On June 13, 2019, at 1:45 p.m. EST, a private Facebook group with around 55,000 members, known simply as “BSM,” was shut-down by site administrators. Was this some group where goateed Oakley dudes posted racist memes? Maybe a place for QAnon followers to spread conspiracy theories about the Deep State? No, BSM, or Bourbon Secondary Market, was simply a spot for drinkers to re-sell bottles of coveted American whiskeys.

“Good riddance,” wrote one person on Reddit’s r/bourbon thread. “Too bad the rats are just going to flee from one burning building into the next.”

Why the animosity? Because just like this decade saw Facebook ruin journalism, politics, rational thought, your grandma, and perhaps even all-around life in general, to many bourbon fans, it ruined drinking, too.

“Facebook made bourbon,” says Gene Nassif, an extremely online whiskey fan from Iowa. He rightly notes that bourbon had been pretty dead since the 1960s, when clear spirits like vodka started rising to the forefront. Then, in 2006, Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy-invading wet dream opened to everybody and soon thereafter began allowing members to start and join private groups. Coincidentally, a bourbon renaissance was in its nascent stages in America, propelled by the craft cocktail boom, the rise of foodie culture, and, some people even say, the Old-Fashioned-slugging louts on Mad Men, which premiered in 2007.

Now with Facebook, many newly minted bourbon fans could easily find like-minded obsessives to talk with, trade with, and sell bottles to in private groups like BSM and countless others. Post a pic of a sexy bottle, ask for, oh, $500 or so, and wait a few seconds until a fellow group member comments “BIN” (buy it now). Boom, you’ve just sold some whiskey.

“Facebook played a huge role in building and expanding the bourbon world,” says Blake Riber, who started the Bourbonr website in 2013 and added a Facebook group in 2016, which now counts 30,000 members. “It’s where a majority of people found other enthusiasts online.”

Pappy Van Winkle bourbon from the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery. Facebook

Eventually, an incredibly active black market arose and, like with anything, greed quickly ran rampant. Take Pappy. You might be surprised to know that Pappy Van Winkle didn’t even exist as a product until 1994, when Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 Year was first released. (The 23 Year Old would come in 1998 and the most ubiquitous 15 Year Old bottling not until 2004.) I still recall the days when you could walk into liquor stores and easily find bottles of what was even by then a highly acclaimed bourbon. You simply needed 80 bucks or so, which was a ton of money to spend on a bottle of bourbon just a decade-plus ago.

Yet it wasn’t until December of 2012 that Pappy really started getting noticed online, marked by searches for it spiking on Google. That month, Anthony Bourdain had drunk a glass on his The Layover show and espoused its greatness. Bourdain had “ruined” things before, notably Texas BBQ. The difference was, you can’t sell Franklin’s brisket on some secondary online market, so far as I know. A sealed bottle of Pappy was a piece of cake to sell. Thus, Facebook became Pappy’s stock exchange, a marketplace where players could watch its price rise and fall (but mostly rise), and then sell it off for a fortune.

American bourbons from Maker’s Mark and Evan Williams. Sean Gallup Getty Images

“[Facebook] heavily influenced the Pappy-mania,” says Riber. “When someone realizes they can buy a bottle for $100 and resell it for $750, that’s going increase attention. To me, that's what put gas to the Pappy fire.”

Pappy was no longer something to drink; it was an asset. Facebook likewise got people into buying bottles they had no interest in ever drinking in the hopes of “flipping” them for a quick buck. And some of these flippers didn’t just not drink their rare bourbon, they weren’t drinkers at all. Bourbon had become like Beanie Babies or baseball cards. By the summer of 2016, a bartender trade show in Baltimore was presenting a seminar about bourbon vis-à-vis Facebook titled “Underground Whiskey: How to Navigate the Collectors Market for Fun and Profit.”

When someone realizes they can buy a bottle for $100 and resell it for $750, that’s going increase attention.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but mere hours after that presentation, Facebook shut down bourbon groups for the first time ever. Two days later, they were magically reinstated. (Selling liquor without a liquor license is, of course, against the law, but when you’re moving a rare bottle here or there, the law doesn't exactly get enforced. There have been very few cases where someone was arrested for selling a bottle on social media, and most only happened in stricter “control” states like Pennsylvania.)

More insidious crimes would prevail, however, as this frenzy eventually spurred people into buying empty bottles for hundreds of dollars so they could refill them with swill and thus counterfeit rare bottles for thousands of dollars, something I wrote about for Esquire in the spring of 2016. In that particular story, when I casually mentioned that Facebook users typically employed FedEx to illegally ship these bottles, one such buyer and seller privately messaged me, threatening to kill me lest the shipping companies get wise to the chicanery. The fact that he was a 40-something dad living across the country didn’t reassure me.

