{"id":2673,"date":"2015-05-31T03:47:22","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T09:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/?p=2673"},"modified":"2015-05-31T03:47:22","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T09:47:22","slug":"calling-all-drunkards-please-stop-this-shit-and-end-the-pappy-van-winkle-nonsense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/calling-all-drunkards-please-stop-this-shit-and-end-the-pappy-van-winkle-nonsense\/","title":{"rendered":"Calling all Drunkards: Please Stop This Shit and End the “Pappy Van Winkle” Nonsense"},"content":{"rendered":"
Where to start, where to start. . .<\/p>\n
Perhaps the best place to begin this plea is an appeal to the annals of history, properly chronicled<\/a> by my colleague Bryan Dent, regarding the seven year long<\/a> string of heists and shenanigans involving the Buffalo Trace<\/a> distilleries and the much-coveted Pappy Van Winkle lines of whiskeys. If you are a fan of American whiskeys, then you know and love at least one BT product: their flagship Buffalo Trace Bourbon, Eagle Rare offerings<\/a>, W.L. Weller lines<\/a>, the spread of E.H. Taylor<\/a>s (which are rather good<\/a>, I must admit), Elmer T. Lee<\/a>, George T. Stagg<\/a>\u00a0(also excellent, if you can find it), Blanton’s<\/a> (for those of you with equine fancies) and a few others. What you likely\u00a0have not had is any of the Pappy Van Winkles<\/a>.<\/p>\n Its popularity is now the stuff of legends, evidenced easily enough by the fact that there was a years-long plot to just steal the damn stuff. Its rarity (between only seven and eight thousand cases annually, about a twentieth<\/a>\u00a0of what Jim Beam does for its flagship, since PVW seems to always be shipped in six-bottle cases* compared to JB’s twelve bottle cases) means that most of us will never taste it (at any vintage), but it also means that pedants with a closet full of Lacoste polos and a job in some kind of finance that they can’t really define will brag about being able to get a bottle of only to chase it with J\u00e4ger and Red Bull.<\/p>\n Yet, the Pappy name is now nearly ubiquitous and means many things to many people.\u00a0As one of those people, I can say that it makes me plumb, mad-dog mean<\/a>. And not just regular Mad Dog 20\/20 mean–I’m talking about belly-full-of-MD-Orange-Jubilee-with-an-Everclear-chaser mean. Police-horse-punching mean. I am humbly calling on all of you to help\u00a0stop this madness and offer a few bits of advice as to how:<\/p>\n First, let’s address what the Pappy craze really is: hype. The odds are good that you know some friend who raves about the stuff. Maybe they got their grubby little hands on a shot at some swanky whiskey bar and then couldn’t wait to get onto every social media platform known to man to talk about it. There will be selfies. We’ll call that “incriminating evidence.” The odds are even greater that they’ll claim that it’s the best whiskey that they’ve ever had–best in the world, in fact–and it was\u00a0totally amazeballs<\/em> that they found it. You should have been there.<\/p>\n Except for the fact that you shouldn’t have. Not that it’s bad whiskey–I can attest that the 10 year (which is under the\u00a0Old Rip Van Winkle name) is delicious (with some great ripe cherry taste and a good dose of oak char throughout), and the PVW 15 is also solid (if not a lot sweeter and with fewer competing flavors), but\u00a0both\u00a0of them suffer from being grossly over-priced<\/a> and over-hyped. I’ll go out on a limb and say that applies to all of the Van Winkles, because it certainly seems to. Do I feel bad about what I paid to try them? Absolutely. Were they worth it? Also absolutely, but not enough to justify the expense<\/a> of a full damn bottle on the primary market. The secondary market gets even crazier<\/a> to the point that there is rumored to be a blacklist that prohibits sales to people known to be re-sellers. There is some debate<\/a> over whether the resale of booze is legal, though.<\/p>\n Second, let’s consider how to deal with the PVW-crazed folks among us. It’s important to remember that they’ve likely never tasted it, let alone even seen a bottle. The heart of this craze is the same as in any other: the blind following the blind. Some bro heard another bro rave about it (like how Skrillex and Deadmau5 got famous) and just got on board with gusto. Such a crazy explosion of demand is fascinating for economists (since it shows how quickly demand can outpace supply with no marketing effort on behalf of the producer), but it creates a bubble. At the liquor store (or, as I call it, Booze Chapel) where I work, it was only a few years ago that they had Pappy sitting on the shelf and no one would give it a second glance. Now there’s a lottery to see who gets it.<\/p>\n The recipe hasn’t changed, but now we have a frigging lottery system set up to determine who gets it when we finally receive it during its annual release (in the fall, usually around October or November, but Buffalo Trace is hesitant to ever say exactly when or exactly where it will all go). So every day I and my colleagues have to field about a half dozen questions that go something like this (and this happened to me three times earlier today):<\/p>\n Some bro: “Hey, do you guys have any Pappy? Like, have you ever heard of it?”<\/p>\n Me: “Yeah, I know about it. And no–unfortunately we don’t have any right now. It’s only released once a year and it sells out quickly.”<\/p>\n Some bro: “Awww dude, I heard it was the best. Can I, like, give you my name and you can call me when you get it?”<\/p>\n