Our ongoing observations about whether the boom has peaked

[The Black Tot]

4 minutes ago, jvd99 said:

I'm in the "only buy at retail group."  Right now, my club has 1 member and everyone is super cool.

 

[BigRich]

I'm in the "only buy at retail group."  Right now, my club has 1 member and everyone is super cool. [emoji4]

I'm still waiting on my membership card. Is it in the mail?


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[jvd99]

16 minutes ago, BigRich said:

I'm still waiting on my membership card. Is it in the mail?

 

Right now, unfortunately, the club isn't taking new members, thereby safeguarding against the dangers of bourbon group-think which is known to be a leading cause of irrational and arbitrary secondary prices resulting in an often incurable condition where otherwise normal people believe they should pay $500 for a $50 bottle of booze.  Not on my watch

[musekatcher]

On 2/1/2017 at 0:42 PM, jvd99 said:

Right now, unfortunately, the club isn't taking new members, thereby safeguarding against the dangers of bourbon group-think which is known to be a leading cause of irrational and arbitrary secondary prices resulting in an often incurable condition where otherwise normal people believe they should pay $500 for a $50 bottle of booze.  Not on my watch

There are many enjoyable bourbons in my msrp rotation.  The only reason I'd ever pay more than $100 for a bottle of whiskey, is for business purposes.  Bringing out a bottle of PVW after the group has necked down, certainly speak of means, taste and resourcefulness, and signifies remaining guests as exclusive.  I've had some special stuff shared with me, but as of yet, no PVW

[jvd99]

Dave Driscoll from K&L's spirit's blog posted his personal prediction for 2017 which is basically that a lot of the bourbon "drinkers" (i.e. posers/hipsters/newbies) will lose interest and drop of out of the game in 2017 leading to better availability for the real drinkers who actually drink the whiskey   

 

http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/  (Not sure if it links directly to the article, but it was posted on 2/3/17 and they are in chronological order).

 

The best line of the article is when he describes whiskey "drinkers" (Driscoll's quotes) he thinks will lose interest as follows: "They're interested in acquiring whiskey, experimenting with whiskey, researching their whiskey, pouring samples into tiny bottles, and sharing their opinions about those experiences." 

 

I found his opinion to be very funny because that's exactly what a lot of us do around here.   As for me - I acquire whisky at a way faster pace than I can drink, I experiment with whiskey by maintaining a solera bottle, I research my whiskey, I definitely pour my whiskey into little bottles for a variety of reasons, and I like to share about all of the foregoing with my fellow "drinkers" right here on SB.  Additionally, I also organize my bottles, take pictures of them and keep track of them in a spreadsheet.  Fun stuff!  It's called a hobby Dave Oh yeah, and I have a drink now and then.

[Limegoldconvertible68]

33 minutes ago, jvd99 said:

Dave Driscoll from K&L's spirit's blog posted his personal prediction for 2017 which is basically that a lot of the bourbon "drinkers" (i.e. posers/hipsters/newbies) will lose interest and drop of out of the game in 2017 leading to better availability for the real drinkers who actually drink the whiskey   

 

http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/  (Not sure if it links directly to the article, but it was posted on 2/3/17 and they are in chronological order).

 

The best line of the article is when he describes whiskey "drinkers" (Driscoll's quotes) he thinks will lose interest as follows: "They're interested in acquiring whiskey, experimenting with whiskey, researching their whiskey, pouring samples into tiny bottles, and sharing their opinions about those experiences." 

 

I found his opinion to be very funny because that's exactly what a lot of us do around here.   As for me - I acquire whisky at a way faster pace than I can drink, I experiment with whiskey by maintaining a solera bottle, I research my whiskey, I definitely pour my whiskey into little bottles for a variety of reasons, and I like to share about all of the foregoing with my fellow "drinkers" right here on SB.  Additionally, I also organize my bottles, take pictures of them and keep track of them in a spreadsheet.  Fun stuff!  It's called a hobby Dave Oh yeah, and I have a drink now and then.

Yeah, he described me to a tee as well. I sure hope I don't quit bourbon this year. 

[mbroo5880i]

2 hours ago, jvd99 said:

Dave Driscoll from K&L's spirit's blog posted his personal prediction for 2017 which is basically that a lot of the bourbon "drinkers" (i.e. posers/hipsters/newbies) will lose interest and drop of out of the game in 2017 leading to better availability for the real drinkers who actually drink the whiskey   

 

http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/  (Not sure if it links directly to the article, but it was posted on 2/3/17 and they are in chronological order).

 

The best line of the article is when he describes whiskey "drinkers" (Driscoll's quotes) he thinks will lose interest as follows: "They're interested in acquiring whiskey, experimenting with whiskey, researching their whiskey, pouring samples into tiny bottles, and sharing their opinions about those experiences." 

