Several years ago, I was invited to an undisclosed bar in lower Manhattan that had just acquired a bottle of single malt Highlands Scotch from the 1960s. It ran $250 per ounce—luckily, I was not paying. The bottle was cracked, and as my companion and I took a sip, we looked at each other, not quite sure what to say. We took another sip. “This is terrible, right?,” my companion said. It was, in fact, one of the worst things I have ever tasted. Overly floral, but with an odd underlying cheesiness, it was impossible to finish.

“I think it’s become easy to dupe uneducated consumers into buying anything with a story, and being historical or antique is its own story,” says Joshua Richholt, a vintage spirits collector and managing partner of The Well, in Brooklyn.

When we refer to antique or vintage spirits, we’re not simply talking about Scotch with an old age statement. Instead, we’re referring to bottles that were literally released decades ago. Today, sipping these old spirits has become such a status symbol that many drinkers have no problem paying hundreds of dollars an ounce for a glass of, say, 1965 Old Fitzgerald, or tens of thousands of dollars for a bottle of 1979 W.L. Weller. This thinking that old equals great has caused auction houses like Christie’s to start vintage spirits programs, illicit secondary markets to boom online and high-end vintage bars, like Mordecai in Chicago and Old Lightning in Los Angeles, to flourish.

While vintage spirits have only recently become widespread and accessible to most, the market for them actually goes back several decades. “I was really the pioneer of the vintage spirit market,” claims longtime bartender Salvatore Calabrese. In 1984, he began serving vintage Cognac and Armagnac at Dukes Hotel London. His first acquisition was a bottle of 1914 Croizet, which he acquired for £70. When he sold off the entire bottle in one week at £15 a glass, he knew he was onto something. He quickly began amassing a collection of Cognac and Armagnac that stretched back to the 18th century, thus blazing a trail for consumers who would gladly overpay to taste what Calabrese dubbed “liquid history.”

When America’s high-end restaurant world began dipping its toes into vintage spirits, it was also by way of Cognac. Alex Bachman, one of the world’s top dusty bottle hunters via his company, Sole Agent, first noticed this while working as a sommelier at Chicago’s Michelin-starred Charlie Trotter’s in the early 2000s.

“These rich regulars would come into Charlie Trotter’s: ‘Hey, I’ve got this bottle of Napoleonic Cognac we gotta open.’ ‘I’ve got Amer Picon from the ’30s,’” recalls Bachman. “It was very obscure shit they were genuinely curious to taste.”

Sensing an opportunity, Bachman says the sommeliers at Trotter’s and other key spots in town started curating small collections of vintage spirits for top customers. And Trotter’s eventually offered a small cache of old Cognac, Scotch and eau de vie, though they never formalized the program by creating a menu for it. It was mainly a hand sell for VIPs.

“We would fly rock star chefs over for dinners, guys like Joël Robuchon, and [Trotter’s] wealthy, multi-repeat customers would always want to drink crazy booze at the events,” recalls Bachman. “That was the first time I really saw people enjoying vintage spirits in a service environment.”

Meanwhile, a slew of single-category collectors had slowly been emerging in the States. Many, like San Francisco’s Julio Bermejo, turned their bars into a showroom for their vintage obsessions. After taking over the beverage program at his father’s eponymous Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco in the late 1980s, Bermejo saw a need to educate his consumers on 100 percent agave tequila, which was a rarity in America at the time.

“What got me started [stocking vintage in the bar] was my love of Herradura and the fact that they had said that they were purposely changing their recipe,” he says. Not trusting that the change would be for the better, he starting snatching up any cases he could find of pre-1992 bottlings. His collection now totals over 160 different releases, and he continues to acquire old stock, mostly when he stumbles upon it, like he did recently when he found a 55-case pallet of 2006 El Jimador Añejo in a Brown-Forman warehouse in Kentucky.

Martin Cate, whose much-loved tiki bar, Smuggler’s Cove, lies a few miles east of Tommy’s, began offering vintage rums upon opening in 2009, primarily in an effort to understand what old tiki classics had once tasted like. Cate, along with Chicago’s Paul McGee and New Orleans’ Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, was amongst the earliest group of tiki devotees who began displaying intriguing examples of rums that had flavor profiles that simply didn’t exist in current products. For many modern tiki enthusiasts, this opportunity to thus “time travel” to a past they’d never been a part of—even if at a heavy cost—was hard to pass up.

If many of these late-aughts and early-2010s bars built their programs around vintage Caribbean rum, French brandy and tequila, it’s mostly American whiskey that is driving the current feeding frenzy for vintage booze. Bourbon lovers have become obsessed with tasting examples from defunct distilleries, like Stitzel-Weller, with many consumers absolutely certain old whiskey is better than anything we have today.

With every new trend, there’s a boom, and then, unfortunately, comes a wealth of inexperience, whether from the professionals or the consumers.

The first bar owners to really afford consumers the opportunity to sample America’s lost whiskey history were three men in three separate cities: Mike Miller, who opened Delilah’s in Chicago back in 1993; Bill Thomas, who gave us the Jack Rose Dining Saloon in Washington, D.C., in 2011; and Jamie Boudreau, who opened Canon in Seattle in 2011 with a “a single row of the sprawling floor-to-ceiling shelving… dedicated to liquor bottles of at least 100 years of age.”

Today, Canon is the reigning World’s Best Spirits Selection at Tales of the Cocktail three times over and boasts over $1 million worth of American whiskey. Last year, Boudreau even joked to PUNCH, “We have more vintage [bourbon] than the Bourbon Museum in Kentucky, and many of their bottles are empty.”

By the early 2010s, the success of bars like Canon had attracted the cocktail revolution’s “in” crowd. Soon an arms race had begun.

Longman & Eagle opened in 2010 in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, offering National Distillers-era Old Grand-Dad and Jim Beam from the 1960s. In 2012, Pouring Ribbons opened in Manhattan with an entire vintage Chartreuse list. And while vintage amaro is seemingly everywhere these days, its moment started at places like Chicago’s Billy Sunday back in 2013.

The trend reached a fever pitch in 2015 with the opening of Milk Room, a pricey, eight-seat bar in the Chicago Athletic Association hotel. The intimate space, helmed by McGee, offered not only vintage whiskey, rum and amaro, but entire vintage cocktails, like a Hanky Panky made using ingredients dating to the 1940s. (The desire to completely recreate vintage cocktails would soon become an integral feature of the trend.)

In the last few years, vintage wonderlands have begun opening, places like Mordecai, White Lightning and Justins’ House of Bourbon in Lexington, the latter bolstered by a recent law that allows Kentucky retailers to acquire vintage bottles directly from home collectors. That law and similar ones in other states have opened the floodgates, and now countless bars and restaurants are dabbling in vintage spirits.

As the trend has grown, the quality of the curation in many newer bars has greatly declined. “With every new trend, there’s a boom, and then, unfortunately, comes a wealth of inexperience, whether from the professionals or the consumers,” says Bachman, who declined to name the bars he believes are doing vintage spirits a disservice. It may actually be the customers that are fueling this cash grab, however.

“Folks are buying things now just because they’re old,” says Justin Thompson, co-owner of Justins’ House of Bourbon. A top buyer and seller of vintage American whiskey, recently he’s noticed customers interested in old gin, which he finds odd. Midcentury gin is known as being a particularly dark era for the category, with brands licensing out their name to various distilleries without much quality control. Yet countless bars are now stocking examples from the era, both for single pours and in vintage cocktails.

“The old [gin] doesn’t taste anything like it used to,” claims Richholt, “even though it often gets marketed as ‘trying it like the original recipe was meant to taste.’” Some of the actual producers of these spirits don’t think the older versions are particularly great, either. “A bottle of prewar gin is going to be quite a grainy alcohol,” says Sean Harrison, current master distiller of Plymouth Gin. He’s tasted plenty of vintage bottles of both Plymouth Gin and other brands and doesn’t understand why people today are spending tons of money to taste them, especially in $45 cocktails. “I don’t like these ‘100-year-old’ cocktails. The essential oils will have gone, and the alcohol base probably wasn’t that great in the first place.”

His words are suggestive enough to make one wonder if many of these vintage bars are being fully transparent. Is it in their best interest to reveal that a 1960s gin is subpar when they’re able to sell it for $75 an ounce—especially when moneyed consumers are seemingly programmed to believe that old is equivalent to great?

Anthony LaPorta, the assistant director at The Aviary NYC and The Office in Manhattan, was the only vintage spirits professional I talked to who disputed the point that consumers today overrate vintage. “Every now and then I will have guests who make the assumption that age equals quality, but most people actually feel the opposite,” notes LaPorta, who started selling vintage bottles at The Office’s original Chicago branch. “They’re skeptical there’s any real difference. I have spirits in the collection that are unbelievably good, and I can’t charge what I think they’re worth because they don’t carry enough value for my guests.”

He cites a 1940s Cognac at $265 per ounce as being one of the best-tasting spirits in The Office’s current collection, but one he is simply unable to move. “[It] sounds expensive, I know, but if it was bourbon it would be twice as much.” (Ironically, old Cognac, the spirit that helped kick off the vintage spirits obsession, has now been largely left behind.)

To this point, LaPorta believes that where the customer typically wins out is with unexpected liqueurs, like amaretto, which change in interesting ways over the years. “With lower demand for less commonly ordered vintage spirits, like Fernet Branca, Jägermeister or Southern Comfort, we can acquire and sell them for a lower price, which in turn builds appeal [toward other vintage spirits],” explains LaPorta. “We actually sold an entire bottle of vintage ouzo in less than a week because it was delicious and cheap. I was convinced I’d be sitting on that one for years; when was the last time you heard anyone ask for ouzo?”

The fact that LaPorta is selling something as obscure as 1970s ouzo points to just how big the trend has become. Online, it’s initiated a sort of mad dash within private Facebook buy/sell groups that shows no signs of slowing.

“There’s a lot of older whiskey that is just blended with GNS [grain-neutral spirit],” notes Richholt. “It’s gross shit, but people on the secondary market still buy it for hundreds [of dollars] simply because it’s old and they don’t realize it’s just flavored vodka.”

Maybe it’s because, in a world where even dive bars can make bespoke Negronis, ordering a classic cocktail has become less exciting. When even chain restaurants have bourbon “unicorn” bottles like George T. Stagg on the back bar, something more unique needs to be pursued by the most committed connoisseurs. Fanatics want to continually up the ante in regards to what they are buying, drinking and, most importantly, bragging about online.

There’s more than enough evidence that age may not, in fact, equal greatness when it comes to spirits. But when you’re peddling a spirit that only a handful of living folks have tasted, it’s really just mystique you’re selling. It’s not the first word in “liquid history” that has become most desired; it’s the second. Or, as Mordecai bar manager Tom Lisy summed it up:

“People want to feel connected and transported to the past. It’s romantic, sentimental and nostalgic—all qualities people love investing in.”

The post When Did Age Start to Equal Greatness in Spirits? appeared first on PUNCH.

Henry had business in Hong Kong back in the fall of 2016. Despite there being plenty of direct flights from there to his home in Los Angeles, on one trip he decided to book an unnecessary overnight layover in Taipei. Henry had learned that Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport had just opened a standalone duty-free store curated by The Macallan and, to celebrate, the Scotch distillery had produced an exclusive bottling called the Boutique Collection, sold only at that airport. He had to have it.

“I book a lot of layover flights, a lot of broken up flights, in order to hunt for whiskey,” explains Henry, a popular Instagram follow under the handle @thewhiskywalker, who frequently posts from airports. “It’s not uncommon for me to have three or four stopovers on my way home.” This active travel schedule means he is able to intentionally search the world’s airports for unique whiskey finds like the Boutique Collection. (Henry made the same trip in 2017 to score the second annual release.)

While most duty-free shops today are packed with rubes hauling home handles of Johnnie Walker Black to save a few bucks, obsessives like Henry are carefully manipulating their flight plans to pass through airports that may have a rare bottle of single malt—or, better yet, a one-off (known as a “travel exclusive”) whiskey sold specifically at that airport.

Duty-free pursuers tend to be completists of certain brands, unwilling to miss out on a single release, no matter how obscure or far-flung. Hans-Henrik Hansen, said to be the world’s preeminent Glenfiddich collector, is one of those hunters. The Danish hotel chef started buying duty-free when he travelled to Prestwick, Scotland, in 2003, upon hearing they had a duty-free bottling produced to honor the launch of the Queen Mary 2. A few years later, he used his honeymoon as an excuse to grab a Glenfiddich 1978 Private Vintage that could only be bought aboard a Virgin Atlantic flight to New York. His new wife supported that trip, but she doesn’t encourage them all.

“When Glenfiddich Private Vintage 1975 came out [aboard Cathay Pacific flights to Hong Kong], I asked her if she wanted to go to Hong Kong and she said, ‘No,’” explains Hansen. “I told her, ‘But you have to! I’ve already bought the tickets.’” She eventually relented and they bought enough bottles to fill two empty suitcases before returning home.

Unfortunately, the golden days of duty-free whiskey have been over for several years. With continued fears of a global whiskey shortage, many distilleries no longer see a reason to offer particularly compelling airport exclusives.

