Trade War Means Higher Prices, Fewer Customers for This Vermont Distillery: 'It's Just Chaos'

Scenes from a trade war.

From her distillery on the banks of Vermont's Mad River, Mimi Buttenheim is worried about a very different stream of madness—one that doesn't pour down from the picturesque Green Mountains, but directly out of the White House.

"This isn't a policy. This is just a sort of shoot-from-the-hip kind of gut reaction. There's no strategy here at all," she says of President Donald Trump's trade war, which is threatening to raise prices (due to tariffs) on critical inputs and turn away many of the Canadian tourists that she counts on as customers.

"I don't see any long-term goal except chaos," Buttenheim told Reason. "It's just chaos, and we're trying to—as business owners—we're trying to react to it on a day-to-day basis."

Buttenheim is the president of Mad River Distillers, which opened in a converted horse farm in Warren, Vermont, in 2013 and has grown to be one of the larger craft distilleries in the state. Between the main distillery and a new tasting room in Burlington, about an hour north, Mad River employs 14 people and churns out 8,000 cases of whiskey, brandy, and other spirits each year.

But even a small, craft operation like Mad River is part of the global system of commerce that Trump is determined to upend. Buttenheim tells Reason that Mad River sources its whiskey bottles from Europe via an importer in Montreal. Other essential packaging products, like cardboard boxes, also cross the border from Canada. Those suppliers are now telling her that price increases are coming, even though no one seems to be sure exactly what tariffs will be charged—as the Trump administration's trade policies are constantly shifting.

"I think the uncertainty is the hardest part because it makes it very difficult to plan," she says.

That might be an understatement. The Trump administration has announced new or revised tariff policies more than 50 times since taking office in January, according to a tally by The Washington Post. Not all of those changes affect every business or industry, of course, but the White House's fickle and unilateral control over trade is fracturing supply chains and causing headaches.

For Buttenheim, those headaches aren't just about supply. She's also worried about reduced demand for Mad River's products, particularly if tourism from Canada dries up as a consequence of the Trump administration's policies—not the tariffs so much as new immigration enforcement and the threats to annex America's northerly neighbor.

"In northern Vermont, we typically see a lot of tourists from Canada—from Quebec and Ontario—over the summer and the fall, and I just don't think they're coming this year," Buttenheim told Reason.

More than 750,000 Canadians visited Vermont last year, but the number of border crossings has been sharply down in 2025, according to the Burlington Free Press. 

The trade war also means fewer bottles of whiskey crossing the border. While Mad River does not export its products to Canada, Buttenheim says other distillers in Vermont expect to see sales drop now that Canada has slapped a 25 percent tariff on American whiskey and some Canadian liquor stores have removed American products from their shelves.

"The problem is that even if they decided to turn the pipeline back on, that's market share that these brands have lost by not being on the shelf," says Buttenheim, who also serves as president of the Distilled Spirits Council of Vermont, a trade association. "Consumers are fickle. And when consumers don't see a brand for a certain amount of time, it sort of fades to the back of their mind. That is market share that's really, really difficult to get back."

Like other small businesses harmed by Trump's trade war, Mad River seems to be getting hit on both sides of the ledger—and with costs that are both seen and unseen. Higher prices created by tariffs are the intended consequence of Trump's trade policies, and the White House believes (despite what economists say) that those higher costs will encourage more investment in American businesses. The unintended consequences include the loss of customers, market access, and future growth. The same dynamic is hitting distillers of all sizes, threatening to devastate the country's burgeoning craft whiskey industry.

What would Buttenheim tell Trump if she had a chance? Two things, she says.

"Why are we punishing our next-door neighbors who are our biggest ally?" she says. Her suppliers in Quebec might be on the other side of the border, but they are a lot closer than other suppliers that she might be able to find in the United States. So why not let the market find the most efficient way to provide the bottles and equipment she needs?

Secondly, she says everyone just wants some stability.

"We can't run our businesses reactively," she says. "We have to be proactive, and there's no way to do that when things change day by day."