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Weller special reserve7/22/2023 Weller lineup of wheated bourbons, touted by collectors as the “next best thing” to Pappy because they were made from the same mash bill. As Van Winkle became increasingly impossible to get, the collecting mania shifted to Buffalo Trace’s W.L. A decade ago, for instance, you had likely heard about collectors going to great lengths to secure bottles of ultra sought-after brands such as Pappy Van Winkle, a premium wheated bourbon from Buffalo Trace Distillery. Put simply, there’s a mania that exists today for certain brands, and the breadth of that mania seems to be expanding all the time. Ultimately, it’s these communities that fuel the intense hype and desire for many bourbon brands, which leads to inflated secondary pricing and eventually inflated pricing at the neighborhood package store. Allow us to explain in far more detail.īefore we can understand how retailers are able to get away with normalizing massive mark-ups from MSRP, we need to understand the basics of how the internet has built a self-sustaining bourbon hype cycle for certain distilleries and brands. This is all to say the following: Bourbon pricing is getting out of control, and only we can stop it. And as much as we’d love for the distilleries or distributors to somehow stop this from happening, the limitations of federal law means that the power to affect change rests almost entirely with us, the consumers. right now, and retailers are becoming more bold in their price gouging with every passing month. Or in other words: Are you ready to pay 300 or 400% mark-ups from MSRP at the local package store on some of your favorite bourbon brands? Because it’s happening all over the U.S. In the process, they’ve already shattered the idea of “MSRP” on numerous brands, and as time goes by, it’s only getting worse. We’re talking about the wild west that is whiskey pricing as set by retailers, and a runaway hype train of bourbon fanaticism that has increasingly driven consumers to pay secondary market prices for whiskey from primary market retailers. However, there’s also a powerful undercurrent to contemporary American whiskey pricing that is now threatening to totally redefine the idea of what any given bottle of bourbon is “supposed to” cost. These are natural factors that contributed to steadily rising manufacturer suggested retail prices (MSRPs) across the industry in recent years, and they should be considered a necessary downside for the consumer of seeing the category revitalized and greatly expanded. You’ve got a shortage of your 12-year-old bourbon brand? Well, I hope you laid down a bigger reserve of it 11 years ago, or there’s not much you can do about it in the near future, short of sourcing that whiskey from someone else. Whiskey is a product with a long production and aging period, which means it can’t respond with alacrity to changes in the market, especially for well-aged examples. As demand began to boom in the back half of the 2000s, distilleries struggled to keep up on the supply front, as most had failed to fully anticipate the steadily growing interest in American bourbon in particular. Prices rose across the board-incrementally in most cases, and dramatically in others, as a new generation of whiskey drinkers discovered their love of bourbon, rye and more.Īnd for the most part, these increases were the understandable effects of basic economics. In addition to new product launches, older brands often received a new coat of paint … and higher price tags, to boot. The brown liquor revival brought along a boom period for the industry as a whole, and many of the largest and most popular American distilleries responded to this new wave of interest by embracing an increasingly premiumized model for their whiskey lineups. It’s no shock, or particularly astute observation, to note the way that American whiskey prices have climbed in the last 15 years.
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