How do you run out of stock in the middle of a global recession? The Kentucky bourbon brand Knob Creek claims that's what has happened at its distillery. Stocks of the premium whiskey have run dry and the next batch of the stuff won't be ready until November.

Knob Creek's owner, Beam Global, ran full page advertisements in US weekend newspapers apologising to bourbon devotees. The promotions showed an empty bottle of Knob Creek under the words "thanks for nothing". The firm has been making the most out of its predicament - it mailed out empty bottles to journalists, just to ram the point home, and it is handing out t-shirts trumpeting "the drought of 2009".

Bill Newlands, president of Beam Global, says the problem is that Knob Creek has to age for nine years in a complex maturing process to come up with a sufficiently full-bodied taste to satisfy bourbon anoraks. Back in 2000, the company apparently did a poor job in predicting supply. Oddly, Knob Creek says it is experiencing "double-digit growth" despite the economic meltdown.

"We could bottle the next batch of Knob Creek a tad earlier than nine years to satisfy demand, but that just wouldn't be right," said Newlands.

Knob Creek is named after a small town in Kentucky where Abraham Lincoln was born. Beam shifts about 150,000 cases of the stuff annually. Distributors still have a small amount of inventory but bars could start running out of the stuff in August or September.

Despite having no Knob Creek to sell, nobody at the brand's press office had time to talk today. One bourbon expert, author Charles Cowdrey, says there's truth in the company's situation - while other whiskeys offer only vague guidelines as to how long they are aged, Knob Creek sticks rigidly to its nine years, giving it little flexibility with the vagaries of demand.

"They're getting some publicity out of a real situation," Cowