Apparently a bourbon shortage is imminent. Maybe it's already here.
My friend can't find one of his popularly priced go-tos, 10-year-old Henry McKenna, in any of the local liquor stores he frequents (and he frequents himself a few), though, not to panic, they do mostly have it in the taverns.
He has not yet been tempted to pay the $99 a bottle it's fetching on the internet. He can still locate Old Granddad bottled-in-bond, but he's reluctant to reveal his sources.
Even before the pandemic, whiskey prices were surging. Back when this occasional column started, brown liquor was regarded as whiskey for the proles. Some might have gotten into bourbon because Scotch was too rich for our blood. Or because listening to Scotch drinkers talk about Scotch was equal parts annoying and intimidating. Scotch was like jazz or Bruce Springsteen in that even if you had a visceral response to the product, you could be put off by its fans. (I hear some of you: "Not all Scotch drinkers!" OK.)
Bourbon appeals more to us small-d democrats. Bourbon is F-150 pickups and Subarus, while Scotch is Escalades and Lamborghinis.
Scotch is really good, and it's a deep subject that — like wine and beer — rewards study. But it's also relatively expensive, and my limited experience with it suggests that there is a direct correlation between how much a bottle of Scotch costs and how much I'll like it. In these waters, monsters brood.
Bourbon is (or was) more sensibly priced.
Besides, as we established with our wholly and completely unscientific survey of Drinkies readers a few years ago, there is no such thing as a bad bourbon. So long as it is legally bourbon — distilled from a mash that includes no less than 51% corn at no more than 160 proof, barrelled at no more than 125 proof, and bottled at no less than 80 proof, aged for at least two years in charred white oak barrels, and containing no added coloring — things are going to be all right.
Then about 15 years ago, bourbon became fashionable.
Go back to 1992, when master distiller Booker Noe created four small-batch releases for Jim Beam: Knob Creek, Booker's, Basil Hayden and Baker's, that mimicked the complex high-proof whiskeys common before Prohibition. In those days bourbon was slumping, and Beam was sitting on an ocean of stock they weren't selling. So Booker got the bright idea to lay some of that bourbon back for a few extra years and let him play with the flavor profiles.
The result was four distinctive craft bourbons that came in a lot hotter than the typical 80-proof bourbons gathering dust on the low shelves of liquor stores nationwide.
Noe, who died in 2004, was a tireless promoter of these upmarket bourbons. I talked to him several times over the years (and twice got hammered with him at lunchtime tastings). He claimed he reserved the "center cut" of the Beam warehouse, which he believed contained just the right amount of sunlight, humidity and heat, for aging his personally curated bourbons. He insisted that it was with reluctance that he made Booker's, his personal hootch, available to the public.
Still, you could detect an air of kitschy calculation about Booker's hand-lettered labels. Packed in old wine bottles, corked and sealed with wax, Booker's was, at the time, the only small-batch product completely unfiltered and uncut. It packs a kick, with a proof between 121 and 127, and a malt, licorice and tobacco edge. Booker's is definitely a grown-up whiskey.
My favorite, Knob Creek, checks in at about 100 proof (and about $30 a bottle). Aged for the Beam maximum of nine years, it is a complex and meaty whiskey a touch less dark than the younger Booker's. Basil Hayden is an 80-proof release, and 107-proof Baker's is distinguished by a special strain of jug yeast used in its fermentation.
A cynic might say that the Beam small-batch labels were a success because they gave bourbon drinkers something to be snobbish about — even in the '90s, a bottle of Booker's could run $60 (as opposed to about $85 today). I remember stocking up on 100-proof Knob Creek, which was for many years the bourbon I turned to whenever I could get it for about $25, $5 less than the regular list price. (Currently basic 100-proof Knob Creek runs about $38, though you can get a pretty good break if you opt for the 1.75 liter big boy, which I've found for around $54.)
Those prices aren't out of line, but consider that the Beam small-batch line was considered pretty expensive back in the '90s. Now they are mid-priced, and bourbon snobs — we have become snobs, some of us — dismiss them as pretty good middle-of-the-road products. Which might be fair, considering what you can pay for bourbon.
There's a 30th-anniversary edition of Booker's that you have to make an appointment to see, and let's not get started on the Pappy Van Winkle phenomenon.
Excuse me?
I'm informed that I am contractually obligated to expound on the Pappy Van Winkle phenomenon.
Julian "Pappy" Van Winkle Sr. opened the Stitzel-Weller distillery outside Louisville, Ky., in 1935. He died in 1965, and in 1972 his son sold it to corporate owners, retaining only the rights to the pre-prohibition brand "Old Rip Van Winkle."
