austinag1997 said:
John Francis Donaghy said:
austinag1997 said:
John Francis Donaghy said:
aggiemike89 said:
It's crazy to look back at the progression of things that are "allocated" and so hard to find now that used to be so readily available. I remember when RHF sat on the shelf. I could got to any number of 4-5 stores that would have several on the shelf at any point in time. Same thing for W12. Heck back in 2012 I left an ORVW squat bottle on the shelf because I had a couple and wanted to leave it for someone else. Wonder if the market will ever level out? Doesn't seem to be. More people drinking bourbon and only so much of the older and allocated bourbons. Simple supply and demand economics I suppose.
The market will level out eventually. Tje thing about 12 to 23 year old bourbon is that it takes 12 to 23 years to make, which means producers have to produce today on speculation of demand over a decade in the future.
Bourbon was in very low demand for a long time, and was mostly considered mixing whiskey, while scotch was for sipping. Buffalo Trace went so far as to renovate two of its largest rickhouses into office space and lease them out to government agencies as a steadier source of cashflow, because there wasn't enough demand for their bourbons to justify filling all their rickhouses at once.
Then more and more people started "discovering" good bourbon, and bourbon makers hadn't been producing at nearly high enough levels to meet the demand. We've all watched bourbon makers re-balance their operations over the last 5-8 years, eliminating some less popular brands, removing age statements, holding back more barrels to age longer in order to increase production of older bourbons.
Those moves should start to pay off in the next few years as the results of those production chages start to hit bottling age, and the releases of super premium bourbons start to get larger. The current crunch won't last forever.
Not exactly. Why is 6-yr Handy still highly allocated? Answer... Sazerac likes it like that.
Sazerac likes selling Handy for less than $90 and letting retailers/flippers turn around and re-sell it for 3-4 times that amount and pocket the difference for themselves?
Sazerac could increase the production on a 6-yr bottle, yet they choose not to. You decide for yourself. A highly sought after rye that only takes 6 years to produce. C'mon... that's not the case of a sluggish response to demand.
I don't think the rye is a good example to use. Not every drop of a batch of BT rye is going to end up as THH quality juice.
With the bourbons there are a lot of mid to upper-mid shelf offerings to absorb excess juice that doesn't make the cut for BTAC level products. How much demand is there for Baby Saz and would upping production of their rye mashbill enough to increase Handy production leave them with a oversupply of Baby Saz that nobody wants?
I would also think they're a bit gun shy to expand their facilities too much too fast, in case the premium bourbon craze passes before the can recoup the investment, and they have to start finding other uses for their excess rickhouses like they had to before.
I don't know any of that for fact. But I just don't believe that BT wants the secondary market to continue to generate tenfold profits on BT products for everyone but BT. It just doesn't make any sense.