Criminal - Pappy, Another Round

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

When it comes to Kentucky bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle is among the most exclusive. You can’t get it unless you’re exceptionally lucky, exceptionally wealthy, or willing to break the law. The Pappy frenzy has the police, bartenders, and even the Van Winkle family themselves wringing their hands. According to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, sales of the most expensive American whiskeys have basically doubled since 2016, when we first looked into Pappy Van Winkle. We decided to find out what's happening now. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey

involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. According to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States,

sales of the most expensive American whiskeys have basically doubled since 2016. Since we haven't talked about bourbon on this show since 2016, we thought we should check in. We'll start with our original episode about Pappy Van Winkle, and then dig into what's been going on since. Generally, the way I've drank Pappy in my life has been in the company of someone who has a bottle squirreled away, sometimes under their coat, sometimes under the seat of their car. Brett Anderson is the restaurant critic for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Last year, he tried to buy a bottle of bourbon called Pappy Van Winkle for a wedding gift. He knew it wasn't going to be easy. Pappy Van Winkle is one of the hardest bottles of

bourbon in the world to get your hands on. People camp outside liquor stores when they know the small annual allotment is going to be released. And then it's off the shelf in three minutes. I naively thought that I would be able to just sort of Google it, you know? And of course you can't, you know, like the, but that's how stupid I was going into all this.

What do you mean? Why, why can't you just Google it? I mean, you can Google it, like you can get anything, right? Well, I thought I'd just end up on some website and I'd pay some extra, you know, exorbitant amount for a bottle of Pappy and it'd show up in the mail, but you can't, I don't believe just legally do that as a seller, right? Like there's been, I've been in so many conversations where people are talking about prices per bottle for Pappy that I thought that the marketplace would be more accessible. I found out that it wasn't that accessible. You'd think if there was one person who could track down a bottle of bourbon, it would be a restaurant critic in New Orleans. But when it comes to Pappy, it doesn't matter who you are.

You can't get it, unless you're willing to be creative. I just assumed that I would have to be willing to let it get a little sketchy if I wanted to get a bottle. Sometimes you've got to meet a guy in a parking lot somewhere. I mean, that's sort of what I figured I'd have to do. You know, in my head, I never imagined that it would get any sketchier than that. I mean, even though it's black market whiskey, it's still whiskey. It's still a legal product. I mean, we're not talking about heroin here. He asked all over town and eventually got the number of a guy in Mississippi who said he had a bottle to sell. He had no idea who this guy was. And after a few text messages, the guy just stopped responding. I'm willing to pay an exorbitant amount. In fact,

I want that to be part of the narrative of this bottle because I want it to be a special bottle to give to someone. You know what I'm saying? And even then, I don't think I would have been able to get a bottle had I not had some pretty good connections in the Southern food world. Eventually, a friend took pity on him and just gave Brett a bottle from his collection. In any situation where demand radically outpaces supply, you might have to meet a guy in a parking lot. You might spend two months' rent on a bottle of booze. We want what we want, even if we don't know why. And with this particular Kentucky bourbon,

laws about how and where we buy liquor have gone completely out the window, with smugglers making a fortune, bar owners getting death threats, and in Kentucky, a small-town crime syndicate busted for, quote, illegal trafficking in spiritist liquor. It's like Prohibition all over again.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Basically, if we wanted to find a guy to talk to us about Kentucky bourbon, you're the guy to talk to us about it. That's what they keep telling me. This is bourbon historian Michael Veach. Bourbon has been popular for as long as I've been of legal drinking age, so I didn't know there was a time when it was seen as a cheap drink, something you took down quickly to get drunk.

But then in the late 70s, something you took down quickly to get drunk. But then in the late 70s, things started to change for an unexpected reason. Scottish distillers started pushing single malt scotch onto American consumers. Let's face it, as a bulk, American consumers aren't very bright. So when they walk into the liquor store, they've been hearing all about these single malt scotches and everything. They see this single barrel bourbon. They say, oh, that must be the same type thing. Yeah. And it's cheaper. You know, it's only $30 a bottle where the cheap single malt scotches were $50. You know, the expenses were $100. So, you know, we'll buy that and put it in there. And the idea behind it was, is that if we could get people to try it once, they'll want to buy it again. It'll be that good. And it worked.

