Many times when I am looking at the craft whiskey on the shelves, I’m seeing bottles that are $40, $50 or more. Sometimes, closer to $100 if not even more than that. I can think of a couple of brands that come to mind. So the debate is do I spend that much money on a whiskey I know nothing about, or spend it on something else I know.
I have to remind myself that for craft distillers, it costs more to get their juice into a bottle, distributed and on my local stores shelves. They pay more for almost everything. And, they often do not have the resources that the big-name brands have.
When a craft distiller purchases a bulk lot of something like bottles, corks, labels, barrels, etc. it’s a large outlay of money for these small distillers. Plus, they have to find a place to store them until they need them. If it’s bottles or barrels, that can take up a lot of space, so they may end up renting extra space just to store them. That adds costs. And the craft distillers don’t have the luxury of buying most of the stock of supplies they need at the bulk levels that the big-name brands do. All that said to explain why the costs of craft whiskey might be a little higher. It just costs more for these small businesses.
Bottles, believe it or not, are not cheap. Custom made bottles are extremely expensive to get the mold built. They also often do not have automatic bottling lines and labeling machines. Many times, they are bottling by and labeling by hand. The process takes longer and is more costly.
Then there’s the whole aspect of corks, and whether or not the cork and topper are custom
or not. I know of one producer who bought custom corks in bulk for the bottles they were using, only to find out that that particular bottle would be discontinued, and they couldn’t buy any more. They had to switch bottles and the corks they had didn’t fit the new bottles. So, they had to purchase new corks, and they now have a mess of old corks that they can’t use. Bad business decision, maybe. Unfortunate, yes. However, for a small producer it’s money that is lost. That can be detrimental to a business if many mistakes like that are made.
Marketing is usually done by themselves, maybe by a friend or family member if they are lucky to get some extra help. In many cases, the person distilling the product is also the marketing department, and in charge of bottling, and possibly also the packaging person, the list goes on for small distillers.
All this to say, remember that when you are buying a craft distillers product, it cost them more to get it to the shelf in front of you than it did the big-name brands. They likely have a lot more sweat and elbow grease to make sure it’s sitting in front of you.
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