Like tequila before it, whiskey is starstruck. Celebrity brands are cropping up left and right. Some follow a simple endorsement model, in which a paid spokesperson sips it at a high-profile event or films a commercial for it—look at  Nick Offerman’s longstanding relationship with Lagavulin.

Some celebrities simply license their name to a brand, as with Bob Dylan and Heaven’s Door: Look high and low—I have—but the man has never once granted an interview about “his” whiskey, nor been seen drinking it.

And there are brands with a more involved celebrity partner, someone who goes out and shills at public events or signs bottles at liquor stores. (Think Peyton Manning and Sweetens Cove.) Such partners are usually investors, and occasionally they take on highly visible roles. Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley, the heartthrob duo of Vampire Diaries fame, quite actively promote and sell their Brother’s Bond brand.

But not a single one of these examples stands out as the celebrity whiskey, whereas in tequila, that mantle was easily assumed early on by one brand: Casamigos. I bet that, even if you don’t drink tequila, you know that Casamigos’ celebrity backer is George Clooney. You might even know that, a mere four years after launching the brand, Clooney and his partners sold it to spirits giant Diageo for $1 billion. Clooney has since been joined by other marquee names hawking their own tequilas—everyone from Michael Jordan and LeBron James to Kendall Jenner and The Rock—but Casamigos remains the benchmark as far as brand recognition and eye-popping acquisition prices go.

So given all the famous folks throwing their names behind whiskey, why hasn’t any brand exploded in the same way?

Why Casamigos Scored So Big

There are essential differences between tequila and whiskey. (Here, we’ll focus on bourbon.) They’re made from different ingredients, in different ways. But aside from that core divergence, other key factors played into Casamigos’ success that, so far, no bourbon has come close to matching.

Timing. Casamigos launched early in tequila’s rise, in 2013, riding a wave that grew bigger each year and still hasn’t crested. Meanwhile, bourbon’s boom has been underway for a good decade and a half now. But its first celebrity brands only started appearing in the last six or seven years—long after they could conceivably appear to be setting a trend.

Star power—and perceptions. No one whose fame matches the Clooney caliber has gotten involved in whiskey. Well, there’s maybe one exception: Matthew McConaughey, who was hired by Wild Turkey in 2018 to help develop and launch its Longbranch expression, complete with his signature on the bottle. But that partnership—in which McConaughey was paid for being “creative director”—was too little and too late.

“If Longbranch had launched in 2013, I think it would have probably done better than it did,” says writer and spirits commentator Aaron Goldfarb, who adds that the bourbon “frankly isn’t very good.” He also points out that tequila also has the advantage of a wellness halo—it's clear; it's typically “only” 80 proof; it's made from agave, whose natural sugars are embraced as better-for-you—making it more believable as a Hollywood star’s drink of choice. “Tequila seems healthy and fit and what a celebrity would drink, even though we know it's the exact same amount of ethanol and calories as bourbon,” Goldfarb adds, whereas whiskey is “more rough and tumble.”

Industry savvy. Clooney had two partners in Casamigos: nightclub titan (and husband of Cindy Crawford) Rande Gerber and Mike Meldman, a deep-pocketed real estate mogul. Early on, they brought in a CEO, Lee Einsidler, who had been instrumental in navigating the $2 billion sale of Grey Goose vodka to Bacardi International and who knew the spirits business inside and out. All of them were just as fundamental as Clooney to Casamigos’ success, as their connections and insider knowledge formed a scaffold that bolstered and sustained the brand’s popular appeal, and helped to build out its distribution and sales.

On top of that, despite their great story that Casamigos was just a tequila they enjoyed as friends and wanted to share with the world, Clooney and co. were super savvy about building the brand from the ground up, trademarking its name and motto years before the actual launch. All of these factors add up to a difficult formula to replicate. So far no celebrity whiskey brand has done so. For that matter, no other celebrity spirits brand has either (though Ryan Reynolds sure is trying with his).

Supply. Even in these boom times, when tequila outsells American whiskey, it’s fairly easy to get your hands on some decent blanco. “Palatable tequila is easier to source en masse than palatable bourbon,” Goldfarb explains. There are dozens of distilleries in Jalisco willing to make it for anyone with ready cash, and it only takes a few days to go from raw agave to a shelf-ready bottled spirit. Casamigos was able to start small but then quickly grow. It was churning out hundreds of thousands of cases a year by the time Diageo came knocking.

Whiskey, on the other hand, requires years of advance planning and waiting. Rapid growth is much harder if you don’t own the means of production. As noted above, celebrities didn’t jump aboard the bourbon train until it was already speeding down the tracks, when mature barrels were hard to find and expensive when located. That trend has only accelerated. These days, even a fat wallet and the right connections might not be enough to ensure the amount of high-quality aged whiskey needed to launch and then grow a brand at scale.

So Could There Ever Be a Casamigos of Bourbon?

Maybe! It’s possible that there’s one in the works right now, aging and awaiting its debut. Or an existing brand might become massively successful and get acquired—although a billion-dollar price tag is highly unlikely these days, unless it comes with a whole lot of inventory.

What’s more likely is that a few moderately successful brands will make it, while the rest either fade away or drop their celebrity affiliation after the first few years. Look at Wild Turkey. The distillery parted ways with McConaughey in 2022, and while Longbranch is still on shelves, the actor’s signature no longer appears on the label.

One possible contender for the celebrity whiskey crown is Traveller, backed by country singer Chris Stapleton. There are obvious synergies with his fanbase, and the whiskey is blended at Buffalo Trace, the home of coveted labels like Weller, Pappy, and the Antique Collection. Notably, however, Traveller is not a bourbon, but a blended whiskey, its components sourced from unknown distilleries. I’ll hazard a guess that that’s at least partly due to the cost of bourbon these days; blending some bourbon with other less expensive whiskies allows Traveller to be priced at an affordable $40, and guarantees steady future supplies.

Traveller only launched in January, so its commercial and popular success won’t be known for a while yet. And while Stapleton’s got a passel of platinum-selling albums on his wall, his fame is not exactly Clooney-esque. (In fairness, that last bit is true for almost every other living human.) Goldfarb, for one, thinks we’ll never see a bourbon reach the level of recognition—or the billion-dollar price tag—of Casamigos. “Bourbon has peaked, plateaued, and is headed downward, and it’s certainly not the time for a celebrity to get in,” he says.

And hey, that’s not a bad thing. Bourbon seems to have done just fine without a high-profile celebrity brand. After all, having a recognizable face attached, even a really good-looking one, doesn’t make the whiskey taste any better. 

Just ask Matthew McConaughey’s fans.