Zurich Airport, for example, was once hailed as a top-spot for duty-free grabs because of the vast wealth that passes through it. Not so anymore, believes Henry. “Their whiskey selection today is the same as you’d find at JFK,” he bluntly notes—and that’s not a compliment (though he does recommend hitting the Swiss Air Senator Lounge for a quick dram). Travel exclusives in most American airports especially tend to leave much to be desired; the bourbon distilleries mostly don’t produce them, either.

Still, there are occasional finds to be had across the globe if you know where to go and what to look for. Visiting key duty-free shops online won’t help; you’ll find hard-to-navigate websites without much info about current stock. Henry sheepishly admits he sets Google Alerts for all his favorite brands. That was how he saw a random press release announcing that first Boutique release at TPE. Another way to hunt, other collectors will tell you, is geo-locating particular duty-free locales on Instagram. It’s a savvy, albeit time-consuming move, so Henry recommends starting with duty-free stores at airports in the six cities below, which tend to keep bottles excite connoisseurs.

Heathrow Airport (LHR)

The World of Whiskies shops in four separate terminals famously stock some of the most limited and expensive whiskies in the world, including Glenfiddich Cask Collection Finest Solera, a travel exclusive, and Glenmorangie Pride 1974, which retails for £7,200 ($9,648). In the last year, there have been more reasonable exclusives, from a BenRiach 12-Year-Old (a special cask bottling, distilled in 2005 and released in honor of Heathrow Whisky Festival) to a 10-year-old Loch Lomond Inchmurrin Single Cask, which was limited to 278 bottles. You can even pre-order online for pickup.

Edinburgh Airport (EDI)

It’s hardly a surprise Scotland’s busiest airport would have a great single malt selection. The World of Whiskies shops here include travel exclusives for the well-heeled jet-setter like the Craigellachie 33-Year-Old at £2,000 ($2,680) all the way down to more reasonably priced options like Laphroaig PX Cask at £70 ($90). They also offer their own Highland Park 14-Year-Old Single Cask bottlings, these cask strength offerings being a big trend in duty-free at the moment.

Warsaw Chopin Airport (WAW)

While few think of Poland as a whiskey mecca, their main airport is surprisingly well-stocked. Bypass the insane amount of wodka at Aelia Duty Free for exceptionally priced big-ticket Scotch like Highland Park Ragnvald and Bowmore 1973. The diverse selection is also stocked with tons of Asian whiskey that’s largely not available in the U.S., like Nikka 12 Years Old as well as several Kavalan travel exclusives.

Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (TPE)

The larger of Taipei’s two airports has several Ever Rich Duty Free locations, which recently opened the Macallan standalone shop in the departures area of the terminal, just after immigration. Besides Macallan one-offs from the newly-introduced Boutique Collection, the name of the game is the hometown favorite here: Kavalan. Ever Rich offers a very wide selection of Kavalan Solist bottlings priced at about half of what they cost in America.

Hong Kong International Airport (HKG)

Last year, the travel retailer DFS Group opened The Whiskey House at Hong Kong International Airport in collaboration with William Grant & Sons. That means a great selection of limited offerings from their portfolio, such as Glenfiddich 25 Year Old Rare Oak and Balvenie 21-year-old Madeira Cask Finish. HKG also has several special Single Cask Series bottlings from Highland Park, specially labeled for the airport.

Narita International Airport (NRT) | Haneda Airport (HND)

You can’t go wrong at either of Tokyo’s airports, both of which used to have Japanese whisky aplenty before the rest of the world caught on. But there are still scores to be had, like the Nikka Taketsuru 21 Year Pure Malt, as well as quality single malts like Laphroaig 25 Year Cask Strength, Glenlivet XXV and GlenDronach 27 Year Old Single Cask. What you really want to stumble upon, however, are the special painted bottlings of Suntory brands like Hibiki Japanese Harmony Master’s Select, which are arguably the world’s top duty-free exclusives.

The post The Duty-Free Hunters appeared first on PUNCH.

In the spring of 2017, Steven Zeller and eight of his friends from the New York-based whiskey group he co-founded—the Beast Masters Club—flew down to Kentucky to buy single barrels of bourbon. During a stop into a nearby Liquor Barn to stock up on supplies for the weekend, somebody in the group caught sight of an illustration of a sweating pickle on a plastic bag in the check-out line. The group found it so hilarious that the Van Holten’s pickle-in-a-pouch turned into the weekend’s unofficial mascot. When they finally received bottles from their Russell’s Reserve private selection, they thought the pickle deserved a tribute.

“One of the guys in the club made a sticker where he took the hot pickle [illustration] and put him on the beach underneath a palm tree,” explains Zeller. They stuck the label on the back of every bottle of their Russell’s Reserve haul (which they dubbed “The Hot Pickle”) and posted them online. All 160 bottles sold out almost immediately.

While so-called barrel “picks” have been hot in the bourbon world for a while—that is, single barrels individually selected by bars, liquor stores and private groups like Beast Masters Club—the post-purchase addition of cartoonish stickers is a newer phenomenon. It’s a trend that has taken the community by storm over the last few years, artificially driving the prices of these bottles into the hundreds of dollars.

Take Goykh Smash!, a Four Roses bottle featuring the Incredible Hulk punching through rocks. It has become one of the most legendary sticker-clad picks and currently sells for over $500 on the secondary market. Another, Tipsy Buffalo (a Buffalo Trace bottle with a sticker depicting a blotto bison), soared as high as $300. There are countless others, from a bottle slapped with John C. Reilly’s preening Mike Honcho from “Talladega Nights” to Beetlejuice to Mr. Peanut treating a peanut butter jar like a port-a-potty on a bottle dubbed “The First Flush.”

“You have a lot of what I call ‘funny money’ online,” explains Beau Johnson, a former member of The Fifth Column (T5C) whiskey club, in reference to private buy/sell whiskey groups on Facebook. “Everyone is seeking the next cool thing. And if you can’t get something, all of the sudden, you want it even more. All because of a sticker! There’s this perceived rarity where these crazy valuations are real myopic and incestuous.”

Zeller is quick to point out that it was neither he nor the Beast Masters that started adding stickers to bottles. “I got the general idea from Doug’s Green Ink,” he notes, citing a legendary Willett Family Estate single barrel rye from 2006, noted not just for its exceptional taste, but because its selector, Doug Phillips, filled in the barrel information with, yes, green ink. As Zeller explains: “He was branding his particular barrel, something I had never seen before.”

While Zeller doesn’t know exactly with whom or when the trend began, a trail does lead back to T5C. Consisting of around 30 online collectors from across the country, T5C began buying Smooth Ambler single barrels in the fall of 2014. Back then, Smooth Ambler Old Scout labels offered a blank space at the top of them where one could stamp the logo of the barrel’s particular buyer. Early on, buyers simply had their store logo or bar name printed on the label. For their first barrel purchase, however, T5C opted to have “FS/FT” stamped on the label—an acronym for “For Sale/For Trade.” But it wasn’t until their second bottling—dubbed “Jawbreaker”—that things really took off.

“This name was a play on some guy on one of the Facebook [whiskey] groups who had gotten angry once and claimed he was going to break another member’s jaw,” explains Johnson. “That really started this whole tongue-in-cheek, inside joke thing that has begat all these special labels.”

For some collectors, the stickers aren’t just about hijinks. For the longest time, if you bought a single barrel, it might come with a tiny distillery add-on sticker that mentioned the recipe (Four Roses) or a “neckling” hang tag that noted the warehouse the barrel came from (Wild Turkey). Distilleries like Buffalo Trace and Jim Beam merely slapped on tiny decals that noted who picked that particular barrel. The earliest private stickers often provided missing information. “It’s really about the details of the barrel, which companies aren’t great about putting on their bottles,” says Zeller.

So, what do the brands think about their bottles being relabeled and sold online? The executives I reached out to at distilleries like Wild Turkey and Buffalo Trace know about the stickers and, while few celebrate it, they mostly ignore them. If anything, the whiskey groups are more likely to get a cease and desist from, say, Van Holten’s for unapproved use of their pickle logo—as was the case with the Beast Masters Club, who simply censored the image on their website.

In fact, these “private label” bottles are only growing in number. You can hardly consider yourself a respectable whiskey group these days if you don’t have a few private-barrel picks on the docket and if you aren’t branding them with your group’s very own sticker. It is each group’s way of offering their personal stamp of approval—and a way of signaling to would-be online buyers what’s in the bottle.

“We’re known for going for the highest proof, the richest, darkest, spiciest taste,” notes Zeller of Beast Masters Club. “So putting our stickers on our bottles, it’s like the Blockbuster employee recommendations thing on the shelf.”

The post The “Private Labels” Ruling Whiskey’s Black Market appeared first on PUNCH.

In the summer of 2000, when I was an intern living in NYU’s West 3rd Street dorms, my roommate and I would hit Down the Hatch for cheap pitchers of Miller Lite, or Off the Wagon for games of beer pong. In my early 20s, when I dated someone on the Upper West Side, we’d spend happy hours at The Gin Mill and play late-night foosball at Jake’s Dilemma. I watched my friend run the New York City Marathon hanging my head out the window of the Upper East Side’s Stumble Inn. I once forgot my credit card at The 13th Step and lost my jacket at 3 Sheets Saloon.

Dotted around Manhattan like an Olympic track with the oval starting in the West Village and ending on the Upper West Side, there are eight bars that belong to the NYC Best Bars group—a series of dives unremarkable in every aspect, except for their unbelievable staying power over the last quarter-century.

“When I look at our trajectory,” notes Jennifer Kay, an operating partner since 1994, “I constantly ask myself, ‘How are we still holding on? Why do people still care about us these days?’”

Not yet old enough to be deified as historical watering holes, they’re likewise not doing anything cutting-edge enough to have a place in the zeitgeist. Most of the bars were opened before the craft beer and cocktail revolutions kicked off and still persevere despite continuing to predominantly serve macro brews and well drinks. Most of my friends and fellow writers thought it was self-evident why the bar group is so successful: They serve cheap drinks in an expensive city. But I thought there had to be more to it.

The group’s origin dates to the late 1980s, when NYU undergrad Mitchell Banchik noticed there were plenty of downscale bars in Midtown, but none in Greenwich Village. By age 29, he and two of his frat brothers had scraped together $75,000 to secure a space, built out the interior themselves and, in October of 1991, opened Down the Hatch. They served pitchers of beer for $4.50, promoted constant happy hour specials and offered a Ladies’ Night. According to Banchik, Down the Hatch was also the first bar to offer Jägermeister on tap, via a system he jury-rigged himself.

“We were a word-of-mouth sensation,” explains Banchik. “All I did was place one ad in the NYU law school paper. It simply said, ‘Don’t Pass the Bar.’”

By 1992, a good real estate deal allowed him to expand to the Upper East Side—another hotbed for young people. He took over a space called Geronimo’s Bamba Bay Cafe; still lacking funds, he ripped down half the sign and suddenly it became Mo’s (today it is known as The Stumble Inn). It was an instant hit.

“Think back to the 1990s,” says Kay. “There are no iPhones. Yelp doesn’t exist. People had less choices and less access to information. The tools people use now weren’t around, so when you got out of the subway station, you had to already know where you were going for the night. And that became us.”

Jake’s Dilemma opened on the Upper West Side in 1994, and in 1996 they added The Gin Mill less than a block away, on Amsterdam Ave. Off the Wagon appeared in 1998 back in the West Village. The 13th Step, Hair of the Dog and 3 Sheets Saloon would all eventually open in the East Village by 2012. They all looked pretty much the same, served the same burgers-and-wings pub grub and cheap drinks and boasted the same type of clientele: 20-something bros and their female counterparts. Today, the company consists of 350 employees, including 12 managing partners, but is virtually absent from any online discussion of New York nightlife.

“We don’t even get a mention when Eater lists their best happy hours deals,” says Banchik. “But ours are by far the best!”

Of course, it’s not entirely true that they don’t get press. “Popular UES Bar Is ‘Drunk Mill’ for Young Revelers, Locals Say,” offers the headline on a 2013 DNAInfo article about The Stumble Inn; “Man smashes pitcher on beer pong player’s head,” reads another, from the New York Post on Jake’s Dilemma. In 2013, Complex ranked The 13th Step the ninth “douchiest” bar in the city, saying it was stocked with the “frattiest frat boys” who cram in a basement bar “damp with shame and sticky discarded Natty Light.” (The Stumble Inn, 3 Sheets Saloon and The Gin Mill appeared on the same list in 2011.) And when Thrillist’s Dave Infante tackled “The 21 Biggest Bro Bars in the Country” in 2015, The 13th Step was his only New York inclusion. The next year, when he offered “50 Signs You’re A New York City Douchebag,” it was again the city’s only bar mentioned by name.

When I ask David Covucci, formerly of BroBible, why these bars are still so successful, he, too, responds with the knee-jerk reaction of cheap drinks, before eventually offering something more thoughtful: “They’re basically college bars you can go to after you graduate,” he explains. “Everyone had spots like them in their college town, and they are the only ones in NYC like that.”

