A Whiskey Connoisseur's Guide to Drinking on a Budget

While it’s easy to look at a bottle boxed in oak staves or swathed in luxurious velvet and presume it’s something delicious, the inverse also feels true. Surely that bottom-shelf bottle with the shoddy label and plastic twist-cap can’t be tasty? Wrong. Many so-called “cheap” whiskeys, like Wild Turkey 101 and Rittenhouse Rye Bottled-in-Bond, are terrific products, and a great place for an aspiring connoisseur to start. Old Grand-Dad Bonded is made from the same “juice” as the much costlier and more fancily-packaged Basil Hayden’s—and OGD is higher proof! Distilleries are finally catching on and starting to gussy up their lower-end bottles—like Wild Turkey did in 2015. A bigger issue is some of these thrifty whiskies accidentally becoming hyped themselves, like what happened to Weller 12 when people learned it was a similar wheated mash bill to Pappy Van Winkle. Once you could find it for $25. Now you can’t find it whatsoever.

OGD Bonded isn’t just tasty, it’s also 100 proof. More bang for your buck! Even if whiskey connoisseurship isn’t (completely) about getting blotto, one can only drink so much whiskey in a single night. Maybe that’s a whole bottle of Jack per day if you’re Lemmy; maybe only a few ounces if you’re a normal person without a liver made of titanium. So you better make those drams count. And, if you’re broke, you better get as much out of your bottle as you can. Thus, your best bet is to go after “barrel-proof” offerings, i.e., whiskey that hasn’t been watered down whatsoever. Surprisingly, many barrel-proof offerings are still fairly well-priced, as they’re just too “hot” for general consumers to deal with. Look for Booker’s (MSRP $70) or Stagg Jr. ($65) to start. Barrel-proof whiskies are often the height of flavor and, if they’ve come straight from a single barrel (like, say, Russell’s Reserve, $60), you’ll get to taste something very few others ever will. 

“Dusty hunting,” as it’s called, is pretty much over. I know dudes who used to dedicate entire weekends to driving in concentric circles around a certain part of town, hitting hundred of liquors stores, hoping to find some ancient bottle of Old Fitzgerald still lingering on a shelf. It was a great way to find something killer for pennies. You might occasionally stumble upon a dusty OGD or out-of-production Wild Turkey nip these days, but don’t count on it, and don’t waste too much time looking. Your better option is to finally accept your grandpa or great aunt’s long-standing invitation to join them for a dinner. In between the soup course, sneak off to their wet bar and maybe you’ll find they still have some old whiskey they haven’t touched since the ’80s. 

By now even your teetotaling mom knows that a lot of micro-whiskey isn’t legit, but instead comes sourced from a giant Indiana factory named Midwest Grain Products. The thing is, many MGP whiskeys are damn good, especially their 95% ryes, which have an utterly distinct note (some say, of pickle juice). Many of the more famed micro-distilleries—High West, Smooth Ambler—use at least a portion of MGP product in their whiskeys, and while those products are terrific, many other (more secretive) MGP sourcers are way over-charging you for the privilege. If you like the MGP flavor profile, grab some bottles of Bulleit Rye, Redemption, and George Dickel Rye, which are made from MGP juice, but can be typically be found a whole lot cheaper than other, more “crafty” MGP employers like Angel Envy’s and Templeton Rye.

Don’t do your whiskey testing and tasting at good bars. While I count whiskey emporiums like Jack Rose (Washington D.C.) and Canon (Seattle) as two of my favorite bars on planet earth, their daunting collections can also be quite pricey, especially if you’re not yet savvy. Fact is, the clientele is often well-heeled at fancier bars, and thus have the wallets to afford the prices (and often the egos to want to try all they hypes whiskeys of the world). Better to do your whiskey drinking at divier bars that aren’t selling you any atmosphere, but instead are simply selling you whiskey. Most of the most ballyhooed whiskey brands come from massive conglomerates like Suntory, Campari, and Diageo, which means you can often find their better products at the same shitty dives that also buy plenty of bottles of those companies’ lower-end offerings. At a joint like Manhattan’s Blue & Gold Tavern, you can get pours of a quality single malt, like Ardbeg 10 or Lagavulin 12, for just $5!

If you’re starting out on your journey, though, you’re going to want to get the training wheels off as fast as you can and learn about the Michters and Staggs of the world. Fair enough, but consider trying them in the smallest quantity possible. While most bars will sell pours that are 1.5 or 2 ounces in size, you can usually talk places into selling you a mere ounce, or even half-ounce, of a pricier offering, even if they don’t list it on the menu. The aforementioned Jack Rose does, in fact, sell one-ounce pours, which are a great way to turn a $25 glass of some obscure 1970s Japanese bottling of OGD into a slightly-more-affordable $12.50 dram. That’s more than enough to learn what you think of something without buying the whole damn cow and going broke.

Bourbon and rye are red hot, Scotch has always been pricey, and any Japanese whiskey of note is becoming impossible to find in America. There are other countries than those three that make whiskey, though, ya’ know? Especially the Irish, who have as lengthy of whiskey history as the Scottish, but for some reason are unable to sell their better products for the same astronomical amounts. (“After Prohibition, Scotch was still around. That’s why it’s so big today. It’s not the taste, it’s the history,” according to The Dead Rabbit’s Sean Muldoon). That’s silly, as there are plenty of phenomenal Irish whiskeys that are as delicious as anything out there. I always recommend Redbreast 12 ($55) as a great, affordable gift for someone. While a product like Jameson Rarest Vintage may seem costly at around $300, unlike most extraordinary whiskies from other countries, it can still be found on store shelves and has absolutely no black market mark-up. (Likewise, Taiwanese whiskey like Kavalan remains cheaper than Japanese whiskey, even if it’s just as good.)