Just noting you think No Fear is an A-List game

I believe the post says the booze group is rude not pinside I think!I hope so!

I was saying that about most of the bourbon groups and forums I used to be in, as opposed to pinside (which ofc has some drama/turds like EVERY forum in existence) which for the most part is super helpful and welcoming. More or less saying we should be happy there is a great resource/collective group for pinball, because a lot of other hobbies lack that.

Unfortunately, that'll never happen,so we can either pay the high prices or stand on the side lines. When people want something bad enough, they're gonna buy it regardless of the price.

Any theories on the bourbon forums to why prices are up so much, presumably due to lowered supply? It's not like there are shortages of corn, water, and yeast. More people at home getting smashed during the pandemic? Worker shortage?

Most likely answer is it's a combination of things. Bourbon started beating out scotch to win some pretty prestigious awards in the late 90s and early 2000s and that put them on the radar of whiskey enthusiasts. Then, much like Sideways did for merlot, the show Mad Men ("Mr. Draper drinks rye") and some other pop culture icons blew up the popularity. A lot of people point to PVW specifically a result of Anthony Bourdain's quote "If God made bourbon, this is what he'd make." Whiskey distilleries reinvested some of the boom and jumped on the bandwagon by expanding their "small batch" and "single barrel" offerings, and also started working with distributers and popular liquor store owners allowing them to get involved in the process by visiting distilleries to have private tastings and actually pick the barrel/barrels they wanted bottled to sell in their private stores as exclusive "store picks". Rather than the new flavored vodkas taking up endcap locations in stores, it became these small batch one off bourbons vying for customer's priority attention when they entered the stores.

Another huge factor is that from an aging perspective you also have to account for just how long it takes to produce bottles of this stuff. The bottles aged 12+ years being gobbled up heavily from 2005 on, were largely bottled a decade earlier. You'll hear people comment who were in it at the start were not only finding these whale bottles sitting on a shelf at a low cost, many of them had layers of dust on them for sitting so long. No one wanted to spend $60-100 on a bottle of bourbon (the same ones now selling secondary for $2k plus). And despite the massive growth in sales over this time, they were already behind 12+ years on production eventually catching up with demand. Add to this at least 4 major distillery fires over the past twenty years, Heaven Hill and Wild Turkey in 96 and 2000; and most recently Jim Beam losing 45,000 barrels in 2019; that's basically resetting the clock on a lot of big name aged bourbons needing to start the process all over again.

I'd like to think in another 5-10 years this is less of an issue. However, as we see in all collectables markets, sometimes the creation of false scarcity drives it even more wild. Perfect example would be like I pointed out about getting Buffalo Trace in NJ. It's an ok bourbon that's MSRP of ~$27 a bottle, but now doesn't even make it on shelves here. So you either pay 2x-3x on the secondary market, or "try to build relationships with your local liquor stores" which is disgusting code for "spend at least $xxx a month here and I'll allow you to purchase this from me from the back room (still at a stupidly marked up rate), even though I've got cases of it back here and it sits on shelves in other parts of the country." And refusing to succumb to this toxic relationship with your local liquor stores won't stop it anyhow because of lot of these owners are the same ones participating in the FB/reddit/craigslist auctions. So they can just sell online whatever the don't sell in their stores. (If you're wondering why this happened with BT in particular, it's because they are the ones making PVW. So people started putting together that Weller 12 is basically the same as PVW, just the coming from the barrels which didn't quite make the cut for whatever reasons. People have trickled that logic down now to all BT bottles including their namesake bottom line stuff.)

I've found your best bet is going the single barrel/small batch options which do sit on shelves because they don't have the same name cache. Get 4-5 different bottles for $150 and find what you like the most. Rinse and repeat until you have a stable of readily available, fairly priced options you can stock your home bar with. For me it's been EC small batch, WT101, Angels Envy, and for old fashions Woodford double oaked. Depending where you live, you may be able to find ones even better, but the pickings are slim where I am on the boarder of Jersey and PA.