 

I found his opinion to be very funny because that's exactly what a lot of us do around here.   As for me - I acquire whisky at a way faster pace than I can drink, I experiment with whiskey by maintaining a solera bottle, I research my whiskey, I definitely pour my whiskey into little bottles for a variety of reasons, and I like to share about all of the foregoing with my fellow "drinkers" right here on SB.  Additionally, I also organize my bottles, take pictures of them and keep track of them in a spreadsheet.  Fun stuff!  It's called a hobby Dave Oh yeah, and I have a drink now and then.

 

It is an interesting perspective.  Not sure it will happen this year but I agree with him that it will happen within the next few years.  If it ain't Pappy, it ain't worth drinking.

[Harry in WashDC]

On 1/14/2017 at 3:52 PM, PaulO said:

 

[ASIDE - A couple days ago, I was going to type something and clicked the wrong post.  THEN, I couldn't get the darn thing to disappear.  THEN, when I came back just now, it WAS STILL THERE!!!!  So, sorry, PaulO, this is only marginally related to your post - like because we are both on SB.]

 

Ah, poop.  Spent so long on the "ASIDE" I forgot what I was going to post. (Wait one . . .)  Oh, yeah.  I haven't read Dave's post, yet, but I wonder what all the bourbon p/h/n's he referred to are going to go drink.  Scotch jumped years ago, vodka has run out of flavors, craft beers are now adding vegetables to create novel offerings (go ahead and laugh while you sip on that pumpkin ale), and cocktails . . ., well, I still appreciate a good one, but those are hard to find unless I make them myself or wait five minutes while fresh cherries get picked off the tree on the bar (he wrote sarcastically as if you couldn't tell).  Perhaps rum.  Perhaps tequila.  Black Tot and tanstaafl2 can tell us about those, I guess.  Maybe Everclear is the answer to our problem.  Get them to drink it neat..  Kidding, of course.

[The Black Tot]

Rum and tequila have already shot up, the speculators and the "mantlepiece gang" people who fill unopened trophy cases are already there. Some rum releases are now as hard to get as Pappy.

 

Rum is a much smaller category, or at least properly made, properly aged rum is, so it didn't take many of them for the market to get pressurized. Having said this, it's still early stages, so people piling into rum only know about a few brands/key words, just like how for the first while people only knew how to say "Pappy please" and later they learned the word Willett. So, also just like bourbon, someone who is nimble and knowledgeable can still make some good buys in rum, for a little while longer anyway.

 

In tequila I'm only a(n enthusiastic) dabbler. Good quality tequila gets made faster (even extra anejos only take ~5yrs to age), so it can rise more effectively to meet demand, but I'm not sure if there are enough good blue agave plants for this. Again, not my area of expertise. I think I read somewhere that the agave growth is more the limiting factor in tequila.

 

Where are the drinkers going to go and what are they going to drink? I think they're going down the shelf, to drink regularly available mid-priced stuff. And after doing this for a while they will grow to appreciate the fact that it's affordable and readily available, and may decide that the limited train isn't necessarily where it's at.

 

They might get into Cognac and Armagnac - which still aren't slammed. They might get into wine, or fancy cocktails. They might get into limited edition guns. Someone might come up with limited edition marijuana in Colorado. They might get into limited edition anything at all. They might, as I've said before, start drinking the bottles they've accumulated and realize they don't need to buy another bottle for the next 10 years.

 

But they are definitely going to get bored and turned off when the availability and prices for limited American whiskeys get unattractive enough. They're getting exponentially worse, so it's just a matter of time. Interesting that Driscoll thinks it's this year. I thought it would happen sooner, and I was wrong.

 

I'm not sure how many more Booker's Ryes and 24yr pre-fire Parker's Heritages are left up producers' sleeves, but rest assured we'll be hitting new price highs in 2017 if there indeed are any.

[BourbonGuy]

On ‎1‎/‎14‎/‎2017 at 5:04 PM, Vosgar said:

 

Agree 100%, especially his last statement:

 

I continue to stand by what I have said for years. If China and India develop as many have predicted, no one will have made enough. If they don’t, everyone will have made too much.

You beat me to it.  There was a link that I saw on this site.  https://www.ft.com/content/a9878bea-2eec-11e6-bf8d-26294ad519fc 

As you mentioned there is a graph of the top 10 whiskey markets.  USA is #2 and is only 1/3 of the India market.  What makes it even more interesting is China isn't on the graph.

[musekatcher]

9 hours ago, The Black Tot said:

They might, as I've said before, start drinking the bottles they've accumulated and realize they don't need to buy another bottle for the next 10 years.

