Nobody tell the taters
A guest post from Dave Infante, writer of Fingers
Editor's note: Today's guest edition was written by
, the award-winning independent journalist behind , an independent newsletter about drinking in America, and one I enjoy a great deal.For a limited time, ACBN readers can score a year of Fingers for 25% off:
Dave is based in Richmond, Virginia, and writes today on the bizarre, hilarious, and unwelcome side effects of contemporary "whiskey mania."
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I got a text from an old college buddy the other day. We both live in Virginia, and he’d gotten word that a liquor store near his house had received a new shipment of Blanton’s, a mid-shelf bourbon sold by the Sazerac Company best known for the silver horse figurines that adorn the top of each globular bottle’s cork stopper. My friend—let’s call him Mike—is a moderate brown-liquor enthusiast, and had signed up for the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority’s email list to learn when new releases and allocations arrived at the agency’s 350+ locations statewide. Blanton’s being solid, serviceable stuff, he’d moseyed over to his local VABC on his lunch break in hopes of picking up a couple bottles.
Fat chance. The store sold out of Blanton’s about 10 minutes after the agency’s email blast had arrived in Mike’s inbox. He didn’t get any bourbon that day. But what he did get was a front-row seat to one of the funniest and most embarrassing examples of the extent to which “whiskey mania” (or “bourbon mania,” depending on how you want to draw your lines around this phenomenon) has scrambled people’s brains over the past few years.
“One guy asked if he could have the empty case that the Blanton’s had come in,” Mike texted me from the VABC store parking lot. “They’d already sold out of the Blanton’s, mind you. He just wanted the branded cardboard box. The associate told him hard no.” He followed this up with a string of “lols” so long that it’d be intellectually insulting for me to barrage them with you here. Suffice it to say, Mike got a very good laugh out of the experience, and I did too.
I’ve told this story a few times before, and it’s now a regular in-joke in my shitpost repertoire. But if you’re just some normie who hasn’t shopped for whiskey in awhile, you may not find it so funny. People—OK, let’s be real, it’s mostly dudes—have gone absolutely hog-wild for the brown liquor in the past half-decade or so, and it’s creating bizarre distortions in the marketplace.
“Today, $75 is the new $35,” Dixon Dedman, the creator of Kentucky Owl (owned by Stolichnaya since 2017) told the New York Times in December 2022. The article, by the seasoned whiskey writer Clay Risen, ran under the headline “Where Did All the Bargain Bourbon Go? Blame the Whiskey Mania.” I certainly do.
As someone who used to be able to occasionally buy and drink Blanton’s without signing up for special email lists and throwing down hundreds of dollars for the privilege, I think all this sucks very much. But as an independent journalist who covers drinking in America, I think it rocks. The current brown-liquor gold rush we’re living through has people doing all sorts of insane shit, and insane shit is a lot of fun to write about. Which brings us to “taters.”
In the jargon of the too-online whiskey-collecting community, bourbon “taters” are too-enthusiastic dorks that have lately flooded into the formerly niche hobby, driving up prices and embarrassing themselves and others in the process. Asking for and getting denied an empty Blanton’s box is primo tater behavior. Starting a YouTube channel named, like, “Whiskey Business with Steve” that’s just you and your golf buddies hanging out in your bottle-lined mancave arguing about Weller special releases? Tater behavior. Getting divorced because your wife kept being like “Steve the YouTube channel is ruining our marriage and the basement smells like a dive bar” and you just ignored her? Behavior, thy name is tater.
“Some of the biggest taters I know have all their money tied up in bottles and can’t even afford like a shower curtain,” Aaron Goldfarb, a longtime spirits journalist and the author of Dusty Booze, a forthcoming book about rare-spirits hunters, told me earlier this year. “Like the typical tater—buying $100 Blanton to sell for $200—is a sad, not wealthy person.” Unhinged, unhygienic, and unspeakably grim—what’s not to love?!
As Goldfarb alludes, taters are often flippers, buying and reselling brown liquor at pornographic markups on informal, social-media-enabled black markets comprised of their tater brethren. If Prohibition taught us anything, it’s that illicit interstate liquor trade is corruption’s best friend, and buddy… it sure is.