That’s perhaps the most plausible answer I’ve heard. When New York magazine deigned to review The Gin Mill in 2009, they called it a “non-stop frat party for sneaker-footed and jeans-clad 20-somethings, with Fordham and Columbia grads particularly well-represented.”

In a city that, perhaps more than any other, forces its residents to perpetually toe the line between true adulthood (your rent is $3000 a month) and arrested development (you will have roommates forever and your parents will always be your guarantor), maybe the NYC Best Bars group simply offer a comfortable limbo for young New Yorkers eventually headed somewhere else—to better jobs, nicer apartments, marriage, families, maybe even the suburbs.

Anyone who chooses to make New York City their home after college can identify with that need to have a place that doesn’t rush you to grow up. So maybe that’s why these bars are still so packed every night. Because with each vodka-soda ordered, your inevitable descent into adulthood is prolonged just a little bit longer.

Or, maybe it’s just the cheap drinks.

The post Don’t Grow Up, Go to Stumble Inn appeared first on PUNCH.

In early 2015, Campari approached Kristin Donnelly, co-founder of small-batch lip balm manufacturer Stewart & Claire, with an intriguing proposition. The Italian spirits giant wanted her to produce a Negroni-flavored product for them.

“I didn’t think I could do it, but I mixed myself a Negroni, and started playing around,” says Donnelly. “It’s such an aromatic cocktail, so it’s hard to figure out. There must be hundreds of botanicals between the gin, vermouth and Campari.”

But by combining a few essential oils—from jojoba, Peru balsam, gentian root, sweet and bitter oranges and, of course, juniper—she eventually created something that smelled a lot like the of-the-moment cocktail. Campari had intended to simply use the lip balm as a giveaway during that summer’s annual Negroni Week, but Donnelly realized the product had staying power and began offering it to her customers. Three years later, it’s still Stewart & Claire’s best-seller.

But Negroni-flavored lip balm is just the tip of the iceberg. Today there are Negroni donuts, Negroni ice creams, Negroni lollipops, Negroni pizzas, Negroni beers and even Negroni salt. These products are sold in suburban malls, coastal hipster boutiques and on Amazon. More than any other cocktail, the Negroni has transcended the drinks arena to become a flavor unto itself.

“I think a lot of these products are a fun way for people to reimagine this iconic cocktail,” explains Karen Foley, publisher of Imbibe. “They’re also a great way for people to be introduced to the flavors of the Negroni if they’ve never tried the cocktail itself.”

In 2013, the same year that Campari and Imbibe launched their inaugural Negroni Week, dishes inspired by the bittersweet Italian cocktail began popping up. That July, the first article on the phenomenon appeared in the Bay Area’s 7X7, which claimed Campari had “found a new home on plates and in kitchens throughout the city,” citing several dishes, including Perbacco’s Negroni caramel popcorn.

Desserts were, in fact, the Negroni’s entrée into the culinary world. “Boozy baking was definitely something that had already been on the rise for a while,” recalls Foley of the era, and the Negroni’s sweet and bitter, citrusy and floral flavor profile just naturally worked in a variety of items. Butter & Scotch, a food stand at Brooklyn’s weekly Smorgasburg, stumbled onto a hit when cocktail bar Ward III asked them to make Negroni pies for their Sunday “industry night.”

“Cocktails work well because they are sugar-based to begin with, so it’s no great stretch to translate that flavor into dessert form,” explains Keavy Landreth, co-founder of Butter & Scotch. Her Negroni pie has a custard base made with equal parts gin, Campari and sweet vermouth which she claims is balanced by its savory all-butter crust. The incredible buzz it generated on social media eventually helped Landreth and her partner open a brick-and-mortar shop in Crown Heights in 2015.

If many of these Negroni items appeared organically early on, by then Campari was heavily promoting the emerging “trend” to writers. (I must admit I wrote about this new wave of Negroni foods for Esquire that very summer.) That year Campari’s PR team asked Manhattan’s The Doughnut Project if they could produce Negroni donuts, while Tipsy Scoop, an alcoholic ice cream maker, was asked to produce a Grapefruit Negroni Creamsicle flavor.

It wasn’t just desserts either. Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco started offering a Negroni-esque pizza as early as 2011, which included a Campari and blood orange reduction as the sauce base. Oregon’s Jacobsen Salt Co. created a Negroni salt that combined mineral salt with juniper berries, orange peel and Campari. The Negroni even spread to other beverages with Colorado’s New Belgium and several other breweries creating Negroni beers.

It’s easy to think this onslaught of Negroni items only exists due to a brand’s marketing ploy. But, if it was so simple to go viral, why wouldn’t, I don’t know, Gosling’s make a push for Dark ‘n’ Stormy pies? Or Galliano try to infect the world with Harvey Wallbanger cupcakes? Even as both Campari and Imbibe have slowed down on commissioning and promoting Negroni spin-off items, new ones have continued to emerge while the original ones show real staying power.

Of course, other cocktails have indeed been tackled by the food world. The much-maligned Mojito had a bit of a moment outside the cocktail world in the late aughts, though it always appeared in distinctly more white-bread settings—“lo-cal” powdered drink mixes, as frozen dinners, on chain restaurant menus and especially in the form of grilling rubs and marinades. These items weren’t really a comestible analogue for the rum cocktail; they were just minty and citrusy and vaguely “Cuban,” piggybacking on the popularity of the cocktail’s name. Thankfully, most of those products have been discontinued by now.

As for the most famous cocktail of them all, the Martini seems destined to never escape the confines of the cocktail glass. Its dry, boozy flavor profile just doesn’t seem to work elsewhere. “I considered a Martini lip balm,” explains Donnelly. “But with the essential oils [I’d need to use], you know, juniper and lemon, you’d probably have people going, ‘Does this smell too much like a bathroom cleaner?’”

Ultimately, it’s not merely flavor profile that has allowed the Negroni to reign supreme outside the bar scene. Its name alone carries a certain mystique; evocative, but not just of one thing, it allows the cocktail to shapeshift into new forms without losing its essential charm.

“The Negroni just has a certain allure,” claims Donnelly, “with its Italian connections, as a before-dinner drink, as something bitter that is also sweet. The romance of it all continues to be really appealing to people.” 

The post Is This a Negroni? appeared first on PUNCH.

“King Cocktail” Dale DeGroff likes his Miller High Life served alongside shots of Old Grand-Dad. Brooklyn bar owner St. John Frizell opts for his as a boilermaker either with rye whiskey or chilled Jäger. Tiki pirate Brian Miller likes High Life with some absinthe, while James Beard Award-winning bar maven Martin Cate like his with a bourbon. Chapel Hill cocktail bar owner Gary Crunkleton is happy just drinking it ice cold and straight from the bottle.

“To me, this simple, inexpensive beer captures what [my] bar is all about,” he told PUNCH earlier this year

Actually, we’ve come to learn that Miller High Life seems to capture what a lot of people in the beverage industry are all about. Whether cocktail experts, top bartenders, brewery owners or even typically snooty beer geeks, the century-old industrial lager (first introduced in 1903) is continually referenced whenever we conduct a Lookbook interview. Somehow, this is the one macro beer that improbably has cachet amongst the industry cognoscenti. Why is that?

“Drinking a lager beer in general represents a simple approach to life,” Crunkleton explains. “Making it a Miller High Life gives that simple approach more weight or significance.”

How did “The Champagne of Beers” garner this gravitas while its equals lack it completely? There really doesn’t seem to be a lot of difference between High Life and, say, Budweiser or Coors Light or even PBR. It scores a ghastly 9 (out of 100) on RateBeer compared to Budweiser, which getts a 3, Coors Light a 2, and PBR a 22. It’s not even the best of the most abysmal pale lagers available. However, it does taste markedly different from those mostly-indistinguishable lagers.

“It has a serious notch up in sweetness, a much sweeter flavor profile,” explains Joshua Van Horn, owner of Brooklyn’s Gold Star Beer Counter, and a longtime High Life fan. “It’s also not as crisp as some of the other light beers, which makes it way more chuggable.”

Who knows if that is intentional. High Life is brewed at the same Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing plant that makes plenty of other déclassé beers, including everything from Miller Lite, to Milwaukee’s Best to MGD and Colt 45. Like those and many others, High Life is made with extracts and adjuncts like rice or corn, which help lend it an extremely light body.

One unique separator is that it, of course, comes in a clear bottle which are typically verboten due to their inability to block UV light and thus elicit skunking—“Not a good thing, but it does set it apart,” adds Van Horn. It’s neck has a iconic little lady on it. Of course, the easiest explanation for the High Life love is its are-you-being-ironic? motto.

As Robert Simonson posited for PUNCH back in 2015, right as High Life was beginning its moment amongst big city hipsters, “[I] suspect they’re charmed by the corniness of the old ‘Champagne of Beer’ slogan.”

Maybe, but it’s not only beer drinkers who are charmed. Beer makers seem to have a real reverence for Miller High Life as well. Like Chicago’s Marz Community Brewing, who last summer released Chug Life, a “sparkling” lager offered in suspiciously similar champagne-shaped bottles.

“We obviously love weird, extreme, and hopped-up beers. That’s why we got into the business of brewing,” explains Eric Olson, Marz’s co-founder. “However, tasting these big flavor beers throughout brewing, fermentation, and beyond can lead to palate fatigue.” He explains that that’s how Miller’s “carbonated barley-soda” (as he jokingly labels it) became a hit amongst staff—and a beer worth mimicking in their own brewhouse.

Another Chicago brewer revered High Life so much he decided to just collaborate with them. John Laffler’s Off Color Brewing had garnered much acclaim producing oddball beers both historical (Finnish-style sahti, for example) and uniquely modern (s’mores beer). In 2016, the online world was stunned when he revealed he had teamed up with MillerCoors to brew a beer—essentially taking High Life wort and fermenting it with Off Color’s funky mixed yeast strain. The resulting beer, Eeek!, quickly gained notoriety.

“High Life is just one of those real classic beers,” Laffler said at the time. “As a brewer you can really respect the art that goes into it.”

But really, most of this love for High Life is not about its “art,” nor is it necessarily about any sort of tangible flavor quality that sets it apart. Instead, maybe it’s like Proust and his madeleine and about the memories it rouses of special people whose drink it was in the past.

“My dad used to drink it,” reveals Crunkleton. “I drink Miller High Life because it reminds me of the pride I had for my dad when I was a kid, wanting to be like him, and remembering how proud I was that he was mine. The comfort that comes from those memories can be considered the Champagne of life.”

The post The Proustian Allure of the Miller High Life appeared first on PUNCH.

Sitting in the back of my refrigerator, behind an old jar of capers and a bottle of rosé my wife opened this summer but never finished, lives a Jack’s Abby beer growler holding contents born several months before my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter: eggnog I made during the 2015 Christmas season. Has it turned green and curdled? Is it straight milky poison? Hardly. Not only is it potable, it’s more delicious and “safe” than the fresh eggnog I’ll make again this year. Yet convincing nonbelievers of that is a tall order.

“It was entirely possible that it wouldn’t work out and we would have wasted time, energy and precious spirits,” explained Patrick Smith, bar manager at New York’s The Modern, which  launched their Bourbon Barrel-Aged Egg Nog (sic) last week. Made of a Crème anglaise pumpkin custard spiked with bourbon, Venezuelan rum, Cognac and Frangelico, then topped with calvados sabayon, it was aged in 15 1/2-gallon Finger Lakes Distilling Company’s McKenzie Bourbon barrels starting in July. “But luckily it ended up tasting fantastic, with the vanilla and spice flavors from the barrel really tempering the alcohol content and generally rounding things out; while somehow also making it more full-bodied and decadent.”

If folks are a bit squeamish, best of luck trying to talk them into drinking something composed of raw eggs and dairy which expired a long time ago. But just three weeks aging at around 14 percent ABV causes the booze to sterilize any potential pathogens. People in colonial times didn’t need the FDA or Rockefeller University—who tested out this hypothesis in 2009—to learn that, however, they just inherently knew.

“Let set in cool place for several days. Taste frequently,” are the final instructions in George Washington’s eggnog recipe from the Old Farmer’s Almanac. The first president would have almost certainly learned about eggnog (or, perhaps, its forebear called “posset”) from English and Irish settlers. Without refrigeration techniques, in fact, nearly all eggnog would have been somewhat aged well into the 20th century.

You can find discussion of aged eggnog all the way up to 1948’s The Wise Encyclopedia of Cooking, which included a recipe for something simply called “Christmas Eggnog,” which was recommended to be aged for a month or two. And, after that, talk of aged eggnog just sort of ceased. Then again, Americans weren’t really making fresh eggnog any more, either. The culinary laziness of the 1960s had ushered in TV dinners, microwavable snacks and pre-made eggnog from a cardboard carton. It would seemingly take the aughts and its new era of DIY foodies to put homemade, aged eggnog back on the map. It quietly returned into the food conversation courtesy of a brief 2006 Chowhound article entitled “Old but Not Lethal.” It told the story of Stanford lecturer Jonathan Hunt, whose family has been making aged eggnog since 1926, with Hunt noting of the flavor profile, “It’s like a green banana versus a just-ripe one.”