 

But they are definitely going to get bored and turned off when the availability and prices for limited American whiskeys get unattractive enough. They're getting exponentially worse, so it's just a matter of time. Interesting that Driscoll thinks it's this year. I thought it would happen sooner, and I was wrong.

 

 

They = we?  I might have 8 years worth.  I plan to need a lot more than that, lol.  I'm a loyal customer, but not going to endure the escalation much longer.  I've got a few "bottom shelf" brands from my favorite distilleries that still drink well above their price point, but as those are depleted and backfilled with hooch, I'll have enough to do me.  I tend to buy two bottles at a time, which will get me a lifetime supply, hopefully before table grade bourbon hits $45 a fifth. 

Edited February 5, 2017 by musekatcher

[The Black Tot]

3 hours ago, BourbonGuy said:

You beat me to it.  There was a link that I saw on this site.  https://www.ft.com/content/a9878bea-2eec-11e6-bf8d-26294ad519fc 

As you mentioned there is a graph of the top 10 whiskey markets.  USA is #2 and is only 1/3 of the India market.  What makes it even more interesting is China isn't on the graph.

 

I think to put this one to bed we'd need to have a breakdown of what product ranges are being shipped to Asian markets.

 

Anyone here tried to shop for American whiskey anywhere in Asia other than Japan? How'd that work out for you? Thousands of stores, all with only JBW and JD. It's like this in most of the world, actually, apart from Japan and some Eurozone countries. Asia isn't really a threat to the production of the bubble bourbons we're mainly discussing in this thread. If anything, they result in expanding rackhouses to produce bottom shelfers for export, which give us greater numbers of honey ricks in which to grow limited editions in the long run, which get marketed and sold in the US primarily.

 

Asians see Scottish malt as the leading premium whisky category, in the same way they see Bordeaux as the wine region to pile into. If the higher end bourbons can't even meet demand in the US where they are loved, there's not going to be a surplus going over to Asia to start the development of a mid or upper shelf market in Asia. I'll buy into the Asian bourbon miracle when someone posts in the "What bourbon did you buy today?" that they picked up a set of BTAC on a recent trip to Beijing.

[flahute]

5 minutes ago, The Black Tot said:

 

I think to put this one to bed we'd need to have a breakdown of what product ranges are being shipped to Asian markets.

 

Anyone here tried to shop for American whiskey anywhere in Asia other than Japan? How'd that work out for you? Thousands of stores, all with only JBW and JD. It's like this in most of the world, actually, apart from Japan and some Eurozone countries. Asia isn't really a threat to the production of the bubble bourbons we're mainly discussing in this thread. If anything, they result in expanding rackhouses to produce bottom shelfers for export, which give us greater numbers of honey ricks in which to grow limited editions in the long run, which get marketed and sold in the US primarily.

 

Asians see Scottish malt as the leading premium whisky category, in the same way they see Bordeaux as the wine region to pile into. If the higher end bourbons can't even meet demand in the US where they are loved, there's not going to be a surplus going over to Asia to start the development of a mid or upper shelf market in Asia. I'll buy into the Asian bourbon miracle when someone posts in the "What bourbon did you buy today?" that they picked up a set of BTAC on a recent trip to Beijing.

Everywhere I looked in Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, Xian, and Beijing was nothing but JBW and JD except for one little grocery that had just opened that had 2 bottles of WT8 101. (And that was a store in an apartment bock full of Americans that catered to American tastes.)

[The Black Tot]

3 hours ago, musekatcher said:

 

They = we? 

 

Yeah, they totally = a lot of us Didn't want to speak for everyone here though - not everyone has half a liquor store in their basement where they go to turn off the lights and cackle, rocking back and forth compulsively.

[garbanzobean]

Driscoll's post was amusing but he regularly waxes poetic regarding his dislike for shallow poseurs, so it's not like it would be unexpected.  I think the behavior he is really railing against are those we tend to call Trophy Hunters mixed in with latent animosity toward some Bloggers who haven't been real kind to his scotch picks lately.

 

Overall, I have no experience with the customers he gets out in Cali, but it sounds like he gets a fair number of pretty obnoxious ones.

[jvd99]

23 minutes ago, The Black Tot said:

 

Yeah, they totally = a lot of us Didn't want to speak for everyone here though - not everyone has half a liquor store in their basement where they go to turn off the lights and cackle, rocking back and forth compulsively.

I find myself doing the evil Austin Powers laugh when I'm alone with my bunker 

[Spade]

I think there's probably something to what Driscoll is writing here. But, I too am skeptical 2017 is the year things finally settle down. And, I know it probably goes without saying, but I have a feeling he's just trying to draw attention to a product he's got a lot of — looking at their website, it shows have 200+ bottles of OF1920 across their locations. Decent (and shameless!) marketing.

