🧢 Last call on “Vermouth Is The Truth” hats!
Just a couple of these suckers still left in inventory, and no re-up scheduled at the moment. Grab yours before it’s gone!
A few years ago, a short-lived television series called Monarch launched its own bourbon. Do you remember this? Of course you don’t. Why would you? Here’s Variety in September 2022 (emphasis added throughout):
Fox Entertainment, ReserveBar and Next Century Spirits have partnered to create TruthTeller 1839 Bourbon, based on the [Monarch] series’ character Albie Roman, known as the “Texas Truthteller.” The role is played by Trace Adkins. The double-barreled straight bourbon whiskey will be featured in a key storyline moment in an episode airing in November.
The show, launched in hopes of inoculating the median American network-TV viewer against the Yellowstone fever that was then raging, was a flop. I don’t even know what happened to TruthTeller 1839, or if it ever actually made it to market at meaningful scale. Retail listings for it have long since gone stale. This sort of Potemkin brand integration is tricky to pull off even under favorable conditions, and with whiskey-mania still very much in force, and The Sazerac Company splashing out for actual brand cameos in actual Yellowstone episodes, there wasn’t much of a lane. Hell, even Four Sixes Grit & Glory, the sippable spinoff bev-alc brand from one of Taylor Sheridan’s lesser cowboy LARPs, appears to have gone defunct: it gave up the ghost on Instagram in September 2025 after posting some of the most depressing promotional images this side of Real American Beer.
Spinning on-screen cachet into whole-cloth booze brands that can actually compete on real shelves against real labels at scale is a tough row to hoe. But there are other angles on this sort of tie-up, and brown-liquor market conditions have shifted significantly since those heady post-pandemic days. With Kentucky awash in surplus bourbon, it was only a matter of time until another heritage-y Americana brand took another run at its own vanity brand. Which brings us to (sigh) Stetson Kentucky Straight Bourbon.
Earlier this month, the cowboy hat company-turned-Manifest Destiny lifestyle brand announced it was launching a bourbon with mid-major Bardstown Bourbon Company (BBC) and its subsidiary, Green River Distilling Co. On cue, America’s brand-humping media corps sprung into action to breathlessly market the gimmick.
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