Hola Free Rangers,
About a half decade ago, when it seemed a new distillery was opening its doors every twenty minutes somewhere in this great land, and while the Bourbon boom was in full effect, it certainly seemed that there would be a culling eventually. There’s just so much appetite for under aged and (at least slightly) overpriced brown juice out there in the market. Whiskey also requires expensive stills, expensive barrels, and (profoundly expensive) time. And the American business landscape is markedly unforgiving to businesses that can’t hit the ground at or near profitability. In the last couple of years we lost two local distilleries whose juice we enjoy quite a bit. But we’ll get back to all that, and the corresponding sale, below.
This week’s FREE in-store tasting welcomes back to the shop our friends at Social Hour Cocktails. For so many years we swore we’d never carry single serving cocktails because the first pile to hit the market were stabilized with either way too much sugar and/or way too much acid. The entire category has come a long way, and the best of them, like Social Hour, are made with good ingredients (locally) and are in fact balanced and delicious. Please join us this Thursday, March 6th (5-7pm), for FREE tastes of Social Hour Yuzu Sunset Fizz, Black Pepper Paloma, and Whiskey Mule. All Social Hour cans are 10% off on tasting day only!
Now, it’s no secret that Daric (at Van Brunt Stillhouse) and I never got along, but the guy makes good whiskey. I begged him to put down one barrel per year for the long haul, so that 10 years in he could start releasing one 10yr bottling per year. Coulda called it Granpappy Brooklyn 10yr, made up a price, and there woulda been a line around the block. I doubt that this one thing would’ve saved his business model, but it would’ve been a lot more fun. And it’s not bad enough that we’ve lost a genuine Brooklyn distiller to the brutal meathook realities of late stage capitalism, but word ‘round the campfire is that Van Brunt’s facility was purchased by Brooklyn Gin, ya know, the gin that’s never been made in Brooklyn!? Well, it seems like they’ll soon be able to say that they’ve finally produced a bottle here. This won’t change the fact that they’ve been out of town producers (read ‘posers’), squatting on Brooklyn’s name (and sending cease and desist letters to actual Brooklyn based booze businesses) for too many moons, and we’ll never carry them because we don’t dig the way they do business. What we will do is give all of you one last shot at remaining Van Brunt Stillhouse Whiskeys before we crank up the shelf price on these lovely extinct bottles. A small number of Bourbon, American Whiskey, Smoked Bourbon, Campfire Lot #1, and Empire Rye Lot #1, as well as a deal on mixed 4-packs of their canned cocktails, Bay Street Buck and ChaiBall are available ONLINE ONLY right now!
For a completely different set of fanged circumstances, one of the coolest bottled projects ever to grace our fair borough also vanished: Arcane Distilling. In our grief, we grabbed every bottle we could possibly squeeze into the biggest ZipCar I could get, so that we’d carry on the name and availability of Arcane Whiskeys long into the future. And while we still own over 100 bottles of each, they are all but unavailable anywhere else on Earth, and we’re raising the shelf price (still below original MSRP), so we thought we’d give you all one last chance to take as many bottles from us as you’d like at the old price of $29. Click below for Arcane Alpha, Arcane Imperial, and a bunch of Van Brunt Stillhouse at aforementioned discounts:
(!) Click here for Extinct Brooklyn sale page (!)
And for those of you keeping score, and reading to the bottom, there is still a bit left of those crazy rarities on sale, including High West Midwinter Night’s Dram, Silvain Cathiard Bourgogne Rouge 2021, EH Taylor Small Batch Bourbon, and J-F Mugnier 1er Cru Clos de la Maréchale 2021!
(!) Click here for discounted rarities sale page (!)
Cheers,
Jack
Proprietor
Free Range Wine & Spirits
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