There’s a joke in the retail industry about wheated Bourbons. Everyone who works in a liquor store understands it. It goes something like this:
A customer asks if you have any good wheated Bourbons.
You show them Maker’s Mark, Larceny, the Willett Pot Still, maybe even something new like Wilderness Trail, but they’re never interested and invariably say, “Do you have anything else?”
We all laugh. Then we sigh.
The joke (if you didn’t catch it) is that the customer isn’t really looking for wheated Bourbon recommendations. The customer is asking if you have any Pappy, or if you have any Weller, and is trying to be coy about asking directly.
It’s the great dilemma with Pappy and Weller. If you have to ask, you probably can’t get it. But you also won’t get it if you don’t ask.
What’s a loyal Bourbon customer to do? There’s no easy answer. I’m still working on a better solution, and while I’m fairly good at what I do, I haven’t invented a way of turning 50 rare bottles of Bourbon into 5,000 bottles.
When I worked at K&L, I had my own solution for rationing out these whiskies, but it wasn’t perfect and it put me at odds with a large number of consumers. In the case of Weller, I would put them on the web, limit them to one bottle per customer, email my insider list that the bottles were available, and let the technology take care of the rest.
If you live on your phone, you’re probably fine with that solution. But then I would receive hundreds of emails from irate customers who work during the day and weren’t by their computers when the notice went out. How was I planning to take care of them?
In the case of Pappy or the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection bottles, I would raffle them off using an internal email system.
Everyone who won a bottle was delighted. Everyone who lost was pissed. It often would take me weeks to dig out from all the angry correspondence.
“Do you know how long I’ve shopped here? How much money I’ve spent in your store?”
I could write a fifty page dissertation about all of the bullshit you have to deal with as a retailer when selling these rare whiskies, but I’ll save you the sob story. The point is this: no matter how you deal with the situation, you’re going to piss people off. A lot of them. Consistently. Without end.
That’s why many retailers mark the whiskies up, throw ‘em on the web, and forget about them. It’s pure capitalism. They don’t have the time or the patience for the delicate dance that luxury goods management requires. If everyone’s going to be pissed no matter what, we might as well make some money, right?
That strategy is wrought with its own complications, which is why I’m planning to instill some of my customer service protocols at Mission moving forward. But in the midst of holiday madness there are more important battles on my agenda; like finding wheated Bourbon solutions that work for more than just 25 customers.
Hence, why I’m excited about this new barrel of Larceny we have in stock. It may not be exciting for wheated Bourbon fans who really only like two very specific wheated Bourbon labels, but if you legitimately enjoy the sweetly-spiced profile of a true wheated Bourbon recipe and you’re looking for something new to try, this bottle is for you.
WHY: This wheated single barrel Larceny Bourbon barrel was hand-picked by our buying team to match the flavor profile we know our customers crave: sweet notes of clove and nutmeg, creamy oak richness, soft vanilla, with pencil shavings and barrel char notes on the finish.
HOW: Originally barreled on 03/13/13 (lucky numbers!), Barrel No. 6357516 comes from the 6th floor of Heaven Hill's W Warehouse in Bardstown, giving it extra concentration from the elevated position due to the hot summer days. Larceny uses a mash bill of 68% corn, 20% wheat, and 12% barley.
WHAT: Larceny is Heaven Hill Distillery's label for its wheated Bourbon recipe, substituting wheat for rye as the secondary flavor grain in the mash hill.
I’ve been playing around with the bottle all weekend and it works well in so many different ways. It’s delicious as a straight pour, it holds up with ice, and it mixes very well with sweet vermouth, integrating itself beautifully into a Manhattan.
We’ve got a whole barrel of the Larceny at $21.95 a bottle, and the concentration of flavor from that single barrel is what makes the difference here. If you come into Mission and ask us about wheated Bourbons right now, this is what we’ll be putting in your hand.
-David Driscoll