Good Afternoon, A friend of mine here in Southern California who owns a liquor store has purchased 5 used bourbon barrels from the Rip Van Winkle Distillery. The distillery will not handle a shipping truck coming on premises for shipping. I am reaching out to the BA's in the area if anyone can pick these up and then my friend can have the shipping company he chooses come to your residence/work for p/u. He will paypal you for gas/trouble and when he is done aging the beers will send you a couple. Also if any of you work for a shipping company that could help me out on this that would be great. Any help would be appreciated in this. If you have questions, please dont hesitate to contact me via BM. Just trying to help out a buddy here. Cheers! James
I dabble in the industry a bit. Hopefully, he hasn't paid for them yet. His best bet is to contact a Cooperage (Kelvin's Cooperage here in Louisville is my recommendation, tell Paul, John King referred) and work with them. Most distilleries here intown drop off their barrels at a Cooperage and then the Cooperage sends them to Europe, Mexico, or other breweries. (Sidenote: Those Pappy Van Winkle barrels are just real old Buffalo Trace/other old distillery barrels...not original Pappy Barrels). If you buddy can find a local brewery that gets barrels from a cooperage, they can usually take on the extras and shipping is a bit cheaper and he can just go to the brewery and pick them up himself. A lot of breweries in a close proximity do this to save shipping costs.
The pappy van winkle distillery does not actually exist. pappy is made and aged at buffalo trace in frankfort. The old van winkle distillery was actually the stitzell-weller distillery in louisville, ky that closed in the early 90s. Some barrels of their juice are still floating around but just how much is unknown. Using old or non existent distillery names is a very common trick in the bourbon industry. Almost all bourbon originates at 6 or so actual distilleries; jim beam, heaven hill, buffalo trace, four roses, wild turkey and brown foreman/old forester. There might be 150 different distilleries used on packaging but the stuff is coming from the places listed earlier.
Completely off topic and not necessarily all correct... If you haven't figured something out, I'd also suggest posting on Straightbourbon.com forums to see if someone there has a connection to help you out
