The Guardian -Brough Brothers Distillery is in the midst of a big expansion. A fifteen minutes’ drive from its small distillery in the West End neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, workers are toiling away on its new site, seven times the size of the old one, in the heart of Bourbon City.
This has been a long time coming for Brough Brothers, which opened its first location in 2020 and had drawn up ambitious plans for international growth in 2025. Then Donald Trump returned to power.
The Trump administration is conducting a sweeping overhaul of the US economy, using tariffs – levies on foreign goods, paid for by importers – in an effort to reset the country’s trade ties with the world, revive its industrial heartlands and force its neighbors to address illegal immigration and drug trafficking.
“Tariffs are easy, they’re fast, they’re efficient, and they bring fairness,” Trump said earlier this month.
The reality has proven more complex, and confusing, than the bold rhetoric. Threats have been leveled and then dropped; deadlines declared and delayed; tariffs imposed and postponed. Chaos reigns.
Victor Yarbrough, CEO of Brough Brothers, does not want tariffs. But he would take the certainty of tariffs over the current racket emanating from the White House around whether they will, or won’t, be imposed; when; and on which markets.
“They’re happening. They’re not happening. They’re on. They’re off. It doesn’t allow us the timeframe we need,” Yarbrough said in an interview. “We can’t plan."
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