Most notably perhaps, Facebook gave brands an excuse to start jacking up the prices on their legitimate releases. Bourbon had always been an everyman’s drink, $20 a bottle maybe, but distilleries were suddenly emboldened to create crazy-expensive bottles available in scarce quantities. Some of these over the last decade have been quite good—Four Roses Small Batch Limited Edition or Wild Turkey Master’s Keep, for example. But others were indistinguishable liquid packed into slick bottles and fancy boxes, surely because brands knew the Facebook groups would thirst for them and buy them and find others willing to overpay for them out of pure monetary speculation, even if nobody actually wanted to drink them.



“Did these Facebook communities over-hype certain brands?” asks Riber. “Did it allow flippers a place to sell their bottles? Are there terrible people that troll, make rude comments, and take the hobby a little too serious? I could go on, but the answer to all these questions is yes.”

Even worse, liquor store owners began selling these “allocated” bottles on Facebook themselves. Why put a bottle of George T. Stagg with an MSRP of $80 on the shelves when you could go on Facebook and quickly sell it off for $500? Then, when bottles of George T. Stagg, Pappy Van Winkle, and others became impossible to find at retail stores, consumers were forced to greedily snatch up bottles that had once been cheap and readily available on lower shelves. Soon, Buffalo Trace’s most quotidian products like Weller and Eagle Rare became difficult to find in stores. So did Henry McKenna. It currently seems like Wild Turkey Rare Breed will be next. In 2020, it may be your favorite bottle that you currently buy for $25 a handle.

Wild Turkey Rare Breed bourbon from Wild Turkey. Facebook

“The easy-to-find, affordable, well-aged bourbons of the ‘golden age’ of 10 to 20 years ago are no more, which is too bad, but that was bound to happen at some point,” says Steve Ury, who began blogging about bourbon (among other things) in 2007. “Facebook has been a fertile ground for ridiculous secondary pricing, but that was happening on eBay before Facebook and is more a function of the absurd laws around alcohol resale and flippers taking advantage of them than the platform. If it wasn’t Facebook, it would be someplace else.”

Let me pause here and say I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I too have belonged to most of these groups over the years and have bought plenty of black market whiskey through them. (The only reason I don’t ever sell any whiskey is because I’m too lazy to carefully pack up a box and walk to FedEx.) And I mostly agree with Ury.

Still, Facebook has the power to spread things like nothing else in the history of the world, and this bourbon pandemic eventually spread to other forms of drinking. Limited release IPAs and rare stouts have sold rabidly on the site over the years. Currently, rum and armagnac are hot. But unlike with false political ads, Zuckerberg has done a good (or bad, depending on your perspective) job of continually shutting down black market groups. Amusingly, the Van Winkle family, instead of being grateful to Facebook for being the brand’s relentless hype man, may have also helped put the kibosh on groups like BSM.

“We and Buffalo Trace have taken some steps to curb the secondary market,” Pappy scion Preston Van Winkle said at the Bourbon & Beyond music festival in September, later broadcast on the Bourbon Pursuit podcast. “There are a lot of dollars being thrown from a legal standpoint at getting Facebook groups shut down.”

It seems to have worked, but it also seems to have not really mattered. As Ury theorized, banished whiskey buy/sell groups just move to less popular social media platforms with more lax moderators. I won’t tell you about those, lest another 40-something dad threaten to kill me, but they’re easy enough to find if you somehow stumble upon an interesting bottle and need to move it for $1,000.

Saying Facebook ruined bourbon would be like saying your mirror ruined your prom night.

“I suppose what happened with bourbon on Facebook is a good reflection of all things American, isn't it?” says Joshua Richolt, a bar owner and whiskey collector in Brooklyn. “It has been silly, democratic, brash, often juvenile, classist, sometimes wonderful, and likely more that I'm not listing. However, saying it ruined bourbon would be like saying your mirror ruined your prom night. Facebook simply gave us the vehicle to do what we did faster and more broadly.”

Indeed, most people begrudgingly agree that Facebook was ultimately good for bourbon. It fostered nerdy discussions and helped disseminate crucial information, like the release of new products. Sure, it inspired cash grab moves from the big brands, but it also inspired a guy like Nassif to start bottling his own whiskey this year, OBTAINIUM, something he claims he wouldn’t have ever considered without Facebook. And it certainly didn't ruin bourbon for Ury. “As with many things on Facebook, ‘bourbon Facebook’ sucks,” he says, “but it’s a minor irritant at most in the world of bourbon.”

Maybe the next decade of drinking won’t be so bad. Maybe people will again start tasting their bourbon. Like on the Bourbonr Facebook group, which implemented a new rule recently: If you post a photo of a bottle, it needs to be open. That ostensibly prevents people from posting “bourbon porn” to fish for offers (few people will chance buying an open bottle). The bigger goal is to get bourbon fans to stop coveting it, fetishizing it, doing anything necessary to acquire it, and then greedily using it as an asset for profiteering. It seems to be a success.

“At the end of the day, the pros of Facebook expanding the bourbon community and culture outweigh the cons,” says Riber. “The bourbon boom would be far less impactful without it.”

Although, the bourbon drinking would have remained a whole lot cheaper.

Aaron Goldfarb Aaron Goldfarb lives in Brooklyn and is a novelist and the author of 'Hacking Whiskey.'

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