Goose Island Bourbon County - 2024 (Chicagoland)

But you also get a lanyard!

 

My favorite Rare 2015 story was one branch of a grocery store here accidentally getting all the other branches' allocations then the first guy in line bought all 30-ish bottles. So 1 dude bought the entire Sendik's allocation and payed Sendik's pricing for it. What an investment opportunity!

Come on don't leave us hanging like that!

 

200 people in line at a suburban Binny's on Black Friday that year and they announce that they only have 6 rares for the entire store. The following year They jack up the price $20 and suddenly have pallets full no limit.

edit: and then the best part, all the stans defending this move and saying the Goose Island never intended to make you think the beer itself was rare! only the barrels!!!

 

They're really trying to bring the lines back (and the markup)!

 

I know this has been a common point of discussion over the years, but what does rare mean? Are BTAC bottles rare? If so, does that mean rare is based on quantity available, or demand? Or based on theoretically how much they could produce?

Alternatively, how little of it has to be available for it to have been deemed Rare?

Is Pappy rare now? If so, was pappy rare in the early 2000s? Because, there is at least as much now as then, and demand is higher now, but it used to sit on certain shelves at MSRP (including a notorious store in Chicago). So, was it rare?

 

It’s just marketing…they could put it in bottom shelf Jack Daniel’s barrels and have it blessed by the Pope and tell you it’s now worth $100 a bottle….

 

I wouldn't call myself an aficionado but I know a little about King of Kentucky. Think of it as the George T. Stagg or Pappy Van Winkle made by Brown-Forman, the spirits company that owns the Jack Daniels and Old Forester brands. KoK is B-F's most premium product. It's a yearly release introduced in 2018, but it ticks all the bourbon nerd checkboxes: high age (15-ish years), high proof (cask strength), and high exclusivity (low bottle count, very limited distribution area). If you live in Chicagoland you can very likely find an expensive pour of PVW15 or GTS at a high end bar or restaurant near you, but good luck finding KoK outside of Kentucky specialty shops or having a relationship with someone in the industry. Is it rare/exclusive? Most certainly. Is it any good? Hell if I know!

 

That doesn’t answer the question. You’re trying to get at quality and whether something is worth it. The question is how you define something as rare? What is the threshold and cut off?

PVW (the line) used to sit. It didn’t do any marketing to become popular. It became popular because review sites, sources became popular as bourbon become popular. And as popularity grew and demand increased, especially after reviews became widely available, the product became scarce.

 

I wasn’t asking any question. But the answer to yours is you are barking up the wrong tree. Quality, price, and scarcity is a non issue. GI is going to market it as whatever they can perceive value from. In 2010 it was hyping up the 21 year old whiskey and 2 year aging. In 2016 it was 30 whatever year whiskey that people said was past its prime and there sure were huge quantities of it, but it was a marketing story of “lost barrels” that made it a selling point, plus again, 2 year barrel aging. Now GI barrel ages ton of stuff for 2 years so that isn’t an exclusive sell point anymore. Again, they could shit in a barrel and call it BCbS Rare because no one else is shitting in barrels and aging beer…trying to find some mark of quality, scarcity, or high end refinement in what they use for BCBS rare barrels is a fools errand.

 

Guesses on ticket price, or did I miss that little detail.

 

Everyone got upset, because they felt like they got fleeced. If people who went to rare day - if they had been the only one who had access to supply, no one would have complained. But, given the price, because it wasn’t as hard to get as they led the public to believe, people got upset. Rightfully so - an insane price for a beer, especially then, especially if you could get it through any number of opportunities later.

No one would complain about any of this now if it was $22/16.9oz. But we all know it will be $40-60/bottle.

My point is that people love to complain. If you make the price more reasonable, people will bitch about the rare moniker, but that is a straw man argument unless you can define what rare means. It’s mostly just people screaming at the clouds, which is fine, but let’s be honest about what it is, and not actually an injustice that they marketed it at rare. It’s not like it was $70 at rare day and then $22 on Black Friday. The price of admission was more or less always the same.

 

$250?

 

I'm gonna say $160. Rare $50, Prop $30, Vanilla Rye $25, Macaroon $25, glass lanyard and tokens $30.

 

Only $50 for rare? I bet they pull out a $129 price tag or something crazy

 

The last two double barrel variants were $55, being "rare" I'm guessing this is somewhere between $75-$100.

 

I have a very hard time envisioning AB/InBev is selling this Rare for less than the 2015 Rare. So yeah, north of $70.

 

$79.99
Mark it dude

 

Well, I got there quite a bit later than the other maybe 12-15ish people in line. All lines I'd been in up until that point had been fairly jovial. This one was silent. No one was talking, faces all buried in phones. I said hi to the guy in front of me. He starts asking me a ton of questions. Do I think Vanilla Rye will be there? How many Vanilla Ryes will there be? What will they cost? Etc, etc, etc. As a mental health professional, he presented as manic. He smelled like had hadn't showered in a few days and hot boxed Marlboros. He was offering to buy any VR or other bottles that were limited that the first 12 people in line didn't want, then turning around to me and the back half of the line and offering to sell these hypothetical bottles at a profit and laughed at us. I told him I was good. Everyone was really uncomfortable with him. Eventually he started making phone calls to, "His guys," basically harassing I assume random liquor store employees about VR - how much it would be, how many they got, etc. Apparently there were rumors there were gonna be other things than Rare and he was pretty fixated on that. He started making these calls in private and walking away because he didn't want us eavesdropping on his intel. The first time he did and was out of earshot I said to the line, "What the fuck is going on here?" Everyone started laughing. One dude turns around and said he'd been dealing with the guy all morning and now it was my turn. This just continued until Binny's opened and it ended up being only 2 Rare per person or whatever. He bought his max, then scurried off to chase that VR dragon.

It was my first encounter with a Maxx Profitz bro, but something was off about him. He was like a stock market trader on a bender. It was all very bizarre.

 

They certainly don't. But this was actually that weird Rare drop in I believe 2016, the day after Christmas. Binny's sent out the email on Christmas day at some point.