New Spirits Competition to Focus on Southern Distillers

I’ve written about national and international spirits competitions often in this space, but the majority of them are judged and awarded somewhere outside the region where spirits are actually distilled. There are reasons why the South is the best place to create great liquor, particularly the brown kind.

First of all, there is a long heritage of distilling in the region, from Scottish and Irish immigrants in the 18th century, to moonshiners deep in the hollows of Kentucky and Tennessee, to Nearest Green, the freed slave who taught a young man named Jack Daniel how to work a still. Second, we’ve got the major raw material for whiskey in abundance in the form of fields of corn growing across the region. 

Finally, the way you turn clear spirits into brown whiskey is by aging the liquid in oak barrels, where the almost tidal forces of heating and cooling in a rick house force the liquid in and out of the wood and impart the essence of the barrel into the spirit in the form of color and flavor. Since Kentucky and Tennessee experience so much variation between cold winters and hot summers, the expansion and contraction of the whiskey in the barrel is accelerated. That’s why a Tennessee whiskey can be mature in just four years while a Scotch whisky aged in the more temperate (well, consistently cooler) climate of Scotland might take a decade or more to reach maturity.

So it just makes sense that a new spirits competition will recognize those products created in the South, a region they define as 17 states ranging from Texas to Delaware, including the D.C. area. While you might quibble about Delaware being in the South, and I don’t expect the state university’s Fighting Blue Hens to apply for admission to the SEC anytime soon, it’s nice to see the regional focus of the new “The South’s Best” competition, which will award more than 300 “Best of” awards plus Double Gold, Gold, Silver and Bronze medals for numerous categories including Best of Show and Best of State, along with niche awards like Best Veteran-Owned Spirit, Best Female-Owned Spirit, Best Minority-Owned Spirit and Best Organic Spirit.

The competing spirits will be judged by a panel of experts in Charleston, S.C., later this year, and a separate group of marketing and design pros will judge various packaging categories.

The South’s Best is the brainchild of successful Charleston-based beverage entrepreneur Matti Anttila, a former investment banker who is the founder and CEO of Grain & Barrel Spirits. He has partnered with other industry experts to create the awards program, and he invites distilleries from across the South to enter the competition at “The South’s Best” website. They’re offering an early-bird discounted rate of $400 through the end of August. The price to enter will then increase to $450 through Sept. 15. The cost to enter after Sept. 15 is $500 through the Oct. 27 registration deadline.

Hopefully, some of our local master distillers will enter and win some hardware. If that happens, you can be sure that you’ll hear about it here!