Eagle Rare 10 Year Old Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey

VA ABC- $49.99

Total Wine - $41.99

Class VI - $XX.xx

ABV - 45%

AGE - 10 Years Old

From the VA ABC website:  Eagle Rare Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey is masterfully crafted and carefully aged for no less than 10 years. The rareness of this great breed of bourbon is evident in its complex aroma, as well as the smooth and lingering taste. Eagle Rare is a bourbon that lives up to its name with its lofty, distinctive taste experience. The nose is complex, with aromas of toffee, hints of orange peel, herbs, honey, leather and oak. The taste is bold, dry and delicate with notes of candied almonds and very rich cocoa. The finish is dry and lingering.

From the Eagle Rare website:

Nose: Complex aromas of toffee, hints of orange peel, herbs, honey, leather and oak.

Taste: Bold, dry, oaky flavors with notes of candied almonds and very rich cocoa.

Finish: Dry and lingering.

I’ve had Eagle Rare 10-yr-old.  It’s okay.  Not bad.  But as with any whiskey, the price is critical in the rating.  It’s going for $41.99 at both the ABC and Total Wine.  I would say that’s a fair price.  If you find a bottle for forty to fifty bucks, buy it.  I wouldn’t spend much more than that.  As you’ll read below, we’re in a crazy whiskey world.  

I’m hosting a whiskey tasting in the near future.  I had a specific theme that I wanted to stick to.  In that theme I needed Eagle Rare so I went to my local ABC to buy a bottle - none available.  So I went to the closest base Class VI - none available.  I even went to the Total Wine in Delaware - none available.  Now Eagle Rare is allocated, which means there’s not enough to go around so you have to get in line.  And good luck finding a bottle.  Why is it so hard to find a bottle of mediocre (in my opinion) good whiskey???  Well, let’s learn some whiskey slang: ‘Tater’. 

Tater - “A potato has eyes, but does not see”  A whiskey tater is a person whose purchasing decisions are blindly based on hype and not the actual drinking experience.  The non-whiskey-drinking folks are having an effect on the whiskey market. It's an important reason why we can’t get Eagle Rare.

There’s a strong secondary market across the whiskey world.  You can buy a bottle at your local liquor store and, if there’s a demand for it, go on a secondary site and flip it for more than you bought it.  Like primary markets, secondary markets send market signals about price and popularity of a product.  Under normal circumstances if you can’t find the bottle you want, you can check a secondary market website and buy it there for, normally, a reasonable increase in price.  But as with the Beanie Baby craze, people get greedy and the market starts to get distorted and a bubble is inflated.  Is there a bourbon bubble now?  We can’t get a bottle of what is really just a mediocre-to-good whiskey.  That’s telling us something.  

Fresh flippers and market manipulators.  A fresh flipper is somebody who buys and sells quickly.  Among them there is reason to believe that market manipulation is taking place in the secondary markets.  One flipper is selling his bottle to a friend for an inflated price while buying another bottle from the same friend for an equally-inflated price.  That unfair (and illegal) practice is bound to inflate a bubble.  That may be what’s happening here.

But, why is it so hard to find an ER these days?  Distilleries planned for this year more than ten years ago.  They gauged the market and made decisions to produce the amount that they have.  If they guessed less than the market wants today, then they run out of whiskey and that’s that - no more juice. If there’s heavy demand, that batch of whiskey will be difficult to find. 

And so here we are with Eagle Rare.  Years ago I hosted a blind whiskey tasting - my first tasting, actually.  One of my friends, a participant, had been raving about ‘Eagle Rare’.  “Oh, you gotta get Eagle Rare!  It won all sorts of awards.  It’s the best whiskey you can get”.  He would often go on and on about how great it was.  So I got a bottle and included it in with the other five.  Granted, all of the participants were whiskey novices (including me) so we didn’t have refined palates.  However, it is worth something that nobody considered it to be especially good.  Is it worth buying on the secondary market for an inflated price?  Hell no.

Taters and tasters.  What am I saying and what am I not saying? I’m not saying that if you come upon a bottle of ER, you shouldn’t buy it. Even if you’re new to whiskey, go ahead.  Be sure to call me, and I’ll be right over!  As with my first whiskey tasting, ER is a good comparison against mid-shelf whiskies.  And don’t take my word for it, when you taste it, you might really love it.  I’ll be happy for you.  

And I’m not lamenting that whiskey has increased in popularity thereby driving up the price naturally.  The next time you complain about how your favorite whiskey has increased in price, remember that the increase in demand has brought new players into the market.  Many of those new distillers don’t know the whiskey ‘rules’ so they do things like finishing their whiskey in different types of barrels heretofore unheard of and for the stuffy traditionalists, sacrilege.  But, we’ve benefited greatly from those experiments.  I’m thankful that whiskey is popular.

But, if you buy a bottle and put it in your ‘collection’ to admire unopened, or if you buy the bottle and try to flip it on a secondary market, well, I hope you don’t have a nice day.  Yeah, I think there’s a bubble.  And one day, that bubble is going to burst.  And all those taters are gonna get stuck.  Just remember me, taters.  I’ll happily buy your bottle of Eagle Rare - for forty bucks.      

Cocktail

Brown Derby  

3oz Eagle Rare 10, 

1oz Grapefruit juice, 

1 squirt of Honey syrup