Bourbon expert Fred Minnick is a Wall Street Journal best-selling author, entrepreneur, award-winning podcast host and founder of the American Spirits Council of Tasters. Yet 20 years ago, he was battling deep emotional scars and PTSD from his time in the Iraq War. He found healing using a newfound mindfulness technique that transformed his life and opened a new chapter of self-discovery and resilience. It also inspired a career move.
The impact of war
In the early 2000s, Minnick served as a photojournalist for the U.S. Army, documenting the war in Iraq, while navigating the constant danger of bombs and attacks. On June 24, 2004, his team was ambushed, and a grenade landed 10 feet from him, but—by sheer luck—it didn’t detonate.
“That trauma incident… stuck with me,” he recalls, “I would have nightmares about it.”
After returning to the United States, Minnick struggled to reintegrate into normal life again. With his mind plagued by the horrors he’d witnessed, his thoughts and behavior spiraled into violent and distressing patterns.
“I would have a boss tell me to do something, and I’m looking at a stapler just thinking about how I can push it through his head,” he says. “I couldn’t handle someone disagreeing with me, telling me what to do. There [was] anger over everything, or [else] a noise that would go off, and it would remind me of, like a bomb or a mortar or a rocket, and I would just fall underneath the desk… The term is ‘shell shock,’ and that’s a really good description of it.”
After the moments had passed, he found himself embarrassed, aware of concerned stares from others. But these reactions were just the surface of deeper issues.
“I was on the verge of a suicide, basically, because I couldn’t handle it anymore. I couldn’t handle [the] stressors of life.” Minnick admits. “I knew… I have to get help, or I’m going to hurt myself or hurt someone else.”
Recovery through creativity
Recognizing the dangerous path his life was headed down, Minnick enrolled in a program that focused on exposure therapy, which allowed him to confront his trauma and heal from it.
“My therapist basically found that there [were] a lot of ties back to incidents on June 24, 2004,” Minnick says. Knowing of his profession as a writer, his therapist suggested writing as a key method for working through his trauma. He wrote the events of that day repeatedly and read them out aloud. With each retelling, the weight of the memory gradually lightened.
“To this day, I can’t really read it or talk about the incident in its entirety without getting choked up… but I’ll still get through it,” he says. “The difference today versus then is that it doesn’t have the [same] impact on me afterwards.”
In parallel, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) helped him to re-imagine his self-beliefs. “[To] give an example, I’m walking down the street, somebody looks at me, [and] I automatically assume that they want to fight me…. Why do I believe that? Because the person looked at me in a way that someone in Iraq looked at me another way, and they legit wanted to kill so there was that connection. There always [a connection to] Iraq when it came to these anger issues.”
He credits the CBT process with giving him the tools to navigate situations that would trigger his anger or depression, while also preventing new traumas from compounding his existing ones.
Sensory training leads to spirits tasting
As his mental health improved, Minnick sought more from life and aimed to find what brought a genuine smile to his face every day. While he enjoyed his work as a freelance writer in food and spirits, something seemed to be missing. When he brought up his dilemma in therapy, his therapist introduced him to sensory training as a way to tap into his creativity and further ground his mind.
In one exercise, he was given a barbecue chip and asked to focus on it through his senses.
“She asked me to put the chip on my tongue, close my eyes, [and] think about how the salts and the sugar separate them. Think about how the crunch felt all along my tongue,” he remembers. “I had a lot of barbecue potato chips in my life, but that was the first time I think I ever actually tasted it.” This practice helped him build a mindful cognitive connection to his sense of taste, touch and smell—a breakthrough that sparked his calling as a professional spirits taster.
Chasing bourbon
Minnick’s journey to becoming a bourbon-tasting expert began with wine. Trained as a sommelier, he contributed to several wine periodicals and says he even became a finalist for the Louis Roederer International Wine Writer of the Year, under 35 category. Even though he was writing about wine and whiskey, bourbon became his true love.
“There’s just something about people in bourbon that…they just bring you in,” he reflects. “You’re not a reporter to them, or you’re not a customer; you’re really in a lot of ways, like a friend, a family member, maybe a distant cousin, but still a family member. And I just found myself wanting to be around bourbon people more and more.”
The passion for the spirit fueled him to host tastings and spread the word about bourbon through freelance writing. His work appeared in publications that didn’t often feature articles about bourbon, like Scientific American and Parade Magazine. He also became a contributing editor for the British magazine Whisky and secured a role as a whiskey advocate. Later, he expanded into publishing books about whiskey.
However, he knew whiskey books were a hard sell. “No one wants to go to a bookstore for a whiskey book. They want to go to a bar and have a bourbon and learn about it,” he quips. Minnick knew he had to promote his books at events in bars, which eventually led him into becoming an emcee/host for whiskey events.
His first big break came in 2013 through the Kentucky Derby Museum. The event garnered great attention, and he later became the “bourbon authority” at the museum, teaching classes on bourbon at the museum and hosting private bourbon tastings for convention groups. Since then, he’s emceed multiple trade events, interviewed distillers on-stage, and even embarked on an entrepreneurial project he didn’t see coming.
Bourbon and beyond
During a spirits event, he was approached by concert festival promoter Danny Wimmer about co-founding a bourbon festival in Louisville, Kentucky.
“I told him no at first, and I told him no again because I was writing another book…. I didn’t know these guys. And then he said, ‘Hey, why don’t you just come to one of our concerts? We got Metallica playing next weekend, and, you know, to see what we’re capable of,’” he says. “Well, I happen to like Metallica a lot. And I said, ‘Yes.’ I took some friends [with me]. And then they sold me right then and there.”
Minnick went on to co-found the Bourbon and Beyond Festival with Wimmer, curating an incredible event showing southern cuisine, music and spirits, attracting around 210,000 visitors in 2024 alone. This was just the tipping point. Since then, Minnick has since expanded his ventures, by launching The Fred Minnick Show podcast and founding the ASCOT Awards, a global spirits competition.
Practicing mindfulness today
After a decade in the bourbon industry, Minnick operates on a structured 9-to-5 work schedule, conducting tastings, writing and recording for his podcast. Yet, in every segment of his day, mindfulness is still a constant presence, he says. He credits the technique with not only altering his day-to-day life in the professional sense but also in his personal life. It allowed him to manage his triggers, regain control and fully engage with his friends and family again.
“Little did I know I actually had a talent for tasting things [before doing mindfulness training],” he says. “But [it] basically reshaped my entire life, gave me a profession I never knew I would be a part of.”
Looking forward, Minnick is working on his next book, which will explore his origins and personal growth—and offer insights on overcoming mental health challenges through mindfulness.
Photo courtesy of Minnick Media
