“A muddy field …? Heavy grain.” I was seated across from Chris, a fledgling bourbon YouTuber who was offering me his notes after taking a careful whiff of Beyoncé’s latest project, SirDavis American Whisky. Not that he knew that: I’d set up a blind tasting with a group of local liquor geeks as my first step in the very fraught task of fairly assessing whether Bey’s new bottle was good enough to justify its $89 price point.
Gathered in the basement of a suburban northern Virginia split-level, we were about as far as spiritually possible from the bars and clubs where the bottle was clearly meant to be enjoyed. But I wanted to know what fellow whiskey obsessives—the sorts of people who would willingly camp in line outside a liquor store at 5 a.m. to nab a rare release—would make of the product. This was the natural place.
After taking a frowning taste, Chris added some faint praise. It was better than the glass he’d tried just a minute before, he said, “because at least it had flavors.” That previous, very bad sip? It had come from Bob Dylan’s distillery, Heaven’s Door.
Even in a market saturated with dozens of celebrity-backed spirits, the rollout of SirDavis has been a headline-grabbing cultural event: Major outlets like CNN covered the August announcement that the icon who once famously chanted “Yoncé all on his mouth like liquor” would now, in fact, be selling booze. This month’s GQ cover features Beyoncé with a whiskey glass in hand and an email interview in which she discusses her new venture at length. Although actual sales numbers are scarce so far, in the days after SirDavis officially hit the market, several local liquor store owners in Washington, where I live, told me they couldn’t get their hands on the thing. Those who could were being allocated precious few cases and were either selling out quickly—with customers calling well in advance of the release—or marking the bottle up well beyond the suggested retail price. Total Wine in nearby Maryland required shoppers to buy it in-store rather than order it online, typically a sign of high demand.
When I learned that an establishment within city limits still had a bottle available for a mere $100, an employee told me over the phone that the store would hold it for only an hour.
None of this is exactly unheard of in the hype-driven world of American whiskey, where an even moderately rare bottle can generate long lines of bourbon hunters and disappear within hours if not minutes of being stocked. But it’s deeply unusual for a celebrity whiskey, of which there are many, to create that sort of stir. And according to store owners I talked to, the buyers clearing SirDavis from the shelves for the most part appear to be Beyoncé fans rather than the usual whiskey obsessives. The latter have reacted to the project with a combination of curiosity and skepticism. After I finally told Chris what he’d been sipping, he laughed, then offered a mock-serious assessment: “Beyoncé did no wrong. Her people did her wrong.” I suspected I knew what he meant.
Liquor companies have for eons hired actors and musicians to pitch products. (Fun fact: Sean Connery, Mr. Vodka Martini himself, repped Jim Beam bourbon in the ’60s.) But over the past couple of decades, there’s been a boom in alcohol brands in which the stars themselves have a stake in the company—typically as founders or investors but sometimes via a generous profit-sharing deal. There are now more than 150 celebrity-backed spirits on the market, according to industry consultant and blogger Andre de Almeida. The Rock wants you to party with his tequila. Metallica is blasting bourbon barrels with its heavy metal. (In theory, the vibrations help with aging.) Blake Lively doesn’t drink, but you can buy her cocktails in a can.
This trend is by no means limited to alcohol—we live in the era of celebrity wellness and fashion brands. But in the spirits world, the craze has been fueled in no small part by a handful of blockbuster business successes: Sean Combs put Ciroc vodka on the map for liquor giant Diageo, which would, in 2017, pony up $1 billion to acquire George Clooney’s Casamigos tequila. It followed up three years later by paying $600 million for Ryan Reynolds’ Aviation gin. And UFC fighter Conor McGregor’s Proper Twelve Irish Whiskey sold to Proximo Spirits for another $600 million in 2021.
Some celebrities may be less personally invested in their ventures than the marketing lets on. “A lot of times, the degree of ownership is kept under wraps, so it’s hard to know how much of it is a partnership,” Roland Hunter, the spirits industry strategy and innovation lead at Clarkston Consulting, told me. But fame clearly sells. Celebrity-backed gins, tequilas, and rums have all grown faster than their overall product categories in recent years, according to the consulting firm IWSR; Union, a point-of-sale system provider for bars, found that they command a 73 percent higher price per average drink.
Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, has been part of this gold rush thanks to his stakes in D’Ussé cognac and Armand de Brignac Champagne, better known as Ace of Spades. In 2021 he sold half of the latter venture to Moët Hennessy, now the corporate partner behind SirDavis.