[garbanzobean]

58 minutes ago, Spade said:

I think there's probably something to what Driscoll is writing here. But, I too am skeptical 2017 is the year things finally settle down. And, I know it probably goes without saying, but I have a feeling he's just trying to draw attention to a product he's got a lot of — looking at their website, it shows have 200+ bottles of OF1920 across their locations. Decent (and shameless!) marketing.

That's a large portion of his posting style.  He either relates a story or lesson he wants to tell to a product he has to sell, or he picks featured products and tells a story or lesson that fits.  Taken individually, they're generally a good message thematically related to a decent product, but over the long term it tends to induce eye-roll-itis.

[flahute]

1 hour ago, garbanzobean said:

Overall, I have no experience with the customers he gets out in Cali, but it sounds like he gets a fair number of pretty obnoxious ones.

Bay area tech bros. The worst. They have been migrating north to Seattle for a while now.

[portwood]

21 minutes ago, garbanzobean said:

That's a large portion of his posting style.  He either relates a story or lesson he wants to tell to a product he has to sell, or he picks featured products and tells a story or lesson that fits.  Taken individually, they're generally a good message thematically related to a decent product, but over the long term it tends to induce eye-roll-itis.

Driscoll is nothing more, nothing less, than a salesman!

Too many people take him too seriously. Read his posts long enough, sooner or later you'll get tired of his "this* is the greatest _____ I've ever tasted"

 

(*more often than not, "this" just happens to be the item with the highest stock level in the store, or the item not selling as well as anticipated)

Edited February 5, 2017 by portwood

[Jesse11]

On 2/4/2017 at 6:56 PM, jvd99 said:

Dave Driscoll from K&L's spirit's blog posted his personal prediction for 2017 which is basically that a lot of the bourbon "drinkers" (i.e. posers/hipsters/newbies) will lose interest and drop of out of the game in 2017 leading to better availability for the real drinkers who actually drink the whiskey   

 

http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/

I'm new, so totally dismiss my post and all, but this is exactly what I've been feeling.

 

I think that it's relatively clear that the boom and the secondary market are related. If the secondary market no longer holds interest, those types of folks move on. And that seems to be what's beginning to take place now. Lots of people cashing out and bottles being gobbled up by collectors/investors. Prices on even average stuff are so high that people can't even justify splurging. And people who are holding good stuff to actually drink won't let it go because they would never be able to replace it. So there's very little activity of any substance, which is a recipe for people losing interest.

 

Regarding the Willett comment from earlier, it isn't that there aren't people drinking it, it's that posting positive tasting notes is the surest way to hype something into a $600 bottle. So people just keep their mouths shut, which is a sad commentary on what should be a fun shared experience.

[jvd99]

4 hours ago, Jesse11 said:

Regarding the Willett comment from earlier, it isn't that there aren't people drinking it, it's that posting positive tasting notes is the surest way to hype something into a $600 bottle. So people just keep their mouths shut, which is a sad commentary on what should be a fun shared experience.

 

There's a some recent conflict on Reddit about people not reviewing bottles they like for this exact reason - FWIW

 

I'm not sure how closely related Reddit reviews are to skyrocketing secondary prices, but apparently it's perceived as such among quite a few people.  Kinda paranoid if you ask me.

[mosugoji64]

1 hour ago, jvd99 said:

 

There's a some recent conflict on Reddit about people not reviewing bottles they like for this exact reason - FWIW

 

I'm not sure how closely related Reddit reviews are to skyrocketing secondary prices, but apparently it's perceived as such among quite a few people.  Kinda paranoid if you ask me.

 

And that's the reason I tend to avoid the other groups and stick to this one. SB is a place where we can get together to enjoy the hobby without the insanity. Cooler heads prevail. 

[jvd99]

Agreed, I just read Reddit from time to time and use its database for research, but rarely do I actually participate.  It's much more chill around here

[Jesse11]

3 hours ago, jvd99 said:

 

There's a some recent conflict on Reddit about people not reviewing bottles they like for this exact reason - FWIW

 

I'm not sure how closely related Reddit reviews are to skyrocketing secondary prices, but apparently it's perceived as such among quite a few people.  Kinda paranoid if you ask me.

It's especially problematic with Willett because there are ~100 of any given bottle. The supply/demand curve is not normal. You can watch certain ones increase hundreds of dollars in days if people say it's great.

 

But then there are other things like Russell's Reserve 1998 suddenly selling for $1k. It's hard to not be somewhat paranoid and begin to think that there are bad actors at play.