Today, bourbon is bigger than it's ever been, helped along by prohibition-style bars that have opened all over the country. And Don Draper drinking a million old fashions didn't hurt. Bourbon is having a moment. And right at the very top of the pyramid is Pappy Van Winkle. One thing that makes Pappy Van Winkle different is that it's aged longer for 15, 20, and 23 years. You know, retail, I think a bottle of Pappy 20-year-old is going for like $180 a bottle, and the Pappy 23 is like $230. Which is a lot of money, but it's not crazy in the world of bourbons. But the people that are selling it really illegally, because unless you have a license to sell liquor, if you sell a bottle of liquor, it's illegal. So the people who buy the $180 bottle and then...

What they call flipping it, turn around and sell it to someone else, they're getting as much as $2,000, $3,000 for that bottle. Why? How? Because people will pay that much just to say they got a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle. Because everybody knows it's so hard to get. It's hard to get because they just don't make a lot of it. They distribute about 7,000 cases a year. Compare that with Jim Beam's 7 million cases a year.

I had a guy call from Texas claiming to be a billionaire. This is Preston Van Winkle. The Pappy, in the name Pappy Van Winkle, was his great-grandfather. And he said he couldn't even get his hands on any. He said he'd have an easier time buying Ferraris and Lamborghinis than a single bottle of Pappy. That was kind of amusing to me. Because it really doesn't matter, right? This is one of the things where it doesn't matter if you have a billion dollars. If it's not out there to get, you can't, no matter what money you have, you can't get it. Exactly.

My grandfather, back before 1900, started working for a wholesale liquor dealer here in Kentucky called W.L. Weller. This is Julian Van Winkle III, Preston's father. And he was about 18 years old when he started, so gradually worked his way up in the business and ended up owning the company with some other gentlemen. That's kind of where it started. My dad worked for him, and I worked for my dad. Now Preston works for me.

Pappy Van Winkle is now produced by the Buffalo Trace Distillery using the Van Winkle family recipe. Just to do this quickly, the difference between whiskey and bourbon is that bourbon has to be made in America with at least 51% corn. Whiskey doesn't. You might have heard the expression, all bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon. There are three things that make Pappy Van Winkle unique.

Most bourbon is made with corn, rye, and barley, but Pappy Van Winkle is made with corn, wheat, and barley. That's the first thing. Second, it's aged in barrels for a very long time. And third, those barrels have to be approved by Julian personally. We describe it as it ages a little more gracefully, so it doesn't pick up quite as much woody notes, many woody notes as a rye bourbon does, and it just tastes a little different. And that seems to be a flavor profile that a lot of people like, so it was fun to age it a little longer.

But the age definitely is a different product than something that's younger, obviously. So it was not easy to get people to try something like that, but eventually it has caught on, and now there are a lot of older whiskeys out there on the market. You know, Julian will be the first one to tell you that a lot of his success is blind luck. Michael Veach. Just being in the right place. When he first came out with the Pappy 20-year-old, I remember talking to him, and he's like, you know, I'm releasing this. I don't know if it's going to fly or not. He says, I may be losing my shirt on this. But he didn't.

H. Bourbons may have caught on, but the real money being made off Pappy Van Winkle isn't going to the Van Winkles. It's in the black market. Some people we talked to called it the secondary market or gray market because bourbon itself isn't illegal. But whatever you want to call it, business is booming. There's a website called Bottle Blue Book that tracks going rates. It shows that if you had a 2009 bottle of Pappy 23 in your house, you could sell it to someone else for $2,280. That's an 800% markup. People buy it and hoard it and sell it on the secondary market, which is not something we promote at all, but it's just something that happens. It's hard.