That small blurb—and included recipe—inspired noted cookbook author Michael Ruhlman to immediately try his own aged nog, reporting his eventual findings in a 2008 blog post. Back then he was still a bit leery, finding the taste now mellower, but predominantly of alcohol. He was still concerned about the healthfulness, too, writing: “I definitely checked for anything growing on top before shaking it up and pouring it.” By 2014, however, Ruhlman was obsessed. The early-2010s, it seems, is when aged eggnog really began to be more prominent.

Nick Bennett was head bartender at mad science cocktail den Booker & Dax around that time and it’s also when he first heard about (and tasted) aged eggnog. Sidra Durst, who was then helping the bar’s proprietor Dave Arnold launch MOFAD (the Museum of Food and Drink) came in one day with a version she had been making aging for years.

“It was the first time that I had ever heard of such a thing,” Bennett explains. “It was so tasty that I had to try it out and that first batch hooked me for life.”

These days, he regularly makes it both at home and in his current gig at Manhattan’s Porchlight. His version has become so well-known that it even made it into Sother Teague’s recent I’m Just Here For the Drinks, the first time aged eggnog has appeared in a modern cocktail tome. (Teague writes: “Aging eggnog is certainly mental—but in this case, it’s just crazy enough to work.”)

Aged eggnog has been slowly going more mainstream in recent years. In 2016, J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats tested various ages to see what tastes best—his tasters actually found fresh stuff to be the unanimous winner.

I’ve found that aged eggnog pretty much always “works,” you just need to find what your preferred aging time is. If Hunt recommends a year, Ruhlman still goes for two. Alton Brown prefers four to six months, while Bennett thinks eight to 12 months is the “sweet spot.” Though, I’m pushing that one in my fridge as long as I can, I think aged eggnog merely two weeks old is quite extraordinary—caramely, minty and just a bit funky, while smooth as silk. The more I talk to people, however, the more I learn that most are less concerned with hitting an exact perfect age, or even any salmonella-killing aspects, but, rather, where best to keep their projects the entire time throughout the aging process.

“When I started aging eggnog, I would leave it in a cool, dark part of my apartment where the temperature wouldn’t fluctuate much,” explains Bennett. He only recently moved his batches to the fridge after finding many friends loathe to try room temperature eggnog. “My wife wasn’t particularly thrilled about a yearlong batch of nog sitting on our counter either.”

The post Go Ahead, Age Your Eggnog appeared first on PUNCH.

The @intellectualpooperty account was my favorite beer Instagram follow of 2018. Its sole purpose is to, on a near-daily basis, show all the IP infringement occurring in the brewing world (tagline: “Putting the IP in IPA”). The feed includes cans featuring Bart Simpson and Beavis & Butt-Head (er, “Beeris & Brew-head”); Ecto Cooler-like rip-offs with Slimer from Ghostbusters bursting from the bottle; labels meant to look like Snickers wrappers, Fruity Pebbles boxes and Capri Sun pouches. In a way, Intellectual Pooperty serves as a perfect field report for beer in 2018—an insular world refusing to grow up.

It isn’t just the Saturday-morning-cartoon labels, either. The predominant flavor profiles of craft beer today still lean toward juvenile enjoyment: New England-style IPAs (NEIPAs) that taste like OJ, so-called “sours” that have so much fruit purée dumped into them they have the taste and texture of a Jamba Juice and stouts have become more akin to a Dairy Queen Blizzard than anything one might classically define as beer.

That’s why the brews I was most impressed with this year were those made for grown-ups. More specifically, classic European-style beers being tackled by skilled American brewers. That includes singular explorations of wild yeast and microflora, barrel-aging and blending techniques; farmhouse-style beers made on honest-to-goodness farms, sometimes even using locally-foraged ingredients; and spontaneous wild ales that rely on nature to do most of the work.

As I mentioned last year, top beer lists are inherently personal, as is this one. There are now over 7,000 breweries in America and many release a couple new beers literally every single weekend. It would be hard enough to try every beer in your state, much less America. The entire world? Impossible. That’s why this year I decided to focus strictly on American beer. For better or worse, it remains the vanguard.

The post The Top 15 Beers of 2018 appeared first on PUNCH.

If eggnog started out as a Colonial-era drink for aristocrats, by the late-1700s, Americans from all walks of life were getting their nog on.

That would all change when America’s economy came crashing down in 1929. Suddenly, a lot of folks found themselves lacking the budget for such a frivolous use of eggs, milk and spices. Thus, by the mid-1930s, powdered eggnog “mixes” (just add booze and water) were being sold by local dairies, creameries and even bakeries like Madison, Wisconsin’s Strand Bakery, who produced a jarred mix that could seemingly be stored indefinitely. Post-Great Depression, the rise of home refrigeration and supermarkets opened a pathway for carton versions that would come to dominate the eggnog category well into the 2000s.

The dirty little secret is that, today, most nationally-distributed “name brand” nogs are essentially eggless, something that, believe it or not, the FDA doesn’t mind, despite the fact that their printed requirements dictate: “The egg yolk solids content is not less than one percent by weight of the finished food.” It likewise need only have six percent milkfat and just over eight percent milk solids. The rest? Spices, “flavorings,” a ton of sugars and sweeteners that end in “-ose,” preservatives, gums, glycerides and gelatin, which keeps many of these beverages thick despite the severe lack of eggs and milk.

The funny thing is—there’s really no need to jam these products with preservatives. As discussed in the recent aged eggnog piece, alcohol is nature’s preservative, allowing eggnog to keep indefinitely. Alas, most of these commercial brand nogs aren’t just egg-free, they’re also booze-free. Meaning, when blind tasting them, we would have to spike the beverages ourselves (which we did with both Maker’s Mark bourbon and The Real McCoy 12 Year Rum).

It should be noted, when straw polling friends and acquaintances across the country for what they considered the best pre-packaged eggnogs, most tabbed ones from local mom ‘n’ pop creameries and innumerable Midwestern dairy outfits. Unfortunately, it would have been nearly impossible for us to get these freshly-made (and preservative-free) local sensations to Bushwick, Brooklyn.

For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s editor in chief, Talia Baiocchi; deputy editor, Jason Diamond; and partnerships manager, Allison Hamlin. We blind-tasted 15 different eggnogs, running the gamut from large factory eggnogs to “nog-ternatives,” as well as a few already-alcoholic versions. Below are our top picks and a few to avoid.

Our Favorites

So Delicious Dairy Free Coconutmilk Holiday Nog
Picture us stunned that the best, and easily most complex, nog was one lacking both eggs and milk. An intense graham cracker nose leads into a buttery, thick body that one taster described as a “melted McDonald’s milkshake.” It’s a bit tangy, with hints of sour cream or yogurt, though not unpleasant. When rum is added, it becomes a Mounds candy bar, though one taster couldn’t get over its raw muffin notes.

Hood Golden Eggnog
This Massachusetts dairy offers a plethora of nogs which we included in our tasting; some were awful, a few odd (think Pumpkin Eggnog) and this one stellar. It doesn’t smell great, however; like sweet cream that has just about turned. It likewise has a buttery body, almost cake batter-like in richness. Where it excels is in seamlessly integrating with booze, which it did especially well with rum, which caused one taster to label it “danger nog.”

Organic Valley Eggnog
This supermarket standard pleased the tasters for its strong nutmeg notes, which we found lacking in so many other nogs—this one even has the decency to offer visible nutmeg “flecks.” It has a certain freshness most of the other nogs lacked, not having that bubblegum synthetic taste as so many others did, perhaps due to the organic ingredients and cane sugar. When alcohol is added more layers are unlocked and the variety of spices and vanilla notes move to the forefront.

Our Least Favorites

Trickling Springs FarmFriend Egg Nog
This Pennsylvania dairy loudly touts everything it has on its glass labeled bottle (grass fed cows! no carrageenan!). Admirable, yet the tasters couldn’t get over its odd meaty note on the nose, which we eventually homed in on as being “kosher hot dog water from a New York street cart.” The palate actually isn’t all that bad, however. It’s buttery and rich, but just can’t overcome the Hebrew National punch to the face.

Evan Williams Egg Nog
The only two alcoholic nogs in our tasting were arguably the two worst. This one from the stellar Kentucky distillery was a total misfire. A strangely cheesy nose, akin to the powdered stuff that comes with Kraft Mac & Cheese, leads into a body with intense rubbing alcohol notes; if the venerable Evan Williams Bourbon (a winner in our previous bourbon tasting) was actually used, it doesn’t show—this 15 percent ABV product tasted like it used unaged spirits.

Old New England Classic Egg Nog
The retro label for this Massachusetts-based spirit company’s 15 percent ABV nog claims that it is made with Kentucky straight bourbon, rum, brandy and blended whiskey. Off-putting circus peanut notes on the nose at least masks the intense booziness that greets you upon the first sip. The finish is cloying and synthetic, tasting like those hard sticks of pink gum that came in old packs of Topps baseball cards.

The post The Best (And Worst) Store-Bought Eggnogs appeared first on PUNCH.

After hearing about a website that allows people to customize their own devotional candles, Joshua Van Horn knew immediately what he wanted on his—an angular line-drawing of a blonde German girl, dressed in a red dirndl, holding two glasses of foamy beer. Once it arrived at the Brooklyn bar he owns, Gold Star Beer Counter, Van Horn placed it on the back wall by the taps, letting it serve as an altar to Biergit Kraft, the longtime logo for Rothaus Tannenzäpfle. It’s a fitting tableau for a brew that is now worshipped by Brooklyn beer geeks.

“I remember my first time trying it, I thought, ‘This is phenomenal,’” recalls Van Horn of the traditional pilsner, which has been made since the 1950s at a German brewery that dates to the 18th century. “We didn’t really have a true German pilsner available in New York at the time. Nowadays if you see it, it’s pretty much only at connoisseur-type places.”

Almost overnight “Little Fir Cone,” as its name translates, was seemingly at every cool bar or restaurant in Brooklyn. But its entrée into the borough is decidedly less snooty. “There were already lots of Bavarian places in Brooklyn, but not really one that celebrated the Black Forest,” explains Tobias Holler. An immigrant from that southwestern part of Germany, Holler coincidentally met and married another Black Forest expat upon moving to Brooklyn in the early aughts. The couple soon decided to open a beer hall, Black Forest Brooklyn, to bring the tastes of their homeland to their new home.

“Rothaus is the number one beer in the Black Forest,” explains Holler. “We grew up drinking it as teenagers and young adults. So we knew we had to have it.”

Unfortunately, when Holler contacted Rothaus and explained his desire to carry their beer, they unceremoniously turned him down; they were simply unwilling to wade through the FDA’s red tape (more on that in a second) to get their beer to America. But after a year of getting solid press coverage back in Germany, Rothaus decided they were ready to do whatever it took to get their beer to Holler’s Fort Greene restaurant. On October 17, 2014, Black Forest Brooklyn served the first pint of Rothaus in the U.S. The brewery even sent over an entire contingent to commemorate the event, with their CEO Christian Rasch tapping that first keg.

“The atmosphere was amazing,” recalls Rasch. “We were all so excited and relieved but, in the first case, we were very happy that we overcame all the difficulties together to make it possible to let [America] taste our beer.”

From there, the pilsner started expanding to other locations in the borough—Spuyten Duyvil, Gold Star—mostly served via those eye-catching bottles with Biergit Kraft on the label and a gold foil-encased neck.

“It’s more that these bars and restaurants found us,” explains Jennifer Mauer, the brewery’s head of PR. She claims Rothaus has nothing to do with who sells their beer in America, though she’s not surprised who has chosen to sell it, explaining that, “The people in New York have a sense for high quality.”

But there are plenty of other high-quality German beers available in Brooklyn, like Ayinger Bavarian Pils and Weihenstephaner Pils—why do all these hotspots want Rothaus and not something else? For one, Holler claims Rothaus is the only German export pilsner that comes unpasteurized, something that allows the beer to retain aromas and flavors from the yeast and proteins that remain following fermentation. According to Mauer, that unpasteurized state also means the FDA labels Tannenzäpfle shipments as biological weapons. The upside to that designation is that it’s exceptionally well-handled in getting here. It typically ships in refrigerated containers, and Holler claims he is able to tap kegs just two weeks after they have left the brewery.

“It’s a state-owned brewery so they’re pretty conservative and also don’t have to be as competitive,” explains Holler of the reason why they allow so few places to serve their beer. “People from the Black Forest are very stubborn—they like quality, they like craft. Rothaus is like: ‘This is our beer and this is how you’re going to do it.’”

If you’re on the hunt for the pilsner, you’re not going to find bottles at the Whole Foods in Gowanus. Beyond the two locations of Black Forest Brooklyn, which is now the biggest account for Rothaus in America, and those select accounts throughout Brooklyn, it escapes to a few top beer places in Manhattan (The Ginger Man, Cafe d’Alsace), Philadelphia (Monk’s Café) and even greater Los Angeles (Native Son Alehouse). But it’s not deified in those markets—certainly not the way it is in Brooklyn where local breweries Other Half and Interboro even paid homage to the iconic label when they released Interhalf Helles in the summer of 2017.

