US population using the internet

Americans coming online and Americans firing up small copper stills, in roughly the same cadence. The internet did not teach the country to make whiskey. The whiskey did not teach the country to use the internet. And yet the lines hum along together, polite and unsupervised.

US internet penetration climbed from about 70 percent in 2005 to over 90 percent by 2022 as broadband and smartphones reached the last households. Craft distilleries went from a few dozen to over 2,500 in the same window, riding state-level licensing reforms and the same locavore wave that gave craft beer its lift in the previous decade. Both are infrastructure stories that look unrelated but share a tailwind: the rise of small-business e-commerce and direct-to-consumer shipping rules that let a tiny distillery in Kentucky reach a buyer in Oregon. Without the network there is no scale.

Connection and craft, both lifted by the same wires. The small distillery sells through the same fibre as everyone else.