Trophy Bourbon from a Clerk's Point of View.

While I am not to happy with the video quality of this it does convey a truth that bourbon hunters need to know, buying fancy high end bourbon is mostly about building relationships with the stores that sell it. You are not going to have consistent luck with just calling all the stores within one hundred miles of your location and hoping to get bottles held for you. There is a whole world of less rare seventy five, one hundred and, one hundred and fifty dollar bottles of bourbon that stores have a difficult time selling because they just are not as rare and desirable as the buffalo trace offerings, the crazy thing is these other bourbons are also very good and pretty helpful to have around when you do have those super rare bottles, so you don't drink them!

Those bottles let the clerk know who is serious about having a collection of rare and interesting bottles of bourbon and who is just looking to flip bottles that have serious grey market premiums. This notion of the grey (or Bootleg) market is what makes Pappy Van Winkle such a headache for retailers the fact that even at an 100% mark up there is still a potential to make three hundred to four hundred more dollars if you are willing to illegally ship the bottle, and that isn't the most valuable bottle in the line up some of the rarest bottles like Pappy 20 or 23 are worth thousands more on the grey market, this makes vetting your customers a necessity, since if the store is thought of as supplying the grey market the distributors will cut off your supply.

In summary: have a relationship with the store you want to buy from, buy other bottles in the price range from that store, be very discreet about reselling the bourbon if you are going to do that since it will cause problems both for you (it is illegal) and the store (loss of supply). Happy Bourbon Hunting.