It makes sense that these trendy breweries would want the Rothaus association. In a world dominated by fruited sours and pastry stouts, Rothaus is the only Old World lager many Brooklyn beer geeks will deign to drink. “They’ll have a million Rothauses,” explains Van Horn, claiming geeks now use it as a palate re-setter between those trendy, more over-the-top styles. That’s one reason he’s started selling Rothaus to go. “I’ve never seen that with any other beer. I’m used to guys picking up cases of hazy IPAs—not a full case of German pilsner.”

The post The Cult of Rothaus appeared first on PUNCH.

“My favorite Scotch is Macallan 12, but I also love Fireball,” claims Joseph Mollica. The 58-year-old keeps a bottle of it in his freezer at all times, treating it like he would amaretto or Sambuca. “And I know I’m not alone.”

Mollica is confident he’s not the only person above 50 that enjoys the spicy, cinnamon-flavored whiskey because, as chairman of the New Hampshire Liquor Commission (NHLC), he spends a good deal of his time in the state’s liquor stores, checking up on what customers are buying. These days he’s seeing a lot of “older people, of which I consider myself one,” he notes, who have begun drinking Fireball. Like him, he says, most of these older folks enjoy it as an aperitif over ice.

“We’re not seeing the shots customer buying Fireball anymore; we’re seeing an older, on-the-rocks customer who drinks it now,” he says.

So how did a quintessential bro-shot brand become something senior citizens have begun drinking from the privacy of their own living rooms?

“Well, historically the brand has always done well with all age ranges,” says Amy Preske, head of public relations for Sazerac (Fireball’s manufacturer). And, of course, she’s mostly right. When Dr. McGillicuddy’s Fireball Cinnamon Whisky was launched back in the mid-1980s, it wasn’t members of Alabama’s Theta Chi fraternity buying handles of it—it was, then, a Canada-only product, part of Seagram’s schnapps line, mostly popular with hockey players and ice fisherman in need of a warming spirit.

Still, when most Americans think of Fireball in its current heyday (let’s say 2011 and on), they picture it as a popular shot in a bar with a lax ID policy. It’s unquestionably college-aged folks who catapulted the brand to $800 million in sales by 2014. In fact, as recently as 2015, the mere incongruity of “grandmas” drinking Fireball led to a viral YouTube video. But the tide has turned: Today, Fireball is being bought by 21.6 percent of adults ages 21 to 34, and 20.3 percent of adults ages 55 to 64.

“Very fiery,” noted one grandma in that viral video. “Soothing, very soothing,” thought another. “I could get to like this,” offered a third grandma.

A friend who works as a marketing director for a higher-end liquor brand (and wished to remain anonymous) has seen  Fireball’s new relevance with older clientele first-hand while out promoting her own products. This happened most recently while doing the rounds at liquor stores in New Jersey back in October: “Several owners at, what I would call, ‘nicer’ liquor stores kept telling me that they’ll see older customers purchasing premium brands—good stuff—and then one bottle of Fireball as well,” she says.

Tim Toomey is one of those customers. The 70-year-old retiree from Chicago had his first taste of Fireball at a bar on St. Patrick Day’s five years ago. For most of his life he’s been a beer drinker, with an occasional Irish Mist. “If I drink whiskey, I’ll usually drink a shot of it as I really don’t appreciate the taste,” he tells me. “But my son-in-law had told me this Fireball tastes like Big Red gum, so I said to the bartender, ‘Hey, how ’bout if I have it on the rocks?’” He’s been a fan ever since.

This phenomenon isn’t hard to understand. Fireball is ostensibly whiskey, but at a much lower alcohol by volume (a mere 66 proof, or 33 percent ABV), and it’s sweetened so it’s very easy to drink, particularly over ice. It’s also cheap, around $15 for a 750mL-bottle, and what coupon-cutting septuagenarian doesn’t like a good bargain?

Mollica has an additional theory: “In our market, cinnamon is a really big thing,” he says. Fireball sales for New Hampshire more than doubled from 2013 to 2015, and since 2015 they’ve been up 40 percent. “We put cinnamon in everything. That’s the start, in my mind, of why New England leads the way in this sort of trend.”

It’s that cinnamon flavor that older people apparently so adore that has led to smaller cinnamon whiskeys doing just as well with the age bracket. Mollica tells me that the locally-made Rocky Peak Hard Cinnamon also sells like gangbusters in New Hampshire stores, again mainly on the backs of an older clientele.

“I’m in the stores all the time, talking to people, asking them questions. ‘Hey, what are you doing with that product? How are you using that product?’ I talked to one older gentleman recently, he had an array of great things in his cart,” Mollica says. “Some really nice reds, some good Scotch, some Jack Daniel’s. And Fireball. He told me he was making cinnamon eggnog.”

Ultimately, though, maybe this isn’t a whiskey thing or a cinnamon thing. As my friend the marketing director speculates, maybe it’s young people. Maybe we’re to blame for elderly people suddenly gravitating to Fireball, simply because they wanted a quick (if not misguided) way to foster a better relationship with us, their aloof children and grandchildren.

“I actually think it’s like having your grandma on Facebook, your mom on Facebook,” she says. “You go home for the holidays, and suddenly your mom pulls out a bottle, ‘Oh look, sweetie, I got this Fireball for us all to enjoy. Ya’ want some?’”

The post Guess Who’s Drinking Fireball appeared first on PUNCH.

A few months back, an email landed in my inbox from a Belgian man claiming he was the world’s biggest Hennessy collector. When I clicked the link to his website I encountered a nearly nine minute-long video of a man in a tilted Los Angeles Angels cap and baggy Hennessy T-shirt. In the video, he speaks from behind a table covered with hundreds of Hennessy bottles in a European accent that’s hard to place given his Ali G-like cadence. “Wassup, Henny fam?,” he says. “This ya’ man, Don Henny.”

Don Henny is perhaps the world’s largest collector of Hennessy Cognac—and that’s virtually all he collects. “My collection, it really started by accident,” Don Henny, whose real name is Olivier Cocquyt, tells me over the phone. He was 19 at the time, out drinking with a friend in Aalst, just outside of Brussels, where he lives. “One night I saw it at a bar. I remember having heard it in songs from Mobb Deep, Snoop, Capone-N-Noreaga. I saw it and I thought, ‘I know this. I know this Hennessy.’”

He tried it and immediately loved it. When he went to a liquor store the following day to buy his first bottle, he encountered a special release listed for 120 Euros and pulled the trigger. The flavor profile was was unlike anything he’d encountered in a spirit before. He became obsessed, to the exclusion of any other brand of Cognac. “No brand can touch my soul or spirit like Henny,” he says.

Don Henny, now 39, owns a Hennessy lighter and Hennessy high-tops. He “pimped” his Audi with a Hennessy decal on the back window. In the house he shares with his young daughter, there is a wall in a back room with the Hennessy logo custom-painted on it, while the living room plays host to over 300 Hennessy bottles, 15 to 20 of which are open at any given time, with more stashed in the cellar.

He has a girlfriend, he tells me, but he doesn’t really have or want a career. “I’m fully busy with this collection,” he says, before explaining that “for the moment I work in a factory that distributes medicines. Just to keep me a bit busy. But normally I don’t go to work because the collection takes up all my time.”

If you guessed that a small Belgian town doesn’t exactly get a ton of rare Hennessy, you’d be right. Most of what Don Henny buys comes from other foreign collectors in what he calls his “worldwide Henny network.” He has a “Russian guy” who visits him five times a year with a haul of bottles. He’s purchased a 1920s VSOP from a collector in Guatemala, which cost about $90 to ship to Belgium. He’s visited the brand’s headquarters in France twice, and shopped “like a boss” while he was there.

Still, despite having one of the largest private Hennessy collections in the world, there are a few bottles Don Henny doesn’t own—like the Hennessy 8, which was only released in a 250-bottle run, and which Don Henny claims was pre-sold to “rich guys.” He also covets, but unfortunately can’t afford, the Beauté du Siècle, “a very cool bottle” which comes in what he describes as a “huge coffin” and costs around $200,000.

He has bottles worth as little as $5, and as much as $10,000, though he has no idea what the entire collection is worth. But, he tells me with a bit of lamentation in his voice, “If I would calculate how much I’ve spent on Henny in my life, I could probably have bought myself a fucking Ferrari.”

A Tour of Don Henny’s Favorite Bottles

Hennessy Richard Extra Cognac

Don Henny has three of these hand-blown crystal carafes, each housing liquid that’s been blended from more than 100 eaux de vie aged from 40 to 200 years. Of the $5,000 “prestige” product, he notes, “It’s very cool. I have them displayed in my TV cabinet, with all three next to each other.”

Hennessy First Landing 1868

This 1998 Asian-only export was produced to celebrate the brand’s 130th anniversary in Japan. It’s packaged in an elegant Baccarat crystal decanter with a stopper and sold in a silk-lined box. Only 1,868 bottles were made, which means, according to Don Henny, that this is a bona fide “#moneymaker.”

Hennessy FISSA Artistry

A mere 20 bottles of this expression were created for a 2014 event held at Chapter21, a basement nightclub in Amsterdam. The party was held to celebrate the city’s art history, but Don Henny attended to snag some bottles, which came in five different hand-painted variants. “I was able to get all five,” he explains. “Only me and Hennessy have them. The rest were opened at the party.”

Hennessy 3-Star (Early 1900s)

Don Henny has five “dusty” bottles of what is now labeled Hennessy VS—i.e. their youngest expression. He’s only opened one of them, from the 1930s. “In the early days I didn’t know the value, I just opened the bottles,” he explains, noting that he now struggles with the fact that some bottles can increase in value a hundredfold. “It’s beginning to weigh on a lot of Henny collectors these days, opening bottles. That’s a bit of the dark side to it, when you’re a really passionate collector.”

Hennessy Baccarat Limited Editions

Don Henny has a solid collection of Hennessy special releases bottled in Baccarat crystal, like the Nostalgie de Bagnolet, a discontinued duty-free offering that is packaged in a fold-out box that depicts the brand’s lovely Château de Bagnolet. As Don Henny notes, “Henny has the greatest bottles I think.”

The post Meet Don Henny appeared first on PUNCH.

A man who had once worked at the area’s military base drove Fraser Simpson toward the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. As they neared it, the Geiger counter started going crazy. “Radiation now 10 times normal level,” the driver bluntly noted. Once inside, Simpson strolled through the location of the world’s largest nuclear disaster, climbing into an abandoned ferris wheel and feeding bread to some mutant catfish. The small group stopped for a picnic brunch where they shotgunned raw eggs and passed around a magnum of homemade Ukrainian vodka. Simpson did 24 shots. The soldiers had told him vodka would help decontaminate his body of any radiation.

“So long as I didn’t die from alcohol poisoning first,” he recalls. He wasn’t that concerned, however. “Because of my weird background, and being a total history nerd, I like doing some pretty crazy things.”

Born in Paris to a family of noted explorers (his grandmother, Myrtle Simpson, was the first woman to ski across the Greenland ice cap, in 1965), he grew up in Canada, holds a British passport, and is now an American citizen living in Chicago. He works in banking and has his finger in quite a few entrepreneurial side projects. His real passion, however, is traveling to former Soviet republics, “rogue places with interesting people” he calls them, where he’s become obsessed with drinking (and collecting) each area’s vodkas.

“It’s a good way of bonding with different cultures” he claims, “as most Americans shy away from drinking their stuff.”

Simpson first visited the former Soviet Union in 2009 during his gap year, living on the Mongolian steppe with a nomadic tribe. He slept in a ger and rode horses bareback. Every few weeks a pickup truck would drive by with an ATM strapped in the back of it. He’d get cash and trek to the convenience store to stock up on supplies for everyone. That’s where he purchased his first ever bottle, from the bottom shelf, the name of which now eludes him. He does remember it cost 35 cents and “tasted like fuel from a Russian tank.”

He was hooked and started finding reasons to return, even starting a company in Mongolia just to have an excuse. He has now traveled extensively to such far-flung places as Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Georgia, Yemen and Armenia. He loves immersing himself in their cultures and customs, hanging with locals, drinking what they drink, and bringing some bottles back to Chicago if he’s lucky.

“There’s an outdated sense of manliness in a lot of these countries. Being able to wrestle, shooting guns, slaughtering animals, certainly being able to drink a lot.”

Simpson soaks it all in with aplomb, having already lived an incredibly colorful life for such a young age (he’s just 27). He has a never-ending supply of stories that are almost hard to believe: he’s been car-jacked and had a broken bottle lifted to his throat somewhere in Eastern Europe, gotten drunk and shot Georgian tanks with total strangers, sniffed Mongolian snuff (his review: “rocket fuel”), drank a mysterious homemade concoction from an unmarked bottle at a Serbian wedding he once crashed and even lived to tell the tale of tackling the “Mongolian black eye,” a typically debilitating series of double shots of Russian vodka and fermented mare’s milk.

“I’ve definitely been served some things I thought would blind me,” he explains. “But I’m really bad at saying no.”

