A couple of years ago, whilst trying to acquire a specific bottle for a special occasion, I wanted to figure out exactly how much this bottle would cost…and should cost.  A quick Google search provided several options for sale, all with eyebrow lifting numbers that seemed astronomical in nature.  Surely those weren’t right.  I luckily had access to some secondary bourbon sales pages, but had to data mine those pages, which are often taken down from hosting sites given their not exactly above-board nature - and as they go, so does the underlying historical data contained therein.  Surely there was a better way to know what was reasonable to pay.

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Finding myself not being excited about any of the quite frankly poorly put together, out of date and wildly inaccurate sites that claim to provide this information, Bourboneur® took to fill this void.  Every. Single. Day.  Bourboneur® goes to work on culling through the thousands of secondary sales on national sites to track pricing trends that are then published to the Bourbon Blue Book™ on roughly a weekly (or less) basis.  It’s laborious as many bottles that come up to market are purposefully misspelled, abbreviated, the pricing data is in a photo in handwritten scribble, the picture of the bottle needs to be reviewed to ascertain the barrel number, etc.  Artificial Intelligence is not an option…it’s brute force manpower at its finest that has yielded the most up-to-date and expansive guide to pricing for coveted bottles of brownwater on the web, now numbering north of 3,500 bottles.  Type “bourbon pricing” into Google and the Bourbon Blue Book is the number one search result for a reason…thousands of people every day find their way onto Bourboneur’s website to help navigate the ever-changing secondary bourbon market and get the most real, accurate, and up to date data available anywhere.

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Speaking of the bourbon market, let’s talk about what we’re seeing at the moment.

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2024 Secondary Bourbon Market Trends

From hot dogs to a can of Coca Cola, everything costs more now than it did at the start of the year it seems – except maybe bourbon.  As consumers are straddled with the weight of inflationary pressures on their day to day, discretionary spending on allocated bourbon for instance is waning.  A recent poll of Bourboneur’s highlighted this trend with approximately sixty percent of respondents when reflecting on their bourbon spending habits over the course of this year so far saying they were spending less.  Of those polled, approximately fifteen percent said they were spending less on allocated bourbons as a whole, highlighting the pull back that we are seeing on the overall secondary market pricing you see below, with pricing as of this past week dropping 8.16 percent since the start of the year.

Although the overall market is down, it’s not as if it’s down across the board.  Many bottles have certainly seen precipitous declines like Willet’s 8 Year Wheated (-23.40% year to date), Elmer T Lee (-20.18% year to date), or Four Roses Small Batch Limited Edition 135^th Anniversary bottling (20.67% year to date).  However, some bottles have made notable gains against a backdrop of falling prices like Parker’s Heritage 16 (2022) Double Barreled Blend (+13.00% year to date) and Russel’s Reserve 13 Batch 5 (LL/LE) (+7.41% year to date), to name a few.   Below are a couple other bottles that are regularly on folks wish lists.

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New App Coming!!

In the week(s) ahead Bourboneur will be launching it’s own app for iOS and Android, putting the Bourbon Blue Book and some exciting new features in users hands.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page to subscribe and keep up to date on our upcoming launch and join a community of over 10,000 Bourboneurs.  You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, and yes, even TikTok.  Show us some love and give us a like on your favorite platform, or all of them and keep up with all the Bourboneur happenings!

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