Josh Hafner,

jhafner@dmreg.com;

Templeton Rye co-founder Scott Bush recalls sitting in China in 2011 with David Perkins, the founder of High West Distillery in Utah. The two traveled there with a distillery lobbying group to promote American whiskey to the nation of 1.35 billion, many of whom harbor an increasing taste for the stuff.

"One of us said it's interesting how we're here, but sort of be careful what we wish for," Bush said. "If a billion Chinese are drinking American whiskey, even a big company like Jack Daniel's isn't going to fill that niche."

The wish is slowly coming true: Earlier this month, Buffalo Trace Distillery — the 228-year-old national whiskey maker based in Frankfort, Ky. — announced upcoming shortages of its products, the result of an increasing global "bourbon boom" with no end in sight. Bourbon is experiencing a 5 percent growth overall, the distiller stated, with premium brands up 20 percent from last year.

The catch: Top-shelf whiskey can age a decade or more in oak barrels before reaching the bottle, leaving producers with few ways to predict or respond to popularity spikes.

In Iowa, the whiskey boom has left distilleries and sellers feeling its effects and trying to meet demands. Cedar Ridge, the state's first microdistillery that recently began shipping to Hong Kong, on Friday announced a $1.1 million expansion of its operations driven by whiskey sales.

The cause for the boom, analysts say, trails back to drinkers' changing tastes. Those who heralded vodka 10 years ago now prefer the American bourbon swilled everywhere from hip bars in Des Moines' East Village to the sets of AMC's "Mad Men."

Whiskey's surge in popularity over the years doesn't surprise Kolin Brighton, Cedar Ridge's lead distiller.

"This is just sort of how whiskey goes. It's in fashion for a while, then supplies run short and eventually they run on to something else," he said Friday. "If you look at 300 years of whiskey sales, it looks like a damn roller coaster."

That roller coaster tried to toss Templeton Rye a few years back, when the distiller of Al Capone's supposed favorite whiskey found itself with a supply shortage on its hands. The scarcity, combined with the state of Iowa's allocation of its bottles, played right into the brand's Prohibition lore — only increasing its popularity.

The company hired more hands and upped its distribution, said Bush, hoping to stabilize its supply for the foreseeable future. Templeton Rye ages for five years, which means the company can only bottle today what it barreled in 2009.

"We can't go back in time," Bush said. "We feel like we've positioned ourselves well for growth, but you never really know until five years are up. It is an issue."

In Swisher, Cedar Ridge's distillers remain confident they'll continue to meet growing demands for whiskey among the array of brandies and rums it produces. Brighton, the company's lead distiller, said Cedar Ridge whiskeys require only two years of aging because the company produces them through batch distillation.

"The big boys — Buffalo Trace, Jim Beam, the big Kentucky distilleries — are using continuous stills," Brighton said, a process that relies on years and years of aging to filter out impurities and mellow a whiskey's taste. "The advantage of craft distilling is we can remove a good deal of the impurities before it ever goes into the barrel."

Batch distillation remains more meticulous, Brighton said, but it enables Cedar Ridge to knock as many as five years off the necessary aging process and respond more quickly to demands.

But for whiskey to age, it needs oak barrels. Those, too, are in short supply, compounding whiskey production woes. The Spirits Business, an industry publication, reported this month that last winter's harsh conditions hampered the logging industry.

That, in turn, had an impact on the production of barrels, the wood of which ages for years itself. The shortage is expected to last for the next year or two.

As if another complication were needed to separate Iowans' tongues from premium bourbon, the state this year implemented a new allocation system that places high-demand spirits in Iowa stores via a lottery system, because in the past, "demand for products such as high-end whiskey was not as great as today," the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Division said.

The aim is to make sure all qualifying stores have the same shot at scoring some Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, which goes for about $60 a bottle but can go for as much as $6,000 online.

Brian Duax, vice president of Central City Liquors in Des Moines, said his store used to regularly get rare spirits, but because of the allocation system, he can't predict that for his customers.

Duax said he had a single bottle of Redbreast 21-year-old whiskey, and "I have 50 people asking me for that one bottle. What do I with that one bottle? Do I piss off 49 people? Or just take it home for my birthday next week?"