A Tour of Fraser Simpson’s Soviet Vodkas

Chinggis Khan
“Patents don’t seem to be that big of a thing in Mongolia,” says Simpson. “That’s why every fourth brand is called ‘Genghis Khan.’” This one is Mongolia’s best-selling vodka, and considered higher-end, though it only sells for about $20. The bottle was gifted to Simpson by the CEO of the Tavan Bogd Group—Simpson had helped the Mongolian conglomerate bring KFC and Pizza Hut into the country (“I do feel somewhat guilty about that,” he adds).

Chinggis
“I may make jokes about being out in the middle of nowhere on the steppe with these people, but their vodkas are actually pretty good stuff,” claims Simpson. Even this one, that cost a mere $2. Simpson speculates that’s because these nations do a lot more distillations of the spirit than we do stateside. True or just hearsay, Simpson at least notes that “Any vodka from a former Soviet republic seems to give you less of a hangover.”

Soyombo Super Premium
Simpson somehow ended up in a Mongolian Volkswagen commercial and soon billboards with his face on them were blanketing Ulaanbaatar, causing him to become a minor local celebrity. He received this bottle as part of the payment for that gig. Simpson explains that the strange symbol is similar to what appears on the Mongolian flag—it’s supposed to look like a ger, a Nomadic tent, as viewed from the side. Of the vodka, Simpson notes that it’s “pretty good, but not the best.”

Rada Special Vodka
“It’s the kind of vodka you’d get at the club,” Simpson explains of this Ukrainian product. “As you do shots of it, they have these attractive women walking around serving tiny pickles, cornichons. Very strange.” With a hint of lemon in it, Simpson calls it his favorite vodka of the region.

Zhytomyr Vodka
This bottle was gifted to Simpson by the former base commander of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, 18 shots into that epic, drunken brunch. Touched, Simpson claims he was compelled to offer his favorite toast (via his translator) offering that “Chernobyl was both Ukraine’s darkest hour, but also where it showed its greatest strength. However, the base commander and his retinue have made one big mistake…” As everyone looked at Simpson confused, Simpson added, “By showing us such great hospitality we will have to come back again!” They lost it after that and did six more rounds of shots.

The post Fraser Simpson Has a Thing for Soviet Vodka appeared first on PUNCH.

“In many ways Kentucky is like what most people think it’s like and some stereotypes ring true,” explains Bruce Russell. “Like, I was an adult before I realized not everyone drinks Mountain Dew.”

The scion of renowned Wild Turkey Master Distillers Jimmy and Eddie Russell, 29-year-old Bruce now serves as the brand’s national ambassador, traveling the country peddling their world-class bourbons. But there was a time in his youth when the only way he could choke down whiskey was by chasing it with PepsiCo’s slime-green soda.

“Growing up in Kentucky, if somebody was drinking ‘almost bourbons,’” says Russell, referring to lower-end products like Mellow Corn and Kentucky Gentleman, “it was Mountain Dew that you chased it with it.”

Of course, “Mountain Dew” has long been Southern slang for moonshine; in fact, Russell speculates that the soda was originally designed to help mask the poor quality of illegal booze. “I don’t think whoever came up with Mountain Dew thought it would one day be a part of high-end mixology though,” adds Russell, “but I have to keep explaining… it’s not really an adult thing in Kentucky, it’s a 16-year-old thing.”

And, indeed, it would have probably continued to exist as a quotidian, un-ironic Kentucky call drink—hardly more interesting than a Rum and Coke—if not for Josh Seaburg, the Norfolk, Virginia, bartender who has become the face of Turkey Dew.

In June 2017, Seaburg visited Kentucky to attend Camp Runamok, the annual “summer camp for bartenders.” At the Wild Turkey Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Seaburg attended the screening of the brand’s latest Matthew McConaughey commercial and was amused by the actor’s famously unique vernacular. Later, Seaburg and some fellow attendees decided to look up the video on YouTube to see what other people were saying. One seemingly innocuous comment would set everything in motion: “Y’all need to try some wild turkey [sic] mixed with Mountain Dew. I call it a Turkey Dew. Trust me you will like it.”

The Runamok group immediately made a Mountain Dew run and began dispensing the drinks as a “layback” (a shot poured directly into someone’s mouth), accompanied by a line McConaughey utters in his Texas stoner drawl: “That’s reeeeal nice.”

What acted as an unofficial motto for the trip took on even more staying power when Seaburg, after a night drinking at Louisville’s Meta, decided to get a Turkey Dew tattoo. (The artist reworked a 1950s Mountain Dew advertisement to read “Ya-hoo! Turkey Dew. That’s real nice.”)

Meta owner Jeremy Johnson describes the Turkey Dew phenomenon as “an inside joke we took way too far.” Just how far? Seaburg commissioned the production of 101 Turkey Dew challenge coins which he would dispense to people in the know. When out-of-town bartenders would visit him at his Norfolk bar, crudo nudo, they started bringing along cans of Mountain Dew to make impromptu Turkey Dews. It remained an underground sensation until March of 2018 when Meta hosted the first-ever Turkey Dew popup event. (“Come celebrate the beautiful marriage of America’s Native Spirit with the hillbilly’s favorite juice” read the Facebook invite.)

Seaburg returned to Kentucky for the event, as did other Turkey Dew-loving bartenders from as far away as California and Reno, Nevada. A menu of seven Turkey Dew cocktails was served, including Seaburg’s Blast Word!!!!!!—a Last Word riff made with Wild Turkey, yellow Chartreuse and a syrup produced from Mountain Dew Baja Blast (an aquamarine-colored variant once exclusive to Taco Bell). In a nod to Mountain Dew’s lowbrow aesthetic, the Turkey Mint Dewlip consisted of Wild Turkey 101, Mountain Dew Ice (a lemon-lime variant) and mint, garnished with a rim of Doritos “dust.”

Just as Joe Namath’s Super Bowl III performance launched the NFL into the stratosphere, the first Turkey Dew popup skyrocketed the profile of the cocktail. As 2018 progressed, Turkey Dew began to spread to other bars in other cities, mostly as an off-menu, word-of-mouth sensation shared by former Runamok attendees and Wild Turkey brand ambassadors, like Russell and his cousin, JoAnn Street. (For what it’s worth, Gruppo Campari, Wild Turkey’s parent company, appears to have no problem with the grassroots growth of Turkey Dew; it’s been speculated that this is because the Italians in corporate don’t quite understand the soda’s stigma in America.)

In the last few months, however, Turkey Dew has finally become more formalized as an on-menu item, popping up on beverage lists all across the country, usually as a highball. It’s also been thrown into slushie machines at Meta and Austin’s Nickel City, and has received a more high-brow treatment at places like Nashville’s Henley, which offers  The Dew Drop, a mix of Suze, Wild Turkey, Mountain Dew and lemon, and Portland’s Shipwreck, which created a Mountain Dew-less ode to the Turkey Dew featuring a homemade melon syrup in its place.

And, finally, in a sign that we’re approaching peak Turkey Dew, on March 3rd, Meta will hold their second annual popup featuring laybacks of Turkey Dew that have been clarified in a Spinzall centrifuge.

“It’s never going to not be funny to me,” says Seaburg of the Turkey Dew’s growing mythos. “But I don’t want to say it’ll be the next Penicillin or anything.”

The post Do the Turkey Dew appeared first on PUNCH.

Like many realtors, John Brittle is always working on raising his profile in town. For the amicable Nashville man, this has typically involved tapping into his ample whiskey collection. The only problem: He didn’t exactly like bringing potential clients over to his family’s home and cracking open bottles in the middle of the day. So he came up with a better idea.

“I was already using whiskey to get my name in front of people,” explains Brittle. “So renting a house for it seemed like a natural progression—certainly better than paying for bus benches with my ugly mug on them.”

In early 2015, the perfect place fell into his lap. Brittle had recently sold a mixed-use fixer-upper in Germantown—a historic neighborhood north of downtown—to a friend. Knowing it would take nearly a year to procure permits before the buyer would be able to renovate the historic 100-year-old home, Brittle asked if he could rent it during the interim. His friend agreed, and Brittle moved several hundred bottles of whiskey from his collection into the house. Before long, those in the know bestowed a nickname on the place: JB’s Whiskey House.

It was around this time that I first began seeing cryptic pictures of it on social media depicting row after row of the most sought-after bottles, well before anyone else had landed them. Its unique location in Nashville—many Southerners pass through the city en route to Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail—and Brittle’s longtime prominence in online whiskey groups quickly made the Whiskey House a whiskey-geek attraction. Brittle would always oblige, generously sharing rare bottles from the collection with visitors. In fact, it’s where many whiskey collectors first got a taste of California Gold, the homemade blend that became a household name. 

How a Homemade Blend Became One of America’s Most Coveted Bourbons

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After a year, the original buyer’s permits were approved and Brittle was forced to find a more permanent residence for his whiskey house. “I finally called five of my best friends,” explains Brittle. “I said, ‘Hey let’s lease something together, make it more formalized, organized.’”

The small crew found an “unassuming duplex from the 1970s” in a recently gentrified neighborhood for $1500 a month; their landlord is a nearby church. Though Brittle doesn’t wish to reveal the neighborhood for obvious reasons, he claims you’d never even know the Whiskey House was there if you didn’t already know it existed.

When a member is drinking in the house they simply put an “Evan Williams/Elijah Craig—Make America Thirsty Again” spoof election sign on the lawn, to alert any members that might be passing by. The house also has camera systems installed in every room so that members can check what’s going on remotely via their phones. Though no one lives in the house, the choice decor—numerous couches, fully stocked kitchen, robust cocktail book library, taxidermy—gives the place a homey feel.

“People like bringing a date or significant other over before dinner,” explains Brittle. “We can’t have it looking like a frat house.”

Indeed, even in a house with over 1,500 bottles of open whiskey—an inventory that would put it in on par with just about any legitimate bar in America—the drinking at the Whiskey House is less Greek life and more refined private club. Members are only allowed to drink a quarter-ounce from each bottle ever. To dole out such a minuscule amount, measuring cups are placed all around the house. That means a coveted bottle of, say, William Larue Weller, might have enough pours it in for 100 different people to taste—though that rarely occurs.

“One of my core principles of the house is we don’t ever want to empty a bottle,” explains Brittle. “We’re trying to build a library of bottles. Typically, when they get under a quarter [full], they then go into the library and we won’t drink from them again.”

Tour JB’s Whiskey House

Though the core of the collection is still comprised of Brittle’s acquisitions, a good 20 to 30 bottles are now being added every single month from members’ dues, though Brittle still acts as, what he calls, the “procurement department.” Stickers are affixed to each bottle denoting the date it was opened and who donated it, while color-coded yarn tied to bottlenecks alert members and guests to the value of each bottle. For instance, green yarn indicates a $25 to $50 bottle, which anyone can pour for themselves; black yarn signifies a $100 bottle, which only members can pour; purple means it’s a bottle from Brittle’s personal collection—hands off.

“The pride every member takes in maintaining the collection means drinking is self-policing,” says Brittle.

Today there are around 30 official members (“donors” as Brittle calls them) of the Whiskey House, each of whom chips in $100 a month for rent and maintenance fees. Donors all have a set of keys, the security code and their own private locker inside the house for personal bottles. Members range in age from their early 20s to late 50s. There are no female members, “but we are desperately trying to change that,” says Brittle, before noting, “We’ve got a couple members’ wives who are whiskey freaks, and regularly have ladies drinking with us.” The same goes for industry luminaries, like Bruce Russell (national brand ambassador, Wild Turkey), Fred Noe (master distiller, Jim Beam) and Marianne Eaves (master distiller, Castle & Key), all of whom have been to the house in recent months.

As far as legalities go, according to Brittle, everything they do is above board since they’re private and don’t ever sell anything. (If guests want to make a donation before they leave, commensurate to what they drank, they are allowed to.) There’s even a lawyer on the house’s “board” and, remarkably, they have 501(c)(3) federal tax exemption status for being a non-profit. That’s because one of the key tenets of the house is raising money for charity, both in donating bottles and in hosting guests at the house for private tastings. Brittle claims the house donated over $75,000 to charity in 2018 alone.

This year, Brittle plans to up that to $100,000 and has even loftier goals beyond that—not just for charitable donations. “We’re going to buy a house someday,” he tells me. “A nice place with some bedrooms and bathrooms, maybe a private area we could use as an Airbnb situation for the community. Because for a whiskey lover, this place is pure Candyland.”

The post You Been to JB’s Whiskey House? appeared first on PUNCH.

The ad was presented in the same terse manner as most ads are on the vintage whiskey buying group of which I—and about 8,000 others—am a member: “Auction for 1 bottle. Mr Wellers Pure limestone water 4/5 quart Straight from Kentucky.”

The comments on the post came quickly, the most incisive one simply asking: “Water?” But then a funny thing happened: Bids started coming in. First $60. Then $80. By the end of the auction, the bottle of 1967 vintage water had sold for $120.

“I don’t ever really plan on drinking them, [they’re] just for show,” explains Larry Baldwin, a Kentucky man who might have the biggest vintage water collection in the country. “They’re definitely more rare to find than dusty bourbon bottles of the same age.”

