In An Age Of Acquisitions, One Distiller Is Thrilled To Be An Indie Again

Photo courtesy Cabin Fever

I’ve been writing a lot of stuff lately, but for various reasons none of it has been published yet. So it’s time for a trawl through the archives — back to 2018, when the contributors’ section of HuffPost had just been terminated. HuffPost was one of the originators of the “We can’t pay you but you’ll get lots of exposure” school of blogo-journalism, and they’ve been rightly called out for it over the years. But in my case, it actually worked. When they invited me to start blogging about the music business in 2007, I was in my late 30s and had no journalism experience that would have gotten me in the door at any reputable publication. And HuffPost was starved for content at the time, so they let me write about anything I wanted. After a few months of music writing, I also started penning pieces about sports, politics… and booze. I got to learn as I went, in front of a huge audience. I was allowed to write pretty much anything I wanted, editor-free (for better and worse), and fortunately I didn’t make any really glaring factual errors or say anything too moronic along the way. Thankfully, my HuffPost writing led to paying gigs, but it was still my go-to for when I just wanted to write without having to pitch to editors — which was pretty often.

So when my little corner of HuffPost was wiped off the map (the archive is still there, for now at least), I was slightly bereft. Fortunately, a bunch of other publications were willing to utilize me, including the great Nino Marchetti, who runs the excellent Whiskey Wash site. He told me up front he couldn’t afford to pay me, but I’d used his site as a resource for ages (and still do), so a couple of freebies was my way of paying him back. This was the first of them, a look at an interesting guy who busted his ass to launch a successful booze brand, lived the dream and sold it… and then got it back, minus the corporate backing. Love over money can be a beautiful thing sometimes. Have a read and enjoy!