There's just no way for us to control that. I wonder if you have a lot of people, both of you, I guess, trying to cozy up to you. A lot of old friends come in of the woodwork asking if you have a bottle laying around. That happens from time to time. And they're our best friends all of a sudden. So it's human nature, and that's the way things are, but it is kind of humorous to see how that works. The 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle,

often regarded as one of the finest bourbons in the world and one of the hardest to get, has been stolen. According to the Franklin County Sheriff, 195 bottles, 65 cases of the rare 20-year-old bourbon was stolen from Buffalo Trace Distillery. The distillery reported the heist yesterday. In October of 2013, 65 cases went missing from the warehouse. No sign of forced entry, no security cameras. Detectives had nothing to work with. The papi was just gone, vanished without a trace. Rumors started floating around

the bourbon blog scene that the theft was so well executed, it had to have been an inside job. Some speculated that it could have been orchestrated by the Van Winkles themselves, a way to keep Pappy in the news. They nicknamed it Pappygate. It really annoys me when I hear people say, well, he just did this for publicity or something like that, because no, he didn't. He didn't need the publicity. He doesn't have enough whiskey to supply his market now, so why would he want to create an artificial theft shortage

to make it even worse on him? Believe me, I've been in Julian's office. He gets a lot of phone calls of people complaining because they can't get his product. And he would love to be able to supply it to everybody. But that's the problem with bourbon and particularly a 20-year-old bourbon. It's not a product that, oh, well, you got a shortage. I'll make more. Okay. You make more, but it's not ready for 20 years. You have to be a fortune teller to know how much you're going to sell. So you think that anyone who says Julian did this because, you know.

They're just being stupid. Sorry if I offend anyone, but that's the truth. You're just being stupid if you think that. But it did drive demand big time, didn't it? The demand was already there. All it did was give him another headache. And believe me, he was pissed, to put it mildly. Thank you. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. issues should you ultimately watch out for. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. This coveted bourbon has become something of a headache for just about everyone. The Van Winkles, law enforcement, would-be buyers. But we learned that the most miserable people in this equation are bartenders. We talked with a lot of them for this story.

And you could just see their irritation the minute the words Pappy Van Winkle came out of my mouth. They're just completely sick of people asking for it. The first question out of almost everyone's mouth is, well, do you have any Pappy? This is Jeremy Johnson, owner of Meta Bar in Louisville. I mean, and it's really, really wonderful bourbon. It's absolutely fantastic. But I mean, this is so out of hand that, I mean, it's not that it's the best whiskey, it's that it's the hardest to find whiskey. Because Pappy is so hard to get, bars can pretty much charge whatever they can get away

with. We heard $60, $70, $100 for a single two-ounce pour. But the problem with having it in your bar is that everyone knows you have it in your bar. You know, having that stuff on your shelf, on one hand, can make you look really good in certain people's eyes who have been looking for it. In another way, when they come in kind of tipsy already, and they're trying to get you to illegally sell them like a half a bottle, and then they get upset that you're like, all right, well, if I was going to do that, which I wouldn't, I would have to sell it to you for this much. And they're like, well, I can't believe this. It's

like, well, sitting on my shelf, it's worth so much more than it is in your house. So I don't understand why you don't get this. Yeah. Here's Amy Fisher. She's the bar manager at Jeremy's Bar. I'd say it's a lot of guys that come in and they're from New York, let's say. And it's quite possible that they're going to try and turn a profit on it or put it in a bar somewhere and mark up the price, you know, a whole lot. And they get really pushy. Which is illegal. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's interesting because I feel like this doesn't happen to me that often. I don't think I close as much as you do. But also, you know, what's interesting to me is how pushy they get.

And, you know, with Amy, she absolutely, I mean, she helps make the rules. So she knows exactly what to say and exactly how to put these guys in their place. But they can get really pushy and kind of try to strong arm my other bartenders. And I can't, you know, I'll get texts and they know that I'm not going to do it. But what will happen is these douchebags will be like, text your boss, text him right now. You know, let me hear that your boss doesn't want you to do it. You know, that's, that's when I get those weird texts at like 1230 at night or one in the morning. And I'm like, no, just tell him, no, you want me to put, just put me on the phone. Yeah. Well, I think it just gets to a point and I feel like they're both kind of bullying and

insulting my intelligence at some point. And so I just spell it out. I'm like, hey, why would I do something illegal for you? Why would I jeopardize the reputation of this bar? Why would I jeopardize our liquor license? Why would I do any of that for you? I don't care about you. The other problem for bar owners is what Jeremy described as an arbitrary and somewhat mysterious allocation process. Each year, restaurants and bars find out how many bottles of Pappy Van Winkle they'll be allowed to purchase, if they can purchase any at all. It's a pretty opaque system. So if the bar down the street got six bottles of Pappy and you got none, it feels personal.