Of course, that Mr. Weller’s Pure Limestone Water may very well have been pulled straight from a Kentucky tap, but it’s no ordinary water. The fact that the label says “Weller” tells even the most green bourbon enthusiast that this product has the stench of Pappy Van Winkle wafting from it. Indeed, it was bottled by Van Winkle’s famed and long defunct Stitzel-Weller Distillery. (Baldwin speculates these bottles were gimmicks even back then; the fact he has acquired a 1960s Old Fitzgerald gallon of water—in a cradle swing stand, no less—makes me think he might be right.)

Julian Van Winkle, Sr. was a salesman par excellence in the post-Prohibition days of bourbon, so it’s perhaps no surprise that he had the chutzpah to try and sell water, too. (Commercially-widespread bottled water doesn’t really start appearing until the late 1970s and early 1980s.) It’s perhaps even less of a surprise that this “Weller Water”—as it was rebranded in the 1980s—has become highly desirable on bourbon’s online secondary market.

Some might see this development as nothing more than a cool curio—no different from a vintage Jim Beam advertisement or an empty McCormick Elvis decanter from the era. But rarely do those sell online with the rapidity that Weller Water or Old Fitzgerald Prime Limestone Water has started to sell.

It’s hard not to see this as an indictment of current bourbon culture. Whether it’s Weller Water (which currently fetches around $150), or, say, a bottle of 2015 Pappy, what’s being purchased is seen only as an asset—something to display on your shelf, post on Instagram and rarely ever open. Once its value becomes greater than what was initially paid, it sells to another schnook and the cycle repeats.

While industry professionals are aware of such items, vintage water hasn’t quite broken into the actual bar world. Kris Peterson, the spirits archivist at Mordecai in Chicago, was gifted a bottle of Mr. Weller’s Pure Limestone Water last summer. He thought it might be a fun little surprise to offer it at his bar as a free bonus alongside “hefty price tag” pours of vintage Stitzel-Weller bourbon. He couldn’t imagine charging for it—the acquisition costs would be a waste of his budget and the customer markup would be too ridiculous.

“$150 can get me some very fun bottles to play with that I imagine will elevate the drinking experience more than this,” he explains. “If you figure it breaks down to $6 per ounce, a bourbon and water highball—which would require four ounces of water—would end up costing around $75 to make. That’s going to be an expensive drink with a third of my cost getting eaten up by the water.”

To be fair, much of the online bourbon community recognizes the absurdity of “vintage water”; every time it’s offered for sale it’s mocked by a good portion of the whiskey group. After his bottle of Mr. Wellers Pure Limestone Water sold so quickly, for example, the aforementioned seller joked: “If anyone can get me into the old water exchange group that would be awesome!”

But, like Dutch Golden Age tulips or late-1990s Beanie Babies, vintage water only holds value so long as people believe it to. So, it’s entirely possible that the current vintage water buyers have capitalized on a trend well before it’s hit its peak, and they’ll be the ones laughing at our lack of foresight when it starts going for $500 per bottle next year. But the tides could just as easily turn the opposite way.

As for Peterson, he’s not planning to buy more, though he remains adamant that $120 bottles of water might not be the worst deal in the world: “I suppose after we fuck up all the freshwater on the planet that will seem like a bargain!”

The post The Absurd Clamor for “Vintage Water” appeared first on PUNCH.

At 400 square feet, the garage at John Garbarino’s recently-purchased home in Maplewood, New Jersey, is bigger than any room in his house. It boasts a soaring cathedral ceiling and an interior outfitted entirely with antique wood. Upon move-in, it needed a new floor, but he and his wife weren’t planning on parking their cars there anyhow. For Garbarino, a recent SoHo transplant still adjusting to suburban life, the novelty of owning a garage presented a different opportunity.

“I thought, maybe I could design this to look like Spring Lounge, my old local,” he explains, naming the famed Lower East Side dive bar where, coincidentally, he first met his wife.

Working in mobile design and development by trade, he wasn’t exactly Bob Vila. So he started simple, with a floor-model TV from Best Buy and a Kegerator. It became a place where he and a few friends could hang out at night without worrying about waking the kids up—a strange inverse of teenagers drinking in their parent’s garage to avoid detection.

By 2011, he had the gumption to try and actually build a proper bar. Garbarino’s initial blueprints were thrown off early on by his own lack of carpentry experience. (He failed to realize, for instance, that two-by-fours did not actually measure two inches by four inches.) Eventually, he managed to fashion a wooden bar with oak veneer railings; he bought church pews on Craigslist and installed a fireplace he found on Facebook Marketplace; he added decorations his wife wouldn’t let him display in the house, like a Donovan McNabb Philadelphia Eagles jersey and an antique rotary club sign. Soon his friends started donating stuff—one gave him stools, another found a bar mirror in Massachusetts—which was quickly integrated into the decor.

“Then one night everyone came over,” he explains. “People were walking around going ‘Holy shit. This is the best bar in town.’”

While certainly a compliment, there wasn’t exactly a lot of competition in a town with only two “real” bars. Maplewood is often called “the Brooklyn of the suburbs,” a bedroom community where young families migrate after leaving Manhattan, Hoboken and, naturally, Brooklyn. These are 30- and 40-somethings ready for a bigger home, but still seeking some semblance of the bustling nightlife of the borough they traded for more living space. So perhaps it’s no surprise that, at the same time Garbarino was building his “Gar Bar”—a term he would eventually trademark—another resident just across the street was also building one of his own.

Joe Melvin had recently relocated from Hoboken, a party town whose residents like to boast that they hold the title for “most bars per square foot” in America. Like Garbarino, when Melvin began building his bar in 2016, the white-collar professional had little knowledge of home improvement, but was adamant in his pursuit of a personal space to kick back with a beer.

“You reach a certain age in your life and think, ‘I need my own space,’” says Melvin. “I’m more of a dive bar guy, so there wasn’t really a plan,” he explains. “As a new homeowner I was spending a lot of time at Home Depot and I just worked out [a design] as I went along… It’s not perfect and I’m still adding things to it.” His bar eventually took the name Sloppy Joe’s, though the Englishman claims that, at the time of its christening, he was unaware of the American sandwich with which it shares a name.

A Brief Tour of Maplewood, New Jersey's Garage Bars

Well off the street, passersby don't even notice Sloppy Joe's if the door isn't open.

Joe Melvin's detached garage sits amongst century-old oak trees.

An Englishman, Melvin wanted a place to watch his beloved West Ham United Football Club.

Though drinks are free, international currency has still been placed on the wall by visitors.

The bar still has to share space with standard garage fare, like lawn mowers and lacrosse sticks.

The Gar Bar sits on the eastern side of the same street, meaning it benefits from plenty of sunlight most afternoons.

Despite lacking carpentry skills, John Garbarino's bar is as gorgeous as any in a "real" establishment.

The Gar Bar has been acquiring knick-knacks special to Garbarino and his friends for nearly a decade.

An avid Philadelphia Eagles fan, Garbarino watched their 2018 Super Bowl victory in his garage.

Garbarino is always searching the web, flea markets and even trash piles on his own block for interesting bar items.

The cathedral ceilings still have their original wood.

As the legend of Sloppy Joe’s and The Gar Bar began to grow, others in the neighborhood became inspired to build their own. Today, Maplewood is home to at least a half-dozen garage bars, including one loftily dubbed The Garage Mahal.

A few blocks away from Garbarino and Melvin, Brian “Smitty” Krupkin, a few months shy of turning 40, decided he wanted to celebrate in a manner appropriate to the milestone. After years of envying Garbarino’s space, turning his two-story, detached garage into a bar of his own seemed apt. In the late spring of 2017, he spent two months building Smitty’s Tavern, which features a reclaimed wood bar with a faux-tin tiled face.

“It’s not that hard to build a bar,” he says, “It’s basically just a box.”

But not all boxes are alike. When Phil Di Giulio and his family moved to the Maplewood-Millburn border five years ago, the former Brooklyn resident claims he didn’t even know how to change a lightbulb. But a conversation with Garbarino during their shared commute to Penn Station changed all that.

“He basically spent about 12 seconds talking to me about his startup then immediately pivoted to, ‘Have you seen my bar?’” says Di Giulio. After Garbarino texted him the bar’s official website, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. “I don’t want to say I was Kevin Costner [in Field of Dreams]—there weren’t ghosts whispering to me at night—but I became obsessed with getting my own bar built.”

Within two years, Di Giulio had started working on turning his carport into what he describes as a “very humble” tiki bar. It houses an L-shaped bar made from 700 pounds of concrete that he poured himself, two beer taps, a chest freezer for ice and a camera security system. It cost him a little under $10,000, fits 15 to 20 people and, with spillover to the backyard, has hosted upwards of 65 guests.

It might be easy to dismiss this garage bar frenzy as a typical case of keeping up with the Joneses, but it’s more than that. The Gar Bar, for one, has become such a neighborhood institution that it has held everything from middle school charity fundraisers to Maplewood Chamber of Commerce events, an NBA team-building exercise and even a stand-up comedy show.

“It’s much more camaraderie based. Our bars have such a diverse set of ideas. No one is trying to compete,” says Di Giulio, before pausing to consider it. “It is a little bit about showmanship, however.”

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Every spring, in the north Colombian countryside, the city of Valledupar holds its annual Festival de la Leyenda Vallenata, a four-day celebration of the region’s music, known as vallenata. It draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to the local stadium and surrounding town plazas where cowboy trios belt out the indigenous, accordion-heavy music, while locals sip a blended Scotch that has become something of a national obsession.

“Love love love love love of my soul,” sings Silvestre Dangond in “10,000 Litros de Old Parr” his 2009 paean to Grand Old Parr, the whisky that has become Colombia’s preferred spirit.

Launched in 1909, the Speyside Scotch takes its name from an Englishman who allegedly lived to the age of 152. It’s meant to denote the seniority of the spirit itself, which has an age statement of 12 years in its youngest and most common expression, and retails for around 100,000 pesos, or $30 U.S. Owned by Diageo since 1997, the precise makeup of the whisky is unclear (Old Parr doesn’t even have a website), but Cragganmore, another Speyside whisky, is thought to be a major component of the blend. Packaged in unusual, brown “turtle shell” bottles, Old Parr is technically sold in North America, though I’ve never come across it, nor has it been reviewed by Whisky Advocate, which currently touts over 4,000 reviews in its comprehensive database.

Yet somehow this virtually unknown whisky moves 2.5 million bottles per year in Colombia, where it also commands 52 percent of the country’s whisky market. (For context, all of AB InBev’s products combined make up 41 percent of the U.S. beer market.)

“It’s ubiquitous. If you go to Colombia the first thing you notice is it is the whisky in every single restaurant,” says Mark Byrne, a spirits writer and liquor consultant who started visiting the country regularly in 2015.

The traditional liquor of Colombia is their version of aguardiente (sugarcane-based and anise-flavored) while, on the Caribbean coast, rum is popular as well. Byrne suspects that some of Old Parr’s renown owes to the fact that its explicitly not Colombian, lending a particular status. “It’s an import, a Scotch import, and in a lot of places that aren’t America, drinking imports is a flex,” says Byrne. “It’s strange because Colombia doesn’t have a historical connection to the whisky. It’s, of course, not produced there, it uses no ingredients from there, it could have just as easily been Johnnie Walker Red that took off.”

The closest cultural connection the country can claim would be the city of Valledupar, which, due to its coincidental name, has adopted the moniker “Valle de Cacique Old Parr” (Valley of Grand Old Parr). The moniker becomes less coincidental, however, when you take into account Valledupar’s proximity to the Venezuelan border. It was Venezuela that first received Old Parr in the 1950s (Colombia was, at that time, still in the midst of La Violencia, a countrywide civil war). By the 1960s, as guerilla conflicts were heating up, it began illegally crossing the border into Colombia through Maicao, a well-known contraband port where electronics, oil and cigarettes were already entering the country.

“As with many things that happen in Colombia, Old Parr [beginning] as a contraband product is one of those ‘everybody knows that’s how it is’ facts,” says Colombian-born writer Efraín Villanueva, who grew up hearing such tales from his older relatives. Only in 1971 did Old Parr begin being distributed legally in the country. (Given the disparity between the cheaper prices at corner stores and the inflated prices of big chain stores, Villanueva believes a good portion of the whisky still comes into Colombia as contraband.)

Whatever the case, Old Parr’s popularity only continues to grow. According to market researcher Hitesh Bhasin of Marketing91, Old Parr is one of the 20 best-selling Scotches in the entire world, mainly thanks to Colombia’s thirst for it. Diageo has leaned into its unexpected market: Old Parr’s official Instagram and Facebook pages are presented entirely in Spanish, populated with images from Medellín and Bogota. In 2014, Diageo even opened a standalone duty-free store in Bogota Airport. That same year, a special Old Parr Tribute—a blend of bourbon- and sherry-cask Scotch, presented in a brown decanter—was released exclusively for the Colombian market. “We wanted to thank the Colombians in some way for being the biggest consumers of this whisky, for their love of the brand,” explained Juan Sergio Valcárcel, then-director of marketing and innovation at Diageo Colombia.