It’s unclear exactly what Beyoncé’s financial stake is in her new brand, but it’s been sold as a deeply personal passion project. SirDavis is named after her moonshiner grandfather, and it ties in nicely with her recent country album Cowboy Carter (both the album cover and bottle feature a horse). The marketing rollout has emphasized the diva’s particular love of high-end Japanese whiskies, and Moët Hennessy brought in Bill Lumsden, the longtime head of distilling at Scotch makers Glenmorangie and Ardbeg, to concoct a sipper that would match her preferences.
On paper, the final product is an interesting mashup of U.S. and global whiskey styles befitting a pop superstar with thirsty fans from Texas to Tokyo. (It’s also already picked up some awards in blind competitions.) SirDavis is technically a rye whiskey, which is very American. But an unusually high 49 percent of the grain used to distill it consists of malted barley, which is the bedrock ingredient of Scotch and Japanese whisky. After some initial aging, that recipe gets finished in former sherry casks, vessels Scotch-makers have long used to smooth out and add fruit notes to their drams but which have only recently caught on among American producers. (SirDavis is being marketed as an American whisky, spelled without the e, as it is in parts of Europe, to drive home the global theme.)
American whiskey has yet to see a celebrity’s brand achieve the smash success of a Casamigos or Aviation. Beyoncé may have the selling power to draw new, more diverse buyers to a category in which the most famous faces and the consumers skew male and white—a development many in the industry would find welcome from both a business and cultural perspective.
But details of what’s in the bottle, not to mention that $89 price tag, have raised eyebrows among some whiskey aficionados. SirDavis’ fine print states that it’s distilled in Indiana, a strong tell that the juice was likely sourced from MGP—a massive contract producer that supplies innumerable bottlers, big and small, across the industry. (Moët Hennessy has not confirmed the partnership, but MGP has in the past sold a recipe of 51 percent rye, 49 percent malt to some craft whiskey makers, such as Nevada’s Smoke Wagon.) The whiskey also appears to be quite young: Moët Hennessy has confirmed only that it is aged at least two years. (A publicist for the brand stopped responding when I tried to confirm more specific numbers that were floating around local distributors.)
Without Beyoncé’s name attached, a similar bottle—contract-distilled, less than four years old, and finished in a dessert cask like sherry—would likely retail for about $40, according to Scott Schiller, executive director of the industry consulting firm Thoroughbred Spirits Group.
Beyoncé’s arrival could be a boon for the U.S. whiskey business overall, exposing new and different drinkers to the category, Schiller told me. But “being nitpicky,” he added, “I think the brand of SirDavis is far greater than the liquid inside of it.”
Even so, a whiskey’s specs can only tell you so much: What matters, in the end, is how it drinks. Because palates differ, I set out to test SirDavis in a pair of blind tastings—one full of dedicated whiskey fans, and one with some current and former Slate staffers who would represent more-typical imbibers. For the sake of consistency, I wanted to pit the bottle against two other rye whiskeys finished in sherry barrels, of which there are merely a handful on the market.
One such bottle just so happens to be produced by Dylan’s Heaven’s Door, among the more successful and respected celebrity-owned whiskey makers in the U.S. Its “Refuge,” which I picked up for about $65, is a 6-year-old 100 percent rye sourced from Canada that gets a final lap in Amontillado sherry casks. In most circumstances, only the most boomer-brained critic would think to compare the work of Robert Zimmerman with that of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, but booze had given me the perfect excuse.
Both bottles surprised me when I opened them at home. The SirDavis greeted me on the nose with a deeply funky grain smell I’ve occasionally found on other young, malt-forward whiskeys; when I’m in the mood for it, the aroma hits me as something cool and sophisticated, like pu-erh tea. When I’m not, it makes me think of a wet log. At the same time, some sweet fruit scents from the sherry tempered things pretty nicely. The taste was much the same: a slightly raw bundle of grain wrapped in a very nice, satiny sherry bow. On the Pitchfork scale, I’d probably give it a 6.8.
The Heaven’s Door was more puzzling. Sticking my nose in the bottle, I picked up a nice candied note that then seemed to mostly evaporate in the glass. The taste was almost nothing—neither good nor bad but a mouth-warming absence of flavor, save for a bit of light rye spice on the very back. It brought to mind a raindrop cake, those half globes of clear gelatin tastefully covered in syrup that briefly went viral years ago and seemed to flout the very idea of dessert. Similarly, this was like an antiwhiskey, a meditation on the void. Pitchfork rating: 3.0.
To round out the lineup, I decided to include a sherry-finished rye from Baltimore’s widely lauded Sagamore Spirit Distillery, which retails for about $77. The whiskey gets four years in oak, then 18 months in sherry, and to me it delivered what I’d want from the genre—a richer, more balanced experience with some nice citrus and raisin, all without the hints of a grain silo. Pitchfork score: 8.1.
