My buddy just informed me that he was able to scoop me my first bottle of Blanton’s for only $10 over MRSP. So hyped, he’s dropping it off now.
Blantons is fine. It was one of my entry’s into bourbon, but after having so many other options, it kind of is eh in comparison to others, especially in price point with how many places jack the price up
Love me some Blanton’s. It’s just so smooth. One of my first entries as well. I’ve just always wanted a bottle and it’s so hard to find. Especially if you can find it, hoping it’s not jacked up to high heavens.
I love Blantons. It was a fair buy at $50 a bottle back when I could find it regularly and I always liked to have a bottle on hand. The whole bourbon market is annoying and exhausting these days.
Place called Paradise liquors put my buddy on their “secret” bourbon drop email list and he’s gonna come scoop me to go grab a bottle. I was looking at that 18 year, but figured I’d ask y’all haha. Hope I can get one.
So I'm not disagreeing, or being argumentative or dismissive here, but I see this a lot about bourbon and I'm kind of curious for more information. I'm new(ish) to drinking bourbon and I have a quality store near me, and I can walk in and get a bottle of bourbon, picked out from a great selection, for what seams reasonable, and that's it. 15 minutes later, I'm home drinking a great pour. How much has it actually gone up and what bourbon is missing and hard to get? It seems there's 40 different styles every time I go to store, from all kinds of prices from $30 to $150 including locals and imports from other states.
Welp almost everything was gone. Almost went Weller’s 107, they had EH Taylor Small Batch, but I just got one of those. Wanted the single barrel but that was gone, as was Blanton’s. So I went with the last bottle of the toasted Elijah Craig. Really stoked to try this one.
Not sure where you're located but I'm part of a local group in Tampa Bay and the prices have gone up exponentially in the past few years. People are constantly hunting for unicorn bottles like Blanton's, EHT, hell even Eagle Rare and Buffalo Trace - which are $30 bottles - are impossible to find. Because of this, bigger stores like Total Wine are only allocated a very small amount of these bottles and they're usually kept behind the counter. People have figured out when these bottles arrive and line up outside the store to buy them before anyone else. This happens to my local TW every Friday. Smaller stores are then charging ridiculous markups on stuff because of the demand. I've seen Buffalo Trace anywhere from $50-75 and that's a $25 bottle at MSRP. The hunting/collecting aspect has made it impossible to find even the slightly rare stuff and some people are buying them up just to have them sit in their collections.
Exactly the same thing happening here in NM. One per person type stuff. I like that, but the price gouging is so lame. Especially for the folks who intend to actually drink it.
Okay, I guess I need to be more attentive. All I know is that my local liquor store (in a downtown metro area) seems to always have a huge collection but I don't know what's rare/good that's missing, or how marked up it was from a few years ago since it's a new drink of choice. Some of my favorites I've had are Wilderness Trail, Whistle Pig, high west (especially the double rye), and knob creek though I am sure those are all pretty basic for in here judging by some of these last comments but those are pretty standard fare to be in stock without trouble. Whistle pig and wilderness trail are the most expensive normally around $65/bottle if I'm not getting special cask versions or anything. High west is cheap, like $40.
Got a Knob Creek 9 Years in my stock rn. A good daily drinker. I want to try the Smoked Maple as well
Yes, this. In PA it's awful in a different way due to the state store system. They release specialty whiskeys every so often and the website crashes because everyone tries to go online at the same time. It's basically impossible to get buffalo trace, blantons, etc... even michters can be hard to find sometimes. People with connections get access to the bottles before everyone else, and if you're an average consumer, it's awful. The pandemic exacerbated all of this. I've been exploring more rum, tequila, and other spirits though, and that's been a nice change.
Positively blazed and blasting Van Halen’s self-titled album in my headphones. I’m basically my dad in 1978 right now.