an overcorrection, history repeating, or just a familiar rhyme, Scotch will survive. There will be casualties, but the lesson is to learn the lessons this time.
