Another sector of the economy is also feeling the impact of trade tensions.

A new report says exports of spirits that includes bourbon fell by 9% during the second quarter of 2025.

But in some key markets, it's much worse.

We talked about that today with Janet Payton, a business reporter from the Lexington Herald-Leader, who says there are other signs that Kentucky's $9 billion bourbon industry is on the rocks.

So right now, I think through April, exports are down about 13% for American whiskey globally.

But to Canada, it's as high as 85%.

And that's already caused, companies here, more than $40 million.

Even knowing what I knew about Canada.

I was really surprised at the big drop, because, you know, Canada has been such a strong market for such a long time.

And so I think to see that hold for months, that boycott going on for months with no end in sight, has got to be pretty distressing for a lot of a lot of whiskey makers, because that's one of the biggest export markets for, Kentucky bourbon and American whiskey.

The Kentucky Distillers Association just released a report that the state had 16.1 million barrels of bourbon as of the first of the year.

That's a record high for Kentucky.

And I think inventory around the US is also at an all time high.

That's a problem, for Kentucky and all spirits makers, but particularly for Kentucky, because we've been on a really big building boom here, right now.

There's a lot of evidence that the market for what they call new make, you know, barrels that would be filled, new, is frozen.

That was the term that they used in, the Kentucky Owl bankruptcy case.

The judge there said that expert testimony convinced him that the market was so dismal that he could not sign off on a plan to let Kentucky Oil and Stoli Group pay off more than 70 million in bankruptcy debt with whiskey barrels.

That's what they wanted to do.

They wanted to basically trade 35,000 barrels and some other assets for this debt that they owed to Fifth Third Bank.

And the third Bank said, we'll never get our money back out of that.

And the judge has agreed with that kind of, alarm bells going off.

I think the industry has begun to pull back in a big way.

Whiskey production has slowed down.

It actually began to slow late last year, but now it's it's dropped considerably.

But the really disturbing thing is that even as that production has slowed down, demand has continued to drop.

Bottling has fallen, but not as much as, there's there's still there's still a big lag.

So we're going to be looking at this massive overhang of excess supply for some time.

Nearly every state exports distilled spirits.

Last year, Kentucky exported more than $750 million worth of distilled spirits.

Second in the country, behind Tennessee.