The guide to the whiskeys you should buy your old man for Father’s Day is a men’s lifestyle media trope. I wrote the one for this very site. And while the whiskeys on that list are quality enough gifts and there’s no doubt a whiskey-loving dad will gleefully take a bottle of whiskey they didn’t pay for, it remains a ho-hum, surface-level gift. Running late, you may very well have gone to the liquor store around the corner from your dad’s home and grabbed Laphroaig 10 off the display shelf at the front of the store (in a highly giftable tube, to boot!) and passed it off to him that night. Job done.
For fathers who are both collectors and bourbon enthusiasts, though, the calculus is different, involving what is perhaps the most challenging whiskey hunt of all: date-specific bottles.
Whiskey fiends willing subject themselves to what is a needle-in-a-haystack search do so to find bottles of whiskey with a date worth remembering scrawled on the label, often the birth of a child or a wedding anniversary. By and large, the hunt for these bottles begins and ends with single barrel bourbons, which are the most likely to carry barrelling dates (when the unaged whiskey was added to the barrel for maturation), dump dates (when the barrels were emptied of whiskey) or bottle dates (when the whiskey was bottled) on the labels. A quick Google search of any of those terms yields dozens of posts in popular bourbon forums like /r/bourbon and Straight Bourbon discussing the task at hand.
But hunting for these bottles isn’t like hunting for other ultra-rare whiskeys like Pappy, which has more to do with your willingness (and ability) to spend money than it does truly hunting for it (if you’re willing to dabble in whiskey’s grey markets, you could have Pappy in your hands in a matter of hours). Bottles with a singular date on them — even just a year and a month — are magnitudes more difficult to track down.
“We don’t have a way to track where specific dates end up in stores. Once it goes to the distributor, we have no way to know which stores they still specific bottles to,” Amy Preske, Sazerac Company’s public relations manager said. Preske, who handles PR for Buffalo Trace Distillery brands as well, added the brand does get “quite a bit” of these requests.
Blanton’s, one of those brands under the Buffalo Trace Distillery umbrella, is the most popular bottle among the date-specific bottle crowd. The bottle’s label lists the barrel number it was made from, what rick it matured on and the date it was dumped on. Its peculiar shape, collector cult bonafides (even the bottle stoppers are collectible) and claim as the world’s first single barrel bourbon doesn’t hurt, either. It’s so sought-after by these collectors it addresses the subject in its FAQ page. If the distillery can’t track them, who can?