Alcolog

As alluded to a few times now, liquor does not go bad. There are exceptions due to poor handling, but if you are mindful of the conditions you keep the bottles, they'll last for a very long time. So what kinds of things do I buy and sit on?

Generally speaking, it's stuff that I don't expect to see again. But rather than being super expensive stuff, I tend to save the "good and cheap" stuff. This trend started a few years ago when Signatory's Vintage line started getting scarce:

These are mostly eight years old and from unnamed distilleries within the regions. Some of them are pretty easy to figure out (There's only one distillery on Mull), but others vary over the years. But the key to their charm was that they were respectable single malt Scotches for about $20 a bottle. Why are they so hard to find anymore? Distilleries are severely cutting back on the numbers of casks they're selling to independent bottlers, and thus the casks for the Vintage line are either sat upon to bottle later in life or just aren't available at all.

I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I also collect Templeton's bottlings:

The love affair with this company unfolded on here years ago, and I've made a point to get examples of everything they've bottled. There are two bottles from the first year (they're the ones labeled "Single Barrel"), three bottles from the second and current year (They're "Small Batch"), and two from their "Quasquicentenial" batch. That last one isn't technically a rye whiskey, since its mashbill was predominantly cane sugar.

I've posted about the Black Bull and All Saints brands never coming back, and I've made sure to grab some of their bottles for my reserves. Looking back at the first pictures of the All Saints bottles, it's good to note that their levels haven't changed in the last year and a half. The Bruichladdich is the most expensive bottle in the reserves, but that's because I've considered it one of the best bottles of Scotch I've ever bought. There have been two more Peat Proposals since this one, and they just haven't been as good as the first one. And finally there are two bottles of John Hall's Three Grain from Forty Creek. John is very adamant that he'll never make it again because of the labor involved. What's odd about the two bottles is that they were imported by different companies and have different labels.

It's a decent collection, and I'll keep adding to it as time goes on. But now it's time to lug the boxes into the basement and keep them safe again.

The average consumer of alcohol tends to be unaware of what kinds of roles exist within the liquor business, but they should already realize that alcohol is not like apples or iPods. The same sets of laws that limit where and when you can buy alcohol also create major roles in how alcohol gets from the brewery/still and into the home. Within the industry, this set of roles is referred to as the “Three-Tier System”.

This system of liquor sales and distribution came about with the passing of the 21st Amendment. After the end of prohibition, the US government ceded control over liquor sales directly to the individual states. The consensus at the time was that liquor needed to be controlled in two main ways: producers should not be able to sell their products directly, and no one should be able to control the end-to-end process of liquor sales. Thus the unspoken “fourth” tier became the local and state governments who oversee the restricted flow of alcohol within its jurisdictions.

The first tier is the producers. These are the breweries, wineries, distillers, and bottlers who create the finished product. For non-domestic production, the importer takes on the role of being a producer. Domestic producers have two masters: the state’s liquor control board and the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). The ATF regulates things such as bottle size, labeling requirements, and assessment of taxes and fees. The states also will regulate the producers through licensing and state-level taxes.

In order to stand between the producers and consumers, states require that there be a distributor/wholesaler that buys the alcohol from the producers. Distributors tend to be much larger than producers, but it’s rare to have a distributor with a presence in more than a few states. In about half of the states, the distributor is the state’s liquor control board, or LCB. Depending on the mentality of the LCB, this can be good or bad. LCBs can buy larger amounts and more diverse selections of alcohol, thus giving the state’s consumers more options for less money. The flip side is when the LCB’s role is to severely restrict the options and access to alcohol. In these states, the average consumer might never experience any liquors beyond a handful of famous labels.

The final layer in the system is the retailer, where the consumer finally has access to alcohol. Retailers are classified as “on” and “off” sale, which merely refers to where the alcohol is consumed. On-sale would be bars, restaurants, and events where the alcohol is consumed on the premises. Off-sale establishments are the liquor stores, gas stations, and grocery stores where you don’t consume the alcohol on the premises. In many of the LCB states, the LCB controls the off-sale stores. For example, the Pennsylvania LCB owns the “Wine and Spirits” stores within the state. Since the local governments control the licensing of off-sale stores, some of them choose to own the liquor stores. This used to be more common, but has fallen out of vogue as local governments look for ways to save money. If you ever see a city’s name in a liquor store, it’s either currently or formerly owned by the local government.

So what does this mean for the average liquor consumer? The more layers in any distribution system, the more expensive the product will be for the consumer. It also greatly reduces a consumer’s selection, no matter how progressive the state or distributor. It’s just impossible to have every option available from the distributor. The obvious solution to this would be to have consumers able to purchase directly from the producer. Unfortunately this is only an option for vineyards, so getting rare beers and liquors from their producers is illegal.

There is hope, though, as state governments relax the laws that limit consumer choice. It’s been 75 years since the end of prohibition in 1933. It may be that in another 75 years the term “Three-Tier System” will be as arcane as the “Speakeasy” is today.

