The Celebrity Spirits Boom Is Over. Long Live Dead Celebrities.

The celebrity spirits boom has almost certainly come to an end.

If there was a gold rush from 2017 — when Diageo bought George Clooney’s Casamigos for some $1 billion — until, say, 2024, an era when pretty much any celebrity (Michael Bublé? Terry Bradshaw? Elon Musk?!) could attach his or her name to a liquor brand and start printing money, those days have cooled.

Casamigos sales dropped 18 percent in 2025 and George Clooney has moved onto NA beer. Conor McGregor has been dropped entirely as the face of Proper No. Twelve. Do we even need to discuss Diddy and Cîroc?

And, the closest thing I can find to a celebrity spirits launch this year was mid-level comedian Gabriel Iglesias’s release of Pocho Fino Tequila, a line of flavored tequilas.

But spirits brands still seemed interested in partnering with one category of celebrities.

Dead celebrities.

The Dean of Whiskey

Just last month, Lasso Motel Whiskey, a non-distillery producer launched in 2024, announced a collaboration with James Dean, the Hollywood icon last alive in — checks Wikipedia — 1955.

I had so many questions about the Lasso Motel Whiskey x James Dean 13-Year Rye Whiskey as it is known.

What did the star of “Rebel Without a Cause” have to do with whiskey? Did he even drink rye? And what exactly was being said in linking an alcohol brand to a celebrity who famously died young in a car crash (admittedly, not from drinking) and who gets drunk in all three of his major film roles, most notably “Giant” in which he’s wasted for essentially the entire movie?

I was probably overthinking things.

“[His] estate reached out to us after they discovered the Lasso Motel Whiskey brand and felt Jimmy, which is what they call him, would have loved it,” explains Devin Odell, founder of Lasso Motel Whiskey. “James Dean embodied the same spirit Lasso Motel Whiskey was built on — rebellion, authenticity, the kind of effortless cool that never needs to explain itself.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but that marketing patter is how all living celebrity spirits collaborations sound as well. (“Whisky has been Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s drink of choice for years, attracted not only by its sophisticated taste, but also by the inherent sense of strength and confidence it inspires,” reads the website for her SirDavis Whisky.)

“The idea wasn’t simply to have celebrities. It was to honor two who helped define the era and who made sense within the Remus Roaring Twenties brand story.”

The fact was, Dean’s whiskey is a classic 95/5 Indiana rye from MGP, aged for 13 years and released at a high 112 proof.

“We weren’t trying to say he was a rye drinker,” says Odell. “We were honoring where he came from. He grew up in Fairmount, Ind. This whiskey is from Indiana. That’s the anchor. Everything else built from there.”

The 13-year age statement was chosen to reflect the racing number 130 on his “Little Bastard” Porsche 550 Spyder — the car he died in, for what it’s worth. The black, red, and silver label is likewise meant to reflect the color palette of the Porsche as well as his McGregor “Anti-Freeze” windbreaker from “Rebel Without a Cause.”

It’ll run you $150, which is a pretty decent price for something with these bonafides. If you like MGP rye, as most serious drinkers do, it’s a fantastic pour, with MGP’s classic notes of baking spices and a sort of dill-y herbal note. It’s packaged in a handsome display box with Dean’s visage and signature on it. I can’t deny I kind of loved it.

“This collaboration exists because it was the right fit,” says Odell. “Lasso Motel has a specific identity and we’re not going to attach a name to something just to have a name on it. The connection has to be real and it has to run all the way through. This one did.”

The Bambino and Iron Horse

Other whiskey brands likewise seem to see a lot of right fits with dead celebrities, too.

There’s notably Remus Bourbon, a brand owned by MGP since 2016 that was never quite able to gain any traction in the market despite bottling (its own) great liquid. Perhaps that’s why it began leaning heavily into “partnering” with dead celebrities from the 1920s.

In the summer of 2024, it first released the Remus Babe Ruth Reserve with a tagline of “The Bambino meets the Bootlegger.” (George Remus was a Prohibition-era bootlegger who notoriously murdered his estranged wife, a point that many bourbon enthusiasts find problematic.) In honor of his jersey number 3, the blend featured three high-rye bourbons aged for six to seven years, bottled at 111 proof, and packaged in a bottle featuring an embossed baseball-diamond pattern, a wooden-cork closure resembling the knob of a baseball bat, and a facsimile of Ruth’s signature. It was released in a limited supply of 10,624 bottles, one for each of The Babe’s plate appearances. In fact, a QR code on the back label allowed consumers to see how Ruth fared on that particular bottle number’s specific plate appearance.

Now, Babe Ruth was obviously a drinker and well-known carouser, though he was arguably better known as an imbiber of beer and Scotch.

“Babe Ruth was a natural choice for the brand’s first baseball legend tribute because few individuals embodied the Roaring Twenties more than he did,” says Ian Stirsman, master distiller of Ross & Squibb Distillery, the name MGP uses for its consumer-branded spirits division. “As the decade’s most recognizable sports and cultural icon, Ruth represented the larger-than-life energy that defined the era and continues to inspire the Remus brand today.”

Whatever the case, consumers seemed to be compelled by the celebrity of a man who had died some 76 years earlier. The $150 retail bottles sold well among both whiskey enthusiasts and baseball fans, enough to make a follow-up release last year.

And well enough, again, to make a Lou Gehrig Reserve Bourbon earlier this year with similar attributes: a blend of four mash bills for his number 4, bottled at 109 proof for the 109 RBIs he recorded in 1926, and 9,665 bottles for his career plate appearances. Though Gehrig famously lived a much cleaner, to say the least, lifestyle than Ruth.

“The idea wasn’t simply to have celebrities,” says Stirsman. “It was to honor two who helped define the era and who made sense within the Remus Roaring Twenties brand story.”

The King, The Duke, and Ol’ Blue Eyes

There are other dead celebrity spirits that just seem to “make sense.”

The most notable is perhaps the granddaddy of this concept, the Jack Daniel’s Sinatra Select, first released in 2012 to honor the Old No. 7-loving crooner. A Tennessee whiskey matured in proprietary “Sinatra barrels” with special grooves cut into them, it has proved popular enough to remain a regular part of their portfolio.

There’s also Elvis Whiskey, released nationally by Grain & Barrel Spirits in 2021 and still going strong. The brand’s releases include Tiger Man and The King, one a Tennessee whiskey, the other a Tennessee rye, in honor of his longtime Memphis residence. But my favorite Elvis Whiskey release is undoubtedly Midnight Snack, a peanut butter, banana, and bacon-flavored whiskey — a cheeky take on Elvis’s favorite late-night treat.

There’s also Duke Spirits, with a growing portfolio of John Wayne-related liquors, including a Kentucky straight bourbon, a rye, and several different tequilas.

Remus has also made a Gatsby Reserve, not exactly a collaboration with a dead celebrity, but, rather, a dead literary figure.

In this era where spirits brands are struggling, a partnership with a dead celebrity brings in an untapped audience — baseball fans, old Hollywood enthusiasts, the literati. Perhaps a dead celebrity collab acts as a sort of insurance policy against disinterested drinkers, no different than Jim Beam putting unsold whiskey in playful decanters back in the 1960s and ’70s when no one was drinking bourbon.

Since the celebrity is already dead, their biography has already been written, and there’s no fear in linking up with someone problematic (McGregor, Diddy, etc.) whose skeletons will soon emerge and torpedo the brands. Who doesn’t want to drink in the shadows of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, or Frank Sinatra?

Says Odell of working with a dead celebrity like James Dean:

“We just had to build a product worthy of them.”