But how would the panels react? Going into blind tasting No. 1, I was genuinely unsure how the crowd would rate the two celebrity bottles. The tasting was conducted at a bottle-sharing event for a local whiskey club I belong to, in which most of the members are bourbon obsessives first and foremost but also like a good rye. To keep opinions unbiased, I told the nine participants merely that they were trying three dessert cask–finished ryes, which I wanted them to rank in order of preference. The bottles would be revealed only at the end.
It turned out to be a rough afternoon for both Bey and Bob. All but one of the tasters ranked the Sagamore first, praising it for a deeper, more mature and dessertlike flavor. SirDavis placed second on five ballots and last on four. Some tasters (like Chris) blanched at the grain notes, much like I had, or found the sweet finish cloying. Others described it as more pleasantly sweet and fruity—“hints of grape must” was one note—and thought the sherry shone through well. But none said they would buy it, especially for $89. Ditto for the Heaven’s Door, which placed last on five ballots, with the haters bashing its drab flavorlessness. (One taster bucked the group by placing it first, describing the nose as like “honeysuckle.”)
When I revealed to the tasters that they had been drinking Beyoncé’s whiskey, the reaction was mostly amusement. This crowd had already expected that bottle to be mid.
But it was also perhaps the wrong crowd to appreciate what Beyoncé had on offer. Dedicated bourbon nuts tend to prefer higher-proof, more intense spirits that can alienate casual drinkers and are often put off by graininess, seeing it as a flaw. They also don’t necessarily view an easy, clean finish, prized by most bargoers, as a huge plus. SirDavis, with its high malt and relatively low 44 percent ABV, pretty obviously wasn’t made with them in mind.
That’s why I considered blind tasting No. 2—the normie challenge—equally important. For that round, I changed up the rules a bit: I told participants that they would be drinking both Beyoncé’s and Bob Dylan’s whiskeys and asked them to not only rank the pours but see if they could correctly guess which belonged to each star. (Spoiler: They couldn’t.)
This round belonged to Beyoncé, who placed first on three of four ballots. Nobody picked up on the grain that put me off, even when asked directly if they’d noticed it. One former colleague, who ranked SirDavis as his top choice, complimented its “candy smell” and “classic whiskey taste and mouthfeel.” The Sagamore, he added, was too sweet. Another remarked that the SirDavis struck him as clean and finished smooth, though he placed it second, behind the Sagamore. In contrast, the Heaven’s Door was unanimously reviled. One person described it as reminiscent of raw White Dog whiskey, while another concluded that it “leads with foul, followed by sweet.” In this niche battle of celebrity whiskeys, Beyoncé had emerged victorious.
Where SirDavis seemed to fall short again was on value. Two tasters said they would happily buy the bottle after their initial sample, only to backtrack when learning that it cost $89. Maybe for $50, they said.
I finally decided to test SirDavis under real-world conditions. I hauled it to my friend’s 40th birthday party, a packed D.C. row house affair in which people were crushing everything from cans of Modelo to nice rum to Dom Pérignon. Everyone I asked, it turned out, was excited to try Beyoncé’s whiskey, even if some were a little confused as to why she was selling one. As they sipped from tall red Solo cups, the crowd collectively agreed: It was sweet. Sweet and gross, concluded some. Sweet and tasty, concluded others. One self-declared hardcore Beyoncé fan grimaced and walked away wordlessly before I could ask their opinion. “Ooh, that’s delicious,” said another person, who’d taken an initially skeptical sip. But would she pay $89 for it? “Nope.”
That’s what makes me think Beyoncé’s new whiskey might fall into a sort of no-man’s-land. Based on the blinds and party, it seems as if she’s created a product that a lot of regular drinkers and/or Scotch fans will genuinely enjoy, even if it might not win over dedicated bourbon and rye obsessives. But it’s priced like the sort of premium product that appeals mostly to connoisseurs or people with an expense account to blow. A bottle of Casamigos, by comparison, costs less than $50, while Proper 12 is under $25—price points that are much easier for more typical consumers to swallow. Beyoncé has one of the world’s most dedicated fan bases, but it’s an open question whether she can persuade them to buy a $90 bottle more than once.
Some liquor store owners told me that they’re convinced demand will cool after the initial hype, mostly because of the sticker price and some of the middling reviews that had already begun to trickle out online. As one put it to me while pointing to his shelves: “There are a lot of good whiskeys you can buy for that much money.” This was, alas, not one of them.