As for the Old Parr-crooning Silvestre Dangond, in 2012 he partnered with the brand on a special signature bottle, which sold out quickly. This year, he’s slated to perform on the main stage at Festival de la Leyenda Vallenata, his fame in the vallenata community still stemming from that 2009 song. While most of the 40,000 concert attendees will be swigging Old Parr, Dangond will not. His international concert travel has led to him discovering a new obsession, “a French drink that is very traditional in the weekend breakfasts of the Americans“: the Mimosa.

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In 1972, the American bourbon industry introduced a new category of whiskey that unreservedly leaned into its lack of flavor as a ploy to win the attention of a public increasingly enamored of vodka. The bottles had names like Crow Light, Galaxy and Four Roses Premium—the latter’s slogan boasting a “taste that underwhelms.” Far from a success when it was first introduced, this long-derided category is undergoing a revival, all thanks to the discovery of a forgotten stock from the 1990s.

By definition, light whiskey had to be distilled to at least 160 proof, though it was typically distilled as high as 190 proof, stripping it of its flavor until it closely resembled grain neutral spirit (GNS). (Bourbon, by contrast, usually enters the barrel in the 100- to 125-proof range and legally can never be distilled higher than 160.) Light whiskey would then be briefly aged in used barrels, typically bourbon barrels, which, having gone through the ringer a few times, were largely lacking in char flavor. These factors resulted in a mildly flavored, almost vodka-like whiskey. It failed to catch on as a standalone spirit and, for the last three decades, has been used as the cheaper, more neutral component of lighter American and Canadian blends.

“I didn’t live through the ’70s. I think that allowed me to look at [light whiskey] objectively,” says Eugene Nassif, a 25-year-old lawyer by trade, who helps source single barrels of whiskey for the Iowa-based Cat’s Eye Distillery, which recently released a 13-year-old light whiskey that Nassif had acquired. “While light whiskey may have gotten a bad rap when it was young, as it aged, it developed into something truly special.”

High West Distillery was among the first to notice this development. In April 2016, it bottled a light whiskey that had been distilled in 1999 at the Lawrenceburg, Indiana, distillery that would go on to become MGP. As a light whiskey, it should have been dumped from the barrel after just a few years; it certainly was never intended to rest for 14 years, as it did. (Once High West bought the stock, they likely transferred it to a tank for a few years before bottling).

“It quite honestly fell off the books,” says Brendon Coyle, High West’s master distiller. Back in the ’90s, some excess stock didn’t fit on a truck destined for Canada, and the distillery simply forgot to schedule another delivery. “When MGP was cleaning up old inventory, they found the barrels,” says Coyle. “Knowing we liked weird, interesting stuff, they gave us a call. We simply [bought it] for educational purposes.”

High West 14 Year Light Whiskey has a delicate, cream-soda-like flavor. Nassif likens the profile of the category to “liquid candy,” heavy on the toffee and butterscotch. These flavors likely develop so prominently because the used barrels don’t overwhelm the corn-predominant liquid—99 percent corn in the case of MGP—with char and oakiness, like they might in a well-aged bourbon.

“It’s a totally different flavor,” says Joshua Hatton of the “cotton candy notes” he finds present in light whiskey. As the cofounder of Single Cask Nation, an independent bottler based in Connecticut, he first tried light whiskey when High West offered him some of its barrels for a collaboration blend back in 2013. “One of the first things we said was, ‘Why is this called light whiskey? It’s not like it’s Diet Coke. It’s not lacking in flavor.’”

In May of 2014, Single Cask Nation released the first “modern” light whiskey, having convinced High West to sell additional barrels of both an 11- and 13-year-old light whiskey it had acquired in that initial purchase from MGP. The two products sold out quickly, and Single Cask Nation has continued to experiment with light whiskey since then, even bottling an eight-year-old light whiskey finished in an ex-rye cask that once also held IPA.

With aged bourbon and rye becoming increasingly harder to acquire, there’s been a boom in aged light whiskey releases recently. The Colorado-based Weaver’s Spirits introduced a seven-year-old expression in 2016; in 2018, Berkeley’s Mosswood Distillers released a series of light whiskeys finished in oddball barrels, including ones that held sour ale and another “seasoned” by cold brew coffee; meanwhile, the San Francisco–based Bitters & Bottles, an online liquor club, launched its Old Fortunate brand in late 2018 for the sole purpose of bottling a 1992-distilled light whiskey.

“When I first tried it…the part of my brain that lights up with excitement over something totally new got triggered,” says Joe Barwin, the club’s cofounder. “The American oak flavors of caramel, vanilla, and wood spice all get softened up, making room for this lovely gentle fruitiness. It feels like a classic American whiskey profile executed with some of the elegance of Scotch.”

Each of these light whiskies, it should be noted, have stemmed from the same forgotten stock from the Lawrenceburg distillery, the only location that has produced it for the last couple of decades. That, too, is changing. A few craft distilleries are revisiting the 1970s model of young light whiskey. Wisconsin’s La Crosse Distilling started making its own high-rye light whiskey since opening late last year, while Wicked Tango’s recently released “rowdy” light whiskey is served in packaging that looks like a gasoline can—not exactly a ringing endorsement for the product held within.

“It seems like the rush to judgment in the whiskey world has peaked, and there is more curiosity and openness to whiskey in all its different expressions. And even the more cynical whiskey geeks have gotten excited about being able to try something so unique,” says Barwin. Still, he realizes he might have just had an intriguing one-off release on his hands, and light whiskey may continue to remain nothing more than an industry curio, noting: “If light whiskey does find a following and continues to be made, who knows if anyone will ever let it sit around for 25 years before putting it in a bottle again.”

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Had I bothered to walk just two miles from my apartment to LeNell’s, a local liquor store, I could have scored what is perhaps the biggest “unicorn” in American whiskey today.

Known as Red Hook Rye, the 23-year-old bottling quietly arrived in New York in 2006, and was priced at just $75 a bottle. Four different batches hit the shelves over the course of several years and were slowly bought up, typically only on the recommendation of LeNell’s owner, LeNell Camacho Santa Ana. In fact, when the store was forced to close in 2009, there were still bottles of batch no. 4 on the shelf.

Today, it’s considered perhaps the best rye whiskey ever released and sells for upwards of $30,000 on the secondary market. It’s also the most sought-after expression of Willett, the only modern brand that manages to transcend Pappy van Winkle amongst the cognoscenti, who furiously buy, sell and trade it via online forums.

Unlike, say, Van Winkle or Buffalo Trace’s Antique Collection, Willett is not a name that neophyte whiskey drinkers even know they should know. Even if they did, Willett’s output is virtually impossible to parse for the uninitiated. The packaging looks largely the same across the entire product line; Cognac-style bottles with subdued white labels are differentiated only by small, handwritten details near the shoulder noting age, proof and barrel number. The latter is arguably the most critical detail, though it’s also the most esoteric. Cryptic bottle notations like B57 and C1B have necessitated the circulation of a Google spreadsheet, created by and for collectors, to keep track of the whiskey held within. (Ironically, the Willett bottle that is most unique in appearance—Willett Pot Still—is the most loathed amongst avid collectors due to its lower proof and milder flavor profile.)

Like many Kentucky brands, the roots of Willett go back to the 19th century, but the story of what separates it from its peers begins in 1984, when Even Kulsveen purchased the company from his father-in-law, Thompson Willett. Renamed Kentucky Bourbon Distillers (KBD)—even though, at that time, they weren’t actually distilling anything—Kulsveen immediately began purchasing unwanted stock from nearby properties, which were glad to part with it as the public’s taste increasingly tilted toward clear spirits. When a renewed thirst for well-aged bourbon and rye arrived in the early aughts, KBD was well equipped to meet the demand, and their supply represented a cross section of some of the best whiskey produced in the heart of bourbon country.

“They were transparent, not trying to make up stories about labels, just honest that they were sourcing whiskey while they slowly built back a [functioning] distillery,” says Camacho Santa Ana, who had helped select Red Hook Rye from KBD’s warehouses. “The whiskey they sourced was great, but they were actively investing in relationships with people as a whole.”

Kulsveen’s son, Drew, joined the family business in 2003 and, in 2006, began releasing what he thought to be the best-tasting of its stock as cask-strength, non-chill-filtered single barrels (sometimes with private labels like Red Hook Rye) under the Willett Family Estate umbrella. While most bottles were allocated to bars, liquor stores and a few lucky individuals, occasionally they’d also hit the shelves at the distillery’s Bardstown gift shop, where they would sell for $10 per year of age statement. Enthusiasts and connoisseurs alike found many to be world-class. In fact, a 22-year-old rye release from 2006 garnered what was then the highest score in Whisky Advocate history and was deemed a “benchmark” for the category. It didn’t take long for in-the-know collectors to start lapping up anything they could find.

“There’s nothing out there like Willett,” says Danny Strongwater (not his real name), a Willett collector based in California, whose own blend, known as California Gold, was inspired by its distinctive cherries and pine flavor profile. Yet even connoisseurs struggle to detect where any individual Willett first gestated.

Unlike other non-distilling bottlers, who often source their stock from a single distillery (usually Indiana’s MGP), Willett acquired barrels from a vast array of producers: Bernheim, Heaven Hill, Four Roses, Jim Beam; some earlier releases were even said to be from the vaunted Stitzel-Weller Distillery. By actively sourcing during the 1980s whiskey “glut,” Kulsveen was able to acquire some truly one-of-a-kind stock that, in a more whiskey-friendly drinking era, might have been blended into less-notable releases.

Of course, the cult-like fanaticism surrounding Willett hinges on more than just great whiskey. As is often the case in the world of spirits, its rarity—each individual release consists of approximately 20 times fewer bottles than Pappy—contributes to its perceived cachet. Compounded with the high barrier for entry (it has its own language, after all), it creates an additional layer of exclusivity, only amplifying its desirability.

And it’s only becoming more desirable by the day. In 2017, Willett had to temporarily suspend its private barrel program due to overwhelming demand. Meanwhile, its equally sought-after “gift-shop-only” releases have appeared with greater infrequency and, when they do appear, necessitate standing in exceedingly long lines. As a stopgap measure, the company began bottling its own distillate in 2014, but it has yet to quell the frenzy.

As for Camacho Santa Ana, she has since moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where she opened LeNell’s Beverage Boutique last summer, a new outpost for her shuttered Red Hook liquor store. In December, she released her first Willett single barrel picks since Red Hook Rye—two traditionally labeled offerings called Light Side of the Moon and Dark Side of the Moon.

This time, nobody slept on them—the 334 bottles sold out the same day they hit the shelves.

The Most Sought-After Willett Bottlings

Since the release of Red Hook Rye in 2006, Willett’s output has garnered coveted status among whiskey collectors. Here, an introduction to the canon of Willett whiskey.

Red Hook Rye
One of the most iconic labels in modern American whiskey depicts a flexing arm with a cursive “LeNell” tattooed on the bicep. Red Hook Rye consists of four different releases between 2006 and 2008, only available at LeNell’s Brooklyn liquor store. All told, less than 1,000 bottles were ever produced; it’s so sought-after today that single-ounce samples currently sell on the secondary market for over $1,000.

Doug’s Green Ink
Willett’s first single barrel of rye, released in 2006, was a private barrel for collector Doug Phillips. Considered by some to be the ur–“sticker” label, the 22-year-old rye was rumored to be distilled at Bernheim in 1984 and, in many drinkers’ estimation, is still Willett’s best release. The name refers to the fact that all 263 of the white waxed bottles had their barrel details accidentally written in green ink.

Velvet Glove/Iron Fist
These two “sister” barrels of 23-year-old Bernheim rye were selected by Bourbon DC, a Washington whiskey bar, in 2007. It’s a good example of how inscrutable Willett bottlings can be: The only way to identify each is by a small, handwritten note on the back label.

Speakeasy Select/Rathskeller Rye
Louisville’s “grand hotel,” the Seelbach, selected these privately labeled barrels of both bourbon and rye in 2007. Some escaped into the marketplace where the 24-year-old rye (distilled in 1983 at Bernheim) has since become legendary; it’s believed to be from the same stock as Red Hook Rye and Doug’s Green Ink.

The Bitter Truth
Another private label Willett, this one was selected by Munich bartenders Stephan Berg and Alexander Hauck for the bitters company they run together. The 24-year-old rye is likewise 1984 Bernheim liquid, with only 240 700mL bottles hitting the German market in 2009.

Bonilli
In 2008, two 24-year-old ryes were released to the Japanese market by the eponymous liquor distributor Bonilli; one was bottled at 94 proof, the other 110. The importer is also responsible for releasing two 17-year-old Willett bourbons to the Japanese market that are likewise coveted the world over.

Wheated Patriot/Wheated Warrior
These 2014 releases for Massachusetts liquor store Julio’s—with barrel details written in red ink—are both 21-year-old wheated bourbons sold to benefit the Wounded Warrior Foundation. Many who’ve tasted it consider them to be every bit as good as comparably aged Pappy van Winkle.

Barrel #1404 (aka Ping Island Strike)
A 2017 collaboration “pick” between friends and Charleston residents Sean Brock and actor Bill Murray, pours of this 13-year-old bourbon are available at the HUSK restaurants for $45 a glass—while supplies last.

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