And so I just got fed up. I saw, like, this happened two or three times where I saw a restaurant open up, and, oh, wow, they managed to get some Pappy. And, again, it's not, like, my biggest priority, but when you have guests constantly asking for it, it's a little frustrating, you know, to not be able to get your hands on it. And it just kind of made me take it. I think it makes some people take it more seriously. But for me, it made me take it way less seriously. And I just got so fed up that I said, you know what? If we ever actually get an allocation of this, I'm just going to make jello shots with this shit. And then we got an allocation and we did it. I guess it was like a screw you to the whole wild, nutty. Well, yeah, it's like, this is ridiculous.

I don't like the way this is set up. I don't think it's fair. I think it's ridiculous that this bourbon is so overvalued by so many people. I'm tired of hearing about it. I'm tired of... A cultish fervor. How much were you charging for one of these jello shots? $10.

Which is also kind of like a screw you because the other bars are charging like $70, 80 bucks. And people who had never gotten to try Pappy 20 or Pappy 15 got it. It was an old-fashioned jello shot for them. They got to taste it. Yeah. It was definitely very tongue-in-cheek.

I don't see how you could take it so personally except that a lot of people did. So what happens? So it kind of gets out that you're making jello shots with Pappy. What happens next? I think that's where the death threats came in. Like, you know, someone should do something really horrible to your place. Maybe I'll just have to come down to your bar and burn it down. I actually, someone sent me a link to a subreddit.

Oh, yeah, Reddit went nuts. And it was very graphic. And, you know, they were talking about, like, I'm going to find the guy that did this, and I'm going to, you know, murder his whole family. Didn't they use, I think, I remember the sentence, piss down his neck. Yeah.

Yeah, that was in there. I wasn't sure if I even wanted to share it because, I mean, you have a son. Yeah. And I was just like, I can't even imagine receiving something like this if I had a child. The year after the Jell-O shots, Jeremy says his Pappy allocation was cut in half. He threw his hands up, said, what the hell? I'm bringing back the jello shots. And he also decided to sell glasses of Pappy at cost, no markup.

You know, the jello shot thing initially we got death threats for. Once people were a little more desensitized to it, I think when we said we were doing it at cost, we had to line out the door and I was handing out tickets so that everyone would be limited to one. And people were like shaking my hand. And they said, thank you so much. I really never thought that I would get to try this stuff. He'll find out this month what his 2016 allocation is, if he gets anything at all. Back in Frankfort, Kentucky, a year and a half had passed since the theft of the 65 cases of Pappy.

Detectives finally got a break in the case last March, when someone sent a message to their Text-a-Tip line. The anonymous tip was very specific. It said a man named Toby Kurtzinger had barrels of bourbon hidden behind his house. When detectives reached Kurtzinger's property, they said they could smell the bourbon from where they were standing. Kurtzinger was arrested. As word of his arrest traveled around town, all kinds of people just started showing up at the sheriff's office and coming forward with their stories. I bought nine bottles. I bought nine cases. One man who bought a lot of bottles gathered them all up and had his lawyer deliver them to the sheriff's office. It did turn out to be an inside job. Kurtzinger worked at Buffalo Trace and had very easy access to Pappy Van Winkle. And he was running an elaborate bootleg whiskey business, directing eight accomplices to steal and sell not only the Pappy, but also an entire pallet of Eagle Rare bourbon

and many barrels of wild turkey over a period of many years. Here's Sheriff Pat Melton on the Frankfurt local news last year. This is probably the tip of the iceberg. A Franklin County grand jury indicted nine people on a charge of engaging in organized crime. Melton said the Attorney General's Cyber Crimes Unit analyzed phones and computers. He said they turned up communications about selling the bourbon and it involved, of all things, a softball league. And that's how they interconnected throughout the state, was friends through softball. Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Zach Becker said so far investigators have recovered bottles and barrels of bourbon

