Editor’s note: Today’s top item is an essay from Aaron Goldfarb, longtime drinks journalist, VinePair writer-at-large, and the author of the hot new book Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits. Buy it via the Fingers Reading Room right here:
For more from Aaron, follow him on Instagram.
Programming note: Your fearless Fingers editor is taking a desperately needed vacation next week. Spring break, bay-bee! I’ll be back in your inbox the first week of April. Thanks for your patience.—Dave.
🥔 A brief history of the tater
Few things shock me in the bourbon world any more. But, an hour into an interview last year, when a collector who buys a half-million dollars worth of rare whiskey per year, told me that he’s a teetotaler—he’s doesn’t even drink the $30,000 bottles of Red Hook Rye he shells out for!—I’d finally been left speechless.
Tater isn’t in the Oxford English Dictionary yet, and perhaps it will never be, as its etymology remains murky. What we do know, however, is that around the time people started doing clearly embarrassing things to acquire bottles, more mature bourbon enthusiasts started calling them taters. Because that’s what they were. Fucking potatoes with childish palates and cringeworthy tendencies.
Early on, as primitive Tater habilis began to first walk erect, his hard-ons were often directly strictly toward the first and then only prized bottles on the market. We’re talking your Van Winkles, which they always called “Pappy,” even if the younger bottles like Old Rip Van Winkle 10 Year and Van Winkle Special Reserve 12 Year Lot “B” don’t have the word Pappy or his fucking visage anywhere on the label. It was always “Pappy,” because Pappy was the first god of the taters and they worshipped him mightily.
As with Christ, the taters began seeing everything through him. Old Weller Antique 107 and Weller 12 Year, once mid-tier bourbons with twist-off metal caps, could be combined to make what they called “Poor Man’s Pappy.” Sometimes they’d create goofy labels to go along with it. Eventually people started selling some on Etsy.
A sure sign of a new tater emerging from the primordial booze was him—always him—going on Facebook or Reddit and asking any one if they had the “recipe” for Poor Man’s Pappy. (It was fucking 60% 107 to 40% 12 Year and it didn’t even really taste like Pappy.) Eventually I just published the stupid recipe in my 2018 book Hacking Whiskey, which still remains a sort of Anarchist Cookbook for taters new to the scene. You can ponder whether that is a fortunate or unfortunate thing for me, the famous author.
I’d often write about other emerging tater trends, which became an opiate to these messes. Infinity bottles, essentially a drinkable dump bucket of your personal bourbon history. California Gold, an illicit homemade blend that captured that taters’ imagination like few others. (Once a week at least I get a tater asking me if I can score them some “CA Gold.” I can’t, and I won’t.). There were Cigar blends and sundae-level finishing and dump date searchers, and if you have no idea what I’m talking about by now, count yourself lucky and hug your children tightly.
As Pappy’s well ran dry, and as Weller too became a currency—not to be drunk, but to be purchased and quickly flipped—the taters moved onto other bottles. The Buffalo Trace Antique Collection (always written as “BTAC,” and pronounced out loud as “bee-tack”) had long gotten the same tater treatment. The E.H. Taylor Collection too. Blanton’s. These were all from Buffalo Trace, and the distillery eventually caught on and began “playing to their audience,” as we say in show biz.
The distillery turned the once humble Weller into a breeding ground of new bottles that gestated quicker than the Virginia opossum: Weller C.Y.P.B. (Craft Your Perfect Bourbon), Weller Full Proof, Weller Single Barrel, and even Daniel Weller. The lack of the coveted BTAC offering George T. Stagg allowed them to release Stagg Jr.; eventually it likewise became impossible to find. The company eventually created the Citizen Kane of taterdom with something called Double Eagle Very Rare, a $2,000 crystal decanter of booze that I’m still not sure isn’t an April Fool’s joke. Fools are the ones that certainly bought it, though—and no one ever drank it.
As the pandemic struck, the tater was happy to stay inside, as social distancing and drinking alone in front of the computer was kind of his métier. By now he, had inched over to other brands, all of which were happy to accommodate him. The big Kentucky brands began to offer at least one—say it with me—allocated bottle in ostentatious packaging with jacked-up prices. Smaller brands began to emerge like Smoke Wagon, Nashville Barrel Company, and Rare Character and you have to wonder if the business plan they showed the bank was simply a single sheet of paper that read: “Sell to taters.”
It had been a foolproof full-proof strategy for nearly a decade. Until it wasn’t.
I’m not saying we’re in a post-tater empire just yet. Not when amateur dudes are still out there tiny-barrel-aging Blanton’s on Dr. Pepper syrup, re-bottling it with a special homemade label, and flexing with it on TikTok. (Some choice comments: “How do I get in on these bottles?,” “Sold out or can I still get one?,” “I need in on this one!”) But I am saying the world population of taters is seemingly trending downward.
Maybe they’ve grown older and can no longer stand in line at a Total Wine all morning just to get a chance—a chance!—at purchasing a bottle of King of Kentucky at MSRP.
Maybe their wife is finally starting to ask them why they have several hundred bottles of various Eagle Rare barrel picks stacked up in her shoe closet.
Maybe they simply can no longer afford to be a tater under bIdEnOmIcS.
Maybe they’ve moved on to rum or tequila, longtime followers of which are already bracing for the doom-loop and shitshow that’s about to start as bottles of Foursquare and Fortaleza are no longer easily found.
Or maybe they’ve grown up a bit and moved onto vintage spirits collecting. I sure hope so. I still need the taters to become obsessed with my book.
Don’t forget to grab your copy of Goldfarb’s latest book, Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits, from the Fingers Reading Room or wherever you buy your books.
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⌚️ Pappy Van BuzzBallz WHEN?
Hey, it’s Dave again. Yesterday, the low-profile liquor conglomerate Sazerac Company acquired BuzzBallz, the brand that makes boozy orbs optimized for whimsical impulse-purchasing off gas-station countertops with a pack of Newports on a Thursday night, just for the fuck of it, y’know? Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but I hope it was a bundle, because the cult-favorite ready-to-drink line makes all sorts of sense in the spirits juggernaut’s portfolio.
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