Alcolog hasn't really been a news-based website. There are plenty of news sources on the Internet, and there's no need to re-invent the wheel. But I never realized until a few days ago how much news about booze I read on any given day. There are times it can take a good two hours to catch up on just one day's news. New product releases, reviews and tastings of special bottlings, and the occasional blog post. How does someone burn two hours reading about alcohol? Here's a good start:

Just Drinks
Between Olly Whering's blog posts and the news feed, there's about two dozen stories a day. It's not liquor-specific, and so a lot of the stories are about wine (Constellation Brands pops up a lot) and soft drinks. But they usually are the first to announce new things emerging in various markets. They also help brush up on drinks business lingo with terms such as RTD (ready to drink cocktails), alcopops (similar to RTD, but usually involve cola or spritzer), and functional drinks (soft drinks that include health benefits). They also get credit for teaching me that "Travel Retail" is considered a regional territory in the business. Who knew?

Google Alerts
Due to some create filtering on Google's News Alerts, I can get a pretty consistent stream of newspaper articles about booze. Sure, some of it tends to be repeats and they also cover Just Drinks, but the geographic diversity of the news is pretty strong. This is also where I learn about new craft distillers all around the country, the most prominent was learning about Templeton in 2006. Any time I know I'll be traveling to some place, I'll check the archive of stories to see if there's something I should buy while I'm there.

Newswire Feeds
Some less-fruitful news sources are places such as Drinks Business Review and Drinks Media Wire. They tend to be either low volume or news poor, but they're also free and that helps. Drinks Business Review tends to have analysis on what kinds of products were big in the last quarter or if a company is changing CEOs. Pretty dry reading. Drinks Media Wire is all press releases with a bit of a faulty filter because it's mostly restaurant and hotel announcements.

Blogs
Blogs tend to be low traffic, but give a good idea of what everyone else is talking about. Here's who's currently on my reading list:
Art of Drink
Liquor Snob
Luxist Spirits
Templeton
The Scotch Blog
What Does John Know?

It's pretty thin compared to, say, what The Cocktail Nerd reads, but most alcohol-related blogs on the web are focused on mixed drinks and not so much on just liquor. Liquor blogs also suffer a risk of going stale and not updating for long periods of time. Heck, even Alcolog has had that problem in the past. But they're nice because they don't tend to be very filtered opinions about what's happening in the business. Blogs are also nice because they're interactive. I'll occasionally respond to a posting if I feel there's something useful to add to the conversation. Mostly just reading, though.

So do you want to kill two hours of your days? For the hardcore folks out there it's the most fun you can have without actually drinking. Enjoy!

John Hansell's recent request for good whiskey deals resulted in a couple of suggestions for Bourbon that was "bottled in bond". If you've spent any time browsing a decent selection of Bourbon, you'll have seen this before, but what does it mean?

Simply put, a "bonded" spirit is one that was aged and bottled in a warehouse that's under the supervision of government agents. Specifically, 27 CFR 5.42 states that it must be:
1. Composed of whiskies that are of the same type
2. Those whiskies be produced within a single distilling season
3. Stored for at least four years in a bonded warehouse
4. Unaltered after leaving the cask, except for filtering
5. Reduced to 100 proof by only adding pure water
6. Bottled at 100 proof

But why? What's the big deal? Well, to understand why the label is around, you have to take in the context of when the original law was passed. The Bottled-in-Bond Act was signed into law in 1897, back when there weren't any regulations on what you put in a bottle. Unscrupulous retailers were more than willing to mix together tobacco and iodine and put it in a bottle and call it whiskey. The real distillers of the time felt this was unfair, so they looked to Congress for help. The law effectively carved out a tax exemption for distillers willing to let the government supervise their production process. By having the government supervise the warehouses, the producers didn't pay taxes on production until the bottles left the building. Then consumers would know that the product in the bottle met the six criteria mentioned above, and to ensure that things were kept clean, they'd put a green tax stamp over the top of the bottle to make sure you knew that it hadn't been tampered with.

The effect was staggering. Once the bonded whisky became available in 1901, the non-bonded whiskey dried up. The success of the law dovetailed into the others that regulated food labeling and the formation of the FDA in 1906.

But much has changed in the last century. Now we have legal definitions for all spirits and close supervision to ensure that we don't get fooled by what's on the label. The tax exemption proved to be so great that practically all aged spirits produced in America are done in bonded warehouses. So producers can get the tax benefit and avoid the extra requirements by merely flouting one of the six rules.

Today, a bonded whiskey means something else. It's the producer taking the challenge of bottling a whiskey that might change between seasons. It also assures a very small amount of blending is involved, which cannot be said for "small batch" whiskies. In short, those bonded whiskies are a treat because they're so rare. But unlike the fake whiskies they replaced, they aren't going away any time soon.