from Franklin, Scott, Harrison, and Laurel counties. Melton believes there's more bourbon out there. We tried to speak with Sheriff Melton and with Zachary Becker about the case. Both declined. Although Becker said they're close to reaching a negotiation. Julian and Preston Van Winkle didn't want to comment on the theft either. I tried. Well, we really don't like to talk about this theft at all,

just don't even want to bring it up. Obviously we weren't happy about it, but it's just something that happened, and we're going to move on. But it's too bad, but it's still an ongoing deal, so we just really don't care about talking about it. Can't really comment on it too much since it's an ongoing investigation. Last month we searched for a bottle of Pappy here in North Carolina. Not to buy it, we just wanted to taste it in a bar.

After all this, we couldn't imagine how anything could be that good. We eventually found a bartender who had some, not for sale, but he agreed to let us come and try it. It's good. There's no doubt about that. But I didn't buy the sip I tasted, which maybe made it taste better. It's a very good bourbon. It's worth drinking. Michael Veach. Is it worth the prices that people are doing?

Like I said, not to me. There are many bourbons out there that I consider just as good that are readily available that don't cost an arm and a leg. So if someone said to you, here's a glass of Pappy and here's a glass of Buffalo Trace Heritage, pick one. Would you go for the pappy? It would really depend upon a lot of different factors. The first question is, are these free? They're free. Okay.

Well, if we're talking free, I will go for, you know, I'd say, okay, I'll take both. You know, people always ask me, what's my favorite bourbon? And my standard answer is, what are you buying me? Because my favorite is free bourbon. That was the episode we aired in 2016. Here's what happened next. In September of 2017, Toby Kurtzinger pleaded guilty to theft charges and was later sentenced to 15 years in prison. He only served 30 days.

He was let out early on what's called shock probation. Shock probation is most often granted to young people and first-time offenders convicted of nonviolent crimes. The theory goes that a little time in prison will shock a person into rehabilitating themselves. While he admitted to stealing bourbon from Buffalo Trace, Toby Kurtzinger denied involvement in the 2013 theft of 65 cases of Pappy Van Winkle, the one they call Pappygate.

He's admitted to stealing and reselling lots of bourbon, but not all at once like that. And he says, not that time. During the investigation, police interviewed another man who worked at Buffalo Trace, and he told them that he'd stolen almost 15 cases of Pappy. He says he did it along with a colleague, a woman who had a plan to interfere with the distillery's inventory records. But this man was never charged. When investigators questioned the woman, she said he was lying about all of it, and she wasn't charged either. Toby Kurtzinger has said that taking bottles was just part of the culture of working at Buffalo Trace. If you had an opportunity to steal if you worked in a bank with a vault wide open and nobody seeing you,

are you going to do it if you don't get caught, he said. His parole supervision ends next year. Hello? Hi, Jeremy? Yes. We called Jeremy Johnson, the owner of Metabar, who decided to make jello shots of Pappy, to see how things are going since we first released this episode. Are people still asking for Pappy to see how things are going since we first released this episode. Are people still asking for Pappy?

I think it's gotten to a point that people know, most people know better than to ask, just because no one ever has it. But yeah, we still get the out-of-towners that are just like, oh, where do we get this? And we just kind of giggle. And they're like, well, you don't. They cut us off. Ever since we did the Jell-O shot, they cut our allocation in half the next year. And then the year after that, I got one bottle of 15. And ever since then, I've never gotten anything back. So in 2016, you got one bottle and that was it? And that was it.

We definitely pissed someone off because we just never got it again after that. It's pretty wild. I think that they, I think they send it all. Most of it goes out of state, which is, I think it's really sad when you can't get, get it in Kentucky at all. You know, I think, I think a lot of it's going to Miami and New York and, and we're just not, we don't see it at home. Maybe people in Kentucky are just too smart to pay that much money for a glass of bourbon. I'm sure that's part of it.

Maybe it's a good sign. I'm more than happy to drink some wild turkey. That's right. Well, I want to thank you very much for this little update, and have a good day. Absolutely. You too. Take care. Thank you. We'll see you next time. Presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to eat healthier, but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me?