Virginia has seen its fair share. Because the VABC sets MSRPs statewide, and said prices tend to hew closely to suppliers’ own wholesale pricing, spirits are often cheaper here than they might be in non-control states that are more responsive to spiking demand. This has created a whiskey arbitrage opportunity for residents (and flippers from neighboring Maryland, which is not controlled), who can make serious money buying bottles low and selling them much higher to other freaks enthusiasts on social media that either can’t find them at all, or have to pay higher, non-control prices. To stymie this (illegal, but robust!) black-market for bourbon, and reduce the crush of demand that descended on individual stores anytime word got out they’d received a shipment of, say, Colonel E.H. Taylor, VABC implemented a randomization system. Just three months later, investigators handed out four felony indictments to two jabronis (one, a VABC employee) for trying to sell intel about upcoming bourbon allocations on Facebook under very lazy pseudonyms. We love to see it, folks!
Bourbon mania isn’t limited to control states, but it does seem to be wreaking more havoc upon them. Oregon’s Liquor and Cannabis Commission (OLCC) has been convulsed for the past year with a cartoonish corruption scandal in which officials at the body’s highest levels were routing rare, high-end bourbons like Pappy Van Winkle from the state-run warehouse to nearby liquor stores, then personally showing up to buy them at face value. I mean! This Beaver State boondoggle has triggered resignations, spiraled to implicate lobbyists, and even featured a liquor-store owner emailing OLCC officials with potentially illegal plans to earmark Pappy for certain lawmakers.
To: Officials whose emails can be FOIA’d
Subject line: Bourbon crimes
Body: Let’s do them in these specific ways, on behalf of these specific people, in exchange for these specific favors. Sound good?
That is the good shit right there, folks. 10/10, no notes.
There’s so much more stupid, whiskey-based graft out there, man. I could write an entire fan-fic about the Washington, D.C. police lodge that sold thousands of dollars worth of custom-engraved Jack Daniels bottles (presumably to be poured into Thin Blue Line tumblers with bullet casings embedded in them?) in a scheme that the lodge itself later decided, after an internal investigation, was flatly illegal. I’m fascinated by the fact that somebody managed to pass fake Colonel E.H. Taylor at one high-end Manhattan liquor store. (Well, at least one.) And I am unironically delighted that mounting frustration with bourbon-related hijinks has inspired citizens to more closely scrutinize, in control states at least, how their tax dollars are being spent. Civic engagement is important!
But you know what else is important? Rank-and-file drinkers like you and me being able to get decent whiskey at a fair price. It brings me no pleasure to report that those prospects look bleak in the near term, folks. Many distillers are currently expanding their facilities, but whiskey is an aged product, so that additional capacity will take years to deliver meaningful increases in supply. And besides, those same distillers are currently enjoying the benefits of high demand; they have no incentive to flood the zone and cool their own red-hot market.
My friend Mike has two strategies for drinking decent brown liquor In These Times without buying it at ludicrous markups from dipshits on Facebook:
He monitors the VABC’s email blasts like a hawk.
He buys legitimately bad, cheap bourbons, then re-ages them in mini barrels at home to make them more palatable.
Your mileage may vary, but I refuse to do either of these things on principle. As far as I’m concerned, Evan Williams Bottled-in-Bond tastes fine, and I can still afford it by the handle. Nobody tell the taters.
—
Think you can escape hearing from me on a Wednesday? THINK AGAIN.
I’ve got a post of my own on the specific mania of bourbon tourism—er, “bourbonism”—here in Louisville over on
today. Check it out!—Scott Hines
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The funny thing about living in VA (state-controlled stores) but so close to MD (Private stores) and DC (maybe no laws at all pertaining to liquor stores? Who’s asking? Are you a cop?) is that the simplest booze question can turn into a knockdown drag-out fight over which stores in which locality you should visit for which items. If you ever need to create a distraction so you can sneak out of a gathering of booze-folks, just ask “hey, where can I get a bottle of Buffalo Trace?” and the ensuing melee will be all the cover you need.
They've yet to come for the regular Old Forester and for that, I am relieved. High rye and 86 proof makes it the ultimate utility player, imo