In December 2014, the Wall Street Journal sent a reporter to my house for two days. They called it stockpiling. I called it collecting.
They weren't wrong, exactly. They just didn't have the whole story.
Before I get into what actually happened, I want you to sit with a question for a second. When something you love becomes scarce, do you panic, or do you get curious? Your answer probably says more about you as a collector than anything sitting in your basement.
What the WSJ actually saw
The journalist spent two days at my house. He interviewed me, a few of my friends, my wife. I took him bourbon shopping so he could watch how I actually hunt for bottles instead of just hearing me describe it.
The quote they pulled from me was simple: I never wanted to be in a position where I wanted a bottle and couldn't get it. After a while, that turned into something with a life of its own.
The line that actually stuck with me wasn't mine, though. It was my wife's. The reporter asked her what she thought about all of it, and she said if I ever sold the collection, she'd think about all the shopping she could do.
But here's the detail that matters most for where this story goes. The article didn't just talk about stockpiling — it noted I'd already started buying barrels straight from distillers, bypassing retailers entirely. That wasn't a footnote. That was the whole shift.
Where it actually started
Long before anyone called it a shortage, this was about curiosity, not scarcity. I found a forum post about vintage bottles still sitting on shelves decades after production, and that's what got me hunting. Four handles of 1980/81 Old Forester, 86 proof, for $12.50 a bottle. Pappy 15 for $36. Van Winkle Lot B for $32. BTAC bottles for $45 each.
This was the late 2000s into the early 2010s — before the parking lot drops, before the lottery systems, before any of it had a name. I was thrilled just to find those bottles. My collection started with curiosity, not scarcity.
Then the craze hit
Bottles that were $36 started going for $400. Allocations tightened. Parking lot drops became a real thing. The secondary market exploded. That's when the Wall Street Journal came calling.
I joined the lotteries same as everyone else, but I wasn't chasing. Wasn't sitting in parking lots. Wasn't spamming the secondary market trying to flip something. Everyone around me was reacting to the scarcity. I was asking a different question: why chase when you can go right to the source?
That question sent me down a rabbit hole that ended up with over 300 barrel selections.
The pivot to private barrels
Mid-2009, a few of us got tired of hunting. We didn't want to keep chasing down the selections we wanted, so we asked a simple question: why not just buy the barrel ourselves? Our first two picks were with Willett and Four Roses — Four Roses had only started their barrel program the year before, so we were in on the ground floor of that.
Turned out to be better timing than we knew at the time. Within a few years, availability started drying up. Getting on a list became a thing. Waiting in line became a thing. Lotteries became a thing. We were already past all of that — we'd been picking barrels directly since before anyone needed a lottery to get one.
Zooming out: what was actually happening
Here's what I didn't know while I was living through all of this. Kentucky's aging barrel inventory was already climbing years before anyone called it a shortage — from a historic low of 3.4 million barrels in 1999, up toward 4 million by 2010. And in that same window, bottles on shelves were quietly losing their age statements. I was writing about it on my own blog as it happened: Elijah Craig 12, Old Charter, Ancient Age, one after another.
That same Wall Street Journal article actually listed some of what was sitting in my basement at the time. Old Charter 12-Year was one of them. Next to it, one word: Gone. I didn't know it yet, but I was standing in the middle of the exact data I'd eventually go dig up.
Barrels filled today aren't ready for years. That's the whole story in one sentence. The shortage was never really a shortage of bourbon — it was a shortage of bourbon that had actually finished aging.
The expansion
When the bourbon world got complicated — allocations tightening, relationships turning transactional, the whole culture shifting — my curiosity pointed somewhere else. Rum first, through a Privateer collaboration that turned three Weller Full Proof casks into something nobody had made before. Then armagnac, through a small producer relationship built the same way my distillery relationships were: directly, personally, out of genuine interest in what they were making. Then cognac. Then calvados.
The shortage didn't shrink my collection. It expanded it. I wasn't replacing bourbon — I was following curiosity.
The market catches up
While I was off exploring rum and armagnac, the industry was quietly catching up to itself. Barrel inventory kept climbing — 7.5 million by 2017, 11.4 million by 2022, 12.6 million not long after. Distilleries had massively ramped up production back when the shortage hit, and all those barrels just needed time.
As of the most recent count, Kentucky has 16.1 million barrels of bourbon aging in warehouses right now. That's an all-time record — ten billion dollars sitting in rickhouses. The shortage everyone panicked about in 2014 was never permanent. It was a lag. And the lag is over.
The shelf
This is what following curiosity for twenty years actually looks like: not a bourbon collection, but a brown spirits collection. When I reach for a bottle now, the question isn't which bourbon — it's what spirit fits the mood. It can be almost anything. That's what the shortage actually gave me. Not less. More.
The part that isn't really about bourbon
Here's the piece most people don't talk about. Before the shortage, nobody thought twice — you drank what you had, bourbon was just something you enjoyed. Then scarcity showed up, and the question quietly changed. It stopped being "do I want this" and became "can I get this." People lined up for bottles they'd never even tasted, just to prove they could get one.
I watched grown adults treat a bottle of bourbon like a trophy. Not because they loved what was in it — because getting it meant they'd won something.
That's really the whole difference between where the market's been and where it's headed. Scarcity asks can I get it. Abundance asks a completely different question: do I actually want it. Once bourbon stops being scarce, that second question is the only one left.
Where things stand right now
Bottle lotteries are winding down. Allocations are loosening. Secondary market prices on a lot of formerly-hyped bottles have come back to earth. That's not just a feeling — Kentucky's sitting on 16.1 million barrels of aging bourbon, which Forbes estimates represents something like a 300 percent oversupply. That's not a shortage. That's the opposite problem entirely, and distillers know they need to move that whiskey — which means the surplus itself is expected to bring prices down as producers compete to sell through it.
And the thing I've been tracking since 2009, the age statements, some of them are actually starting to come back. The barrels filled during the 2012-2016 boom are finally old enough to put a number on the label again. I'm not the only one seeing it — Forbes ran a piece on this earlier this year making the same point. Nice to know I wasn't just watching my own basement.
What might come next
Here's where I'll admit I'm guessing, same as anyone else. If this cycle plays out the way the last one did, I'd expect new labels to lean back into higher proof — distilleries competing on substance instead of scarcity. Deeper age statements as a selling point instead of a liability. And maybe, eventually, prices actually settling back down as real competition returns. I could be wrong about all of it. But that's the bet I'd make.
Where I landed
The Wall Street Journal called me a collector during the shortage. They weren't wrong. But a collector doesn't panic when supply contracts — a collector gets curious about what's next. The shortage didn't change what I was looking for. It changed where I looked.
So here's the question I'd leave you with: when scarcity hits the thing you love, do you chase it, or do you let it redirect you?
Because the answer to that question isn't really about bourbon.
Pour thoughtfully. Draw slowly. And savor the journey.
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