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Today, it's even more difficult to get a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle than it was in 2016. Even in 2016, if you said luxury bourbon market, it was a little bit silly sounding. And now, I mean, those same bottles, you know, they're, I don't even, they go for tens of thousands. I'd have to check the most recent figures,

but I'm not buying one. This is Adam Herz. He's a screenwriter and producer, and he's best known for creating the American Pie movies. And somehow I also became a, I guess, expert on counterfeit whiskey. He's in the Guinness Book of World Records for owning the world's oldest whiskey from 1847.

Adam says that in 2014, he started noticing something strange happening with Pappy Van Winkle bottles. Empty bottles were selling on eBay for a shocking amount of money. Like, why is somebody paying $200 for a piece of garbage? Like, that makes no sense. And you'll still see it. Right now, you can go on eBay, type in empty Pappy, and you'll see bottles selling for $200, $300, $400 sometimes, individually. And I went on to eBay and I

looked at Pappy Van Winkle 23-year-old. And Pappy Van Winkle 23 is a little bit unique because every single bottle has a handwritten number on it in series. Bottle number one, two, three, into the thousands. So they're very unique in that each empty bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 23 is one of a kind. And so when I saw, I looked at eBay and I looked at the last few bottles of Pappy Van Winkle 23 that sold, empty bottles, and looked at the bottle numbers. And then I went on to Facebook and a whiskey group and spent about five minutes scrolling through and found a match. A full bottle that had been sold a month or so before empty on eBay. And obviously a bottle can't be empty and then full later and be legit. Adam Herz has gotten so good at figuring out when a fake is a fake that people all over the country call and ask him for his opinion. He's advised auction houses

and worked with private investigators and police. Can you walk me through how counterfeiters are doing this? I mean, it can't just be as easy as refilling an empty bottle. Sometimes it is as easy as refilling an empty bottle. Yeah, it really is. There are some whiskeys out there that are sealed with heat shrink plastic bands. Anybody can buy them. So just get a bottle, fill it up with Jack Daniels, whatever you want,

and slip a new shrink band on it, and you're done. It's indistinguishable from the real thing. And then there are the really complicated ones. Pappy Van Winkle is a great example where Pappy uses a very specific kind of foil and it has to be professionally applied to the bottle with a special machine. But what happens is fakers will get empty bottles of Pappy from eBay. They'll go to bars and say, hey, man, I'll pay you for your trash, and the barman's real excited. They'll get them from friends and whatever, and they have an inside track to the foils,

whether they get stolen directly from the distillery or intercepted on the way. I'm not sure, but Buffalo Trace has a history of, let's say, inventory problems. And so what these fakers will do is they get, they have all the real materials. They have a real bottle, it's just empty. And they have a real foil capsule that's brand new and unapplied. And so they just buy themselves one of these machines that applies the capsules. They're not that expensive. And in about 30 seconds, they've got

a new bottle. You know, it looks new. Fill it up with whatever they want. Full of Jack Daniels, Jim Beam. The smarter fakers, when they're faking a Buffalo Trace product like Pappy Van Winkle, they'll fill it with the $20 Buffalo Trace, or it might be $30 now, I don't know. But they'll try and approximate the profile. But some of them don't care. Some of them don't even clean out the bottles. And I know this because you see all the bacteria and crap growing in them because they didn't wash out whatever gross residue was in the empty. Are there particular prolific sellers or fakers that you know of?

Yeah, there are prolific fakers. There are people that have been doing it for years, and these are the guys who do it really well. They're not active in sort of the social aspect of the bourbon community. And so they can keep selling their fakes to eager buyers

in gas station parking lots. There are other sort of fakers that are active in the whiskey community. Some people become very well known for having an amazing nose at finding rare bourbons that they'll say estate sales or, you know, whatever. And it turns out they've just been cranking out refills. And those people get busted because we can go on Facebook or wherever they're operating and tell 100,000 people, and that's the end of that.

