After fourteen years, Moonshine University has announced that it will wind down its education programs at the end of 2026. Their scheduled courses will run through the year, and then the classroom in Louisville will close for good.
I don’t take any pleasure in writing that. Moonshine was one of the good ones. Since 2013 they helped launch hundreds of distilleries and taught thousands of people who are now making spirits across the country and beyond. They were the Kentucky Distillers’ Association’s official education provider, and they set a standard for hands-on training that a lot of us measured ourselves against. When a school like that closes, the whole industry feels it.
So I want to talk plainly about why it is happening, and what it means for anyone still trying to learn this craft.
Why it’s happening
The reason isn’t a mystery. Craft spirits has been through a hard stretch. The category grew for more than a decade, and then it contracted sharply in a short span of time. Distilleries that were planning to open put those plans on hold. Distilleries already open started watching every dollar. Demand for a course that costs several thousand dollars and asks you to spend a week in Kentucky is a hard thing to sustain in a market like that, no matter how good the course is.
I’ve run Distillery University through the same downturn, so I’m not describing it from the outside. The pressures are real, and they aren’t finished. Moonshine’s decision is a clear-eyed one, and I respect it.
But there is a difference between the market for one kind of school and the need to learn how to make good spirits. Those are not the same thing.
What it means for learning the craft
Distilling itself hasn’t changed. The chemistry, the equipment, the regulations, the slow work of getting a product from grain to bottle. All of it is the same as it was two years ago. What has to change is how that knowledge gets to people.
For a long time, the best distilling education meant traveling to one of a few places and paying a premium for it. That worked when the industry was flush and a new distillery could reasonably expect to earn it back. It works less well now. And it never really worked for the people at the very start of the path: someone at a home bench who is just getting curious, or a small operator who can’t leave the still for a week to fly across the country.
That last group is the one the industry can’t afford to lose. Every distillery that opens starts with one person deciding to learn. If the only way to learn is expensive and far away, fewer people take that first step, and over time the whole industry gets smaller. Education has to cost less and be easier to reach, and it has to make room for people long before they’ve signed a lease.
Where we come in
That’s the work we’ve been doing at Distillery University, and it’s the reason we leaned into it this year rather than away. Our courses are online, so you can take them at your own pace, from wherever you are. The workshops we run are hands-on and kept small, including our next one on March 5-7, 2027 at Quartz Mountain Distillers in the Pacific Northwest, with more being planned. We’ve built guides and tools for people who are still working out their first steps. And everything here has my name on it, because you should know who is teaching you.
None of that replaces what Moonshine was. It isn’t meant to. It’s a different answer to the same question, built for the industry we actually have now.
If you were planning to study at Moonshine, or you’ve been putting off learning because you weren’t sure where to begin, I’d like to help. The doors in Louisville are closing, but the work of teaching this craft is very much still open.
Cheers,
Rockwell Rutter
rockwell@distilleryuniversity.com
