As the bourbon craze continues to swell, more and more people are looking to add Pappy Van Winkle to their collections. But finding a bottle of this rare whiskey isn’t as easy as just walking into a liquor store and picking one up, thanks to high demand and low supply. The price of Pappy Van Winkle is enough to put the whiskey out of the reach of many bourbon drinkers, but the hunt for this legendary spirit isn’t impossible. Here are some tips to help you find Pappy Van Winkle whiskey at a price that is within your budget.
In 1994, Julian Van Winkle III had the courage to release the world’s first 20-year-old bourbon, branding it with a stogie-smoking photo of his grandfather. The bottle was a hit, earning a perfect score from the Beverage Tasting Institute. As a result, the world became infatuated with the brand and its legendary whiskey.
But producing bourbon takes time. Unlike vodka, which can be distilled and bottled in the same day, bourbon must spend years in barrels to reach maturity. This is why Pappy Van Winkle is so expensive and hard to come by.
While there’s only a small amount of each year’s production available to consumers, the popularity of the distillery and its products has led to soaring prices. The suggested retail price of a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve 15 Year is $130, but it can easily be sold on the secondary market for five to 20 times that much. Buffalo Trace, the parent company of the bourbon, and the Van Winkles spend $500,000 per year on anti-counterfeiting efforts.
The best place to buy Pappy is directly from the distillery or its licensed retailers. Liquor stores that work with the brand often allocate a certain number of bottles to loyal customers. When a new batch of whiskey is ready, the store will notify those on its waiting lists and host an online lottery. This method helps save the liquor stores from droves of bourbon drinkers camping outside and running in to try to nab their bottles.
These lottery systems work in different ways across the Pappy van winkle for sale country, but Garden and Gun points out that smaller towns are more likely to have allocated Pappy than bigger cities. The reason is that a smaller town might have less demand and fewer liquor drinkers who want to buy the whiskey. If a large city doesn’t have a good liquor store that works with the Pappy brand, it might not have a bourbon-obsessed population to begin with.
It’s also important to remember that just because a bottle of Pappy is labeled as such on the bottle, it doesn’t mean that it was actually distilled by Pappy. The whiskey may be a wheated sibling that was distilled at Stitzel-Weller or Buffalo Trace, but it doesn’t matter. Regardless, the bourbon is still delicious and worth drinking. In fact, I would suggest you pick up a bottle of the cheaper Wheated Pappy Van Winkle Special Reserve and enjoy it for what it is.
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