Do you ever contact the police? Or is it, you know, is this kind of policed within the whiskey community? I only talk to law enforcement when they contact me or when someone puts me in touch with them. But do I contact law enforcement saying, this guy's faking, you've got to do something? No, because nothing happens. And firstly, again, we're dealing in a gray market. Most places, you're not really supposed

to buy and sell alcohol. And it's a little bit like saying, hey, officer, I need your help. Somebody sold me this fake cocaine. You know, you don't necessarily want to do that. So the community has to be a little self-policing, which is, I guess, maybe what I do. Do you ever hesitate to let people know they've been tricked? You know, if they're enjoying what they're drinking and it feels special to them, do you ever just think, well, I'll just, I'll let this one pass? I always tell people. Usually I'll talk to some friends of mine or some people and say, hey, you know, what do I do here? But I would want to know the truth, so I tell them. And they're grateful, usually. I mean, nobody's ever pissed that I tell them they have a fake.

People get angry because they're embarrassed that they tasted it and thought it was real. But the truth is, it's like you're not gonna know unless the faker got it really, really wrong or is using colored water or something. Tasting is something that's almost irrelevant. It's the same thing with wine. There are countless examples of people who taste fakes and swear they're legitimate. I mean, I see it all the time. We all like to think that we have really great judgment and really great palates, but we tend to taste what we expect to taste and want to taste. Adam says that even experts get it wrong. A bourbon retailer in Kentucky accidentally bought fakes to sell in their shop,

even after they'd checked the bottles. A famous chef at a Chicago steakhouse served fake pappy at his restaurant without knowing. He says people ask him all the time, how do I know if a bottle is real? Well, the first thing you can do is go on Google Images and do a search for what you're supposed to have, what you think you have. And you're going to see a thousand different examples of what real bottles look like. And you just compare. That's the biggest way to spot fakes.

Whether it's wine or whiskey, you just compare it to the real thing. But because we're talking about refills, the only thing that's not going to look right is the capsule, the seal, the foil, or the plastic. And so when it comes to faking techniques, you know, it's not that hard to figure out how to duplicate the real thing. It's not like they have magical powers on the bottling line. They're just using equipment that anybody can get and materials that anybody can buy. If you're buying the kind of Pappy that has handwritten numbers on the bottle, you can search eBay for empty bottles with that same number.

Some collectors even keep an ongoing list of empty bottle numbers to refer back to. Some sellers, though, will change a 3 to an 8 or a 1 to a 4. Look closely to see if the ink is smeared or the numbers look a little funny. Distilleries themselves are looking for ways to stop these counterfeits. Buffalo Trace announced in 2017 that they had spent half a million dollars to deal with the problem. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Buffalo Trace had put security tags

in some of its most valuable bottles. Apparently, you can get an app that will tell you if your bottle has been opened. One thing that everyone got real excited about was when they discovered that some of these new Buffalo Trace bottles have these chips in them. They said, oh my God, it's amazing. Like the thing can tell you when the bottle's been opened

because the foil's been torn. And that's the dumbest, stupidest thing I've ever heard of, to be honest, because we have some amazing technology that can already tell you if a bottle's been opened called your own eyes. There's no value in a foil that you can scan with a phone that tells you this foil's been torn open because you can just look at the foil and it tells you this foil's torn. Your eyes tell you that. It's like having an app to tell you if you're wearing shoes, just look at your feet.

By the way, I don't want to make it sound like these fakes are everywhere. They're not. They get disseminated widely because there's a huge secondary market for bourbon now, and stores and restaurants and bars in many places will buy from there as well. And so they do end up sort of scattered, but for the most part, you're okay. Just don't be naive. What's your best advice for enjoying bourbon, you know, a glass of bourbon? Whether you're paying $100 for that glass or $12. Drink it however you like it. Don't let anybody tell you you should or shouldn't put ice in it

or you have to nose it this way, or you should use a certain glass. That's all BS. A lot of people are afraid of not liking something that's actually good. There's no such thing as that. It just means you don't like something that other people like. And if you like the cheap stuff, more power to you. Great. You like what you like, and nobody can tell you know. You like what you like, and nobody can tell you you don't like what you like. That's it. That's it.

Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Thank you. Gravy, a podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Special thanks to Tina Antolini, Alice Wilder, and Gary Crunkleton. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

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