There have been products in the bourbon industry that must have seemed like a good idea to someone at some time, but flopped in the market. My personal experience is with Rebel Yell Shooters.
It was the early 1990's and the United Distillers archive was just created and the marketing people were working on a new project. The big craze in the bars were shooter drinks. These highly flavored drinks were served in a test tube type shot glass and drank very quickly with a lot of alcohol burn and showing off how tough the drinker was. The cinamon schnaps shooter "Hot Damn" was leading the pack. The marketing people decided to create a bourbon based shooter. Sounded like a good idea, but what they came up with is Rebel Yell Shooters. It had some bourbon in this 101 proof product, but not much and what bourbon flavor there was in the product, was overpowered by the sweet/hot cinnamon flavor. Sure enough the shooter craze died down about the time it hit the market and the product died a quick death.
United Distillers is not the only distiller to jump on the band wagon only to find out it was actually a manure spreader. Brown-Forman thought they would create a "lite" whiskey when government regulations loosened up in the late 1970's allowing for product distilled at between 160 and 180 proof to be labeled "Light whiskey". This regulationreally helped the blended whiskey brands because they could use alcohol distilled to not quite neutral spirit level in their product and call it whiskey. Brown-Forman decided that this was nice but they could beat everyone to the market by taking existing whiskey and filter all of the color out of the product. This clear liquid would convince people it was lighter in flavor and calories, because after all, it was clear! Clear has to be lighter than brown, right. They marketed this product as Frost 8/80. It flopped so bad most of the product never left the shelves. Brown-Forman recalled the product and had it destroyed by turning it into fuel additive alcohol.
Jim Beam also came up with a product to jump on a band wagon. The microbreweries were catching on with their microbrewed beers. They thought they would create a "microdistilled" product. They tried to convince the public that if they took whiskey and consolidated the barrels, i.e. dump the whiskey and refill the barrels, eleminating a few on the way, this was "microdistilling" and worthy of a whole new category of product. They called the product "Jacob's Well" and the public just wasn't buying it - their story line or the product.
Of course Brown-Forman went a different route to try to cash in on the microbrewery craze - they created Jack Daniel's beer. They built a microbrewery at the distillery and even placed a bottling line in one of their buildings. The brand caught on for a while and demand out grew the production facilities, so they contracted it out to a large brewery. The public evidently did not like this new brew because the brand has pretty much disappeared as quick as it appeared.
I am sure there are many other products made in the history of this industry that flopped just as bad as these examples. It would be interesting to spend some time in the patent office just looking at applications from distilleries.