Why Single Malt Whisky Is So Expensive | So Expensive

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There's a lot of bros out there with dat crypto

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/fidelkastro 📅︎︎ May 11 2021 🗫︎ replies

Because it sits in barrels for so damn long. Longer it sits, the more the cost accrues.

You spend tens of thousands of dollars producing a product, and then can't sell it for 20 years? Shits gonna be expensive when you get around to selling it.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/adaminc 📅︎︎ May 11 2021 🗫︎ replies

Taxes. That’s why, Scottish tax law.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/NicholasPileggi 📅︎︎ May 11 2021 🗫︎ replies

50 Year old Whisky - $30,000

125 Year old Port - $5,500 USD https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2021/05/taylors-launches-priceless-125-year-old-rare-single-harvest-port/

Maybe the Whisky is a little overpriced?

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Fuddle 📅︎︎ May 11 2021 🗫︎ replies
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- [Ju] This whisky costs $30,000. It's a single malt. Single malt whisky is one of the most revered spirits in the world. It's exclusively made from barley, which is quite a cheap product. So how does one bottle get to be so expensive? Over the past 50 years, single malts have become increasingly popular. Scottish single malt exports grew by 14.2% in 2017, to just over $1.5 billion. One of the main players in the single malt market is Glenfiddich, whose parent company achieved a 1.2 billion pound turnover last year. - [Ian] We are selling 1.2 million 9-liter cases of Glennfiddich around the world. We have 180 markets around the world that we generally service. In 1963, we started to commercially sell single malt, but also to promote it actively outside of Scotland. But we gave the single malt category the biggest push it's ever had in its life. - [Ju] We were fortunate enough to try a 12-year-old bottle, worth $36, and a 50-year-old vintage, worth $30,000. - [Ju] The 12-year-old whisky was certainly sweet and pleasant to drink, but I was expecting the more expensive bottle to taste out of this world to justify its price. - [Ju] Wow, really distinct. - [Ian] You can taste much more European oak in this one. - [Ju] Yeah, the distinction between the flavors I think is a lot smoother and lot oakier. There seems to be truth that the longer the alcohol is in there, the smoother it tastes, so the more deserving of the expensive price. But that can't be the only thing that justifies one bottle being close to $29,000 more than another. Another reason is that making single malt is an extremely difficult process to get right. Barley is ground down and added to spring water. Heated to 64 degrees Celsius, it turns to sugar, dissolving into a fine sweet, tangy liquid called wort. The wort is drained, cooled, and passed into washbacks. This is heated and condensed in copper wash stills for its first distillation, and a second time in spirit stills. The spirit trickles into the spirit safe, ready for maturation, and then it's batched in casks with spring water. Casks spend years in the warehouse maturing into a single malt. - [Ian] So the secret to the quality of single malt is consistency. You've got to nail down your production so that your unique spirit comes off exactly the same, and you have a spirit quality team that are actively looking at [that], and we also nose the unique spirit on-site as well. - [Ju] But there's more. An age 30 maturation can have 30% to 40% of the alcohol evaporated in the barrel, or 1% each year of the whisky's life. This is because of something called 'angel's share,' the natural evaporation of the liquid into the atmosphere over time. So older whiskies are expensive not just because they're old but because there's less of them left. There's one more factor we haven't touched upon yet: status. - [Ian] It's all about the equity of the brand and the perception of the consumer about how much they're prepared to pay for our brands. I think, in general, younger people want quality. They want good shoes, good clothes, nice cars, nice houses, and they want to be drinking single malt. - [Ju] And it's not just store-bought bottles. One factor that's driving up the price of single malts is a booming collector's market. A bottle of the Macallan 1926 60-year-old recently sold for $1.5 million in auction, marking the largest single sale ever for a bottle. Christie's international director of wine, Tim Tiptree, oversaw the sale. - It was one of 40 bottles produced from a single cask that was distilled in 1926 and then bottled in 1986. It was a hand-painted bottle, so I think it does add a little to the desirability, but it's the intrinsic quality of the whisky inside the bottle that is driving the demand. - [Ju] But scotch has some serious competitors. Alongside China, India, Taiwan, Ireland, Japan is one of the world's major producers of unblended whiskies. - "For relaxing times, make it Suntory time." - [Ju] You might have heard of 'Suntory time.' Suntory own the Yamazaki Distillery in Osaka Prefecture. The rarity of their produce drove prices sky high. - The Japanese have come to the fore, about four or five years ago, one of their whiskies a Yamazaki was named the best whisky in the world, and that created a lot of noise around the Yamazaki single malt. But Yamazaki's owned by Suntory, and the bulk of what they produce goes to blends, so they had insufficient whisky in their warehouses to actually continue on the success of what Yamazaki achieved in that one year. What dictates the price, the value of a whisky sometimes is the exclusivity, so the less there was, it drove the price up to the point where Yamazaki was being sold off at three, four times the normal value. - [Ju] But blended whiskies can also reach quite a high price. Will they ever be as expensive as single malt? - We don't normally sell much blended whisky in our auctions, single malts are much more rare, they are much more individualistic so, whereas blended whisky is typically, generally more produced in larger volumes and also is more homogenous in the actual style and taste profile.
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Channel: Business Insider
Views: 4,853,074
Rating: 4.8035922 out of 5
Keywords: alcohol, UK, drink, glenfiddich distillery, drinks, dufftown, macallan, scotland, Business Insider, barley, Business News, single malt, Video, Original, whisky
Id: QabHUUwC1tA
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Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)
Published: Sat Mar 09 2019
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