Pappy's son started producing whiskey under that name, initially using stock from the Stitzel-Weller distillery. Julian III, Pappy's grandson, took over the family business when his dad died in 1981.
Since 2002, several Van Winkle brands have been distilled and bottled by the Sazerac Co. at Buffalo Trace Distillery in Franklin County, Ky., as a joint venture with the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery company. They produce about 7,000 cases a year, or approximately 84,000 bottles. And some years a lot less.
In 2015, after Buffalo Trace determined that some of the stock wasn't up to standard, production got cut in half. (The distillery's motto for its whiskey production is "at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon.")
This means it is extraordinarily rare, and lots of people who care about bourbon have never seen a bottle in person. (According to the Van Winkle website, there are now no Arkansas stores that receive an allocation of Pappy Van Winkle. The closest store to Little Rock is in Memphis. If you're in Northwest Arkansas, you might have to drive to Kansas City, Mo. Call first.)
So while the suggested retail prices for the Pappy Van Winkle line don't look all that weird — there are price points at $49.99 (Old Rip Van Winkle Handmade Bourbon, 10 Year Old); $59.99 (Van Winkle Special Reserve Bourbon, 12 Year Old); $79.99 (Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve Bourbon, 15 Year Old); $149.99 (Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve Bourbon, 20 Year Old); and $249.99 (Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve Bourbon, 23 Year Old) — you can expect to pay many multiples of those prices to actually snag a bottle.
While the secondary market for alcohol is technically illegal, liquor stores are free to charge what the market will bear. So you'll see the 10-year-old bourbon selling for around $1,000 a bottle. I've seen a bottle of the 15-year-old offered for $2,499. The cheapest price I found for the 23-year-old was $4,999, with reliable online retailer Drizly.com offering it for $8,926.04 plus tax. (The good news is they waive the usual $19.99 shipping fee.)
Pappy Van Winkle is good bourbon. Back when you could find it here at retail, I had a few bottles. I like the 15-year-old stuff a little better than the 20- or 23-year-old varietals, but that's a subjective thing. (I've always preferred my bourbon a little rough.)
And, it's not — as some people claim — the same as Weller's. Weller's has the same wheat-heavy mash bill, but I've got exactly the same number of fingers as Eric Clapton. Once whiskey has been barrelled for three years or more, the differences in taste are at least as much a result of the whiskey's interactions with the oak barrel as it is with the original mash bill.
There's a reason all young bourbons taste pretty much the same and that all those laid up for more than nine or 10 years develop different characters. While you might prefer the taste of a younger bourbon — Booker Noe did — the consensus is aging improves the taste of whiskey. (Which is one reason I consider commercial "moonshines" to be novelty products.)
Pappy's is among the best bourbons I've ever had. But I wouldn't even pay retail price for it now. What sells Pappy to most of the Pappy seekers is its brand story and its exclusivity. When people like Anthony Bourdain and David Chang attest to the toothsomeness of your whiskey, ears prick up.
It's a free country, and people are free to pursue their happiness any way they want. How much would you pay for a vintage watch like the one Paul Newman wore? Some people pay thousands of dollars for a pair of Air Jordans. An empty bottle of Pappy's once sold on eBay for $300.
My point is that part of the attraction of bourbon is that it was relatively affordable. Making it a status symbol kind of ruins it.
Luckily, there's no real bourbon shortage now, or even on the horizon. What we have are particular brands getting hot and selling out and being hard to find for a while. And it becomes fun to hunt around in liquor stores looking for, say, a bottle of Nulu Straight Bourbon Whiskey Barrel Select (about $50-$55).
The pleasure of the hunt is something that the internet has robbed us of — remember how traveling to a different city allowed for browsing the bins of the local record store, which invariably had a different inventory from your hometown one?
Bourbon isn't toilet paper; demand for it is driven by desire rather than practical considerations. Distillers and retailers have figured out that we'll pay more for certain fashionable expressions, which results in secondary pricing becoming the norm with certain hot products.
Were there anything necessary about bourbon, this might be considered price gouging. But consumers only have themselves to blame. If you're willing to pay 200% or 300% of the manufacturer's suggested retail price for a product, soon those inflated prices will be normalized. If you don't, the prices will drop and eventually stabilize.
I try to buy what I want, but if I suffer sticker stock in a liquor store, my impulse is not to buy as much of the high-priced stuff as I can carry as a hedge against inflation but to look down to the more quotidian labels. I'll go white label Jim Beam or Jack Daniel's (which meets all the legal requirements of bourbon) without feeling bad about myself. There's always Old Crow.
And Evan Williams knew that I'd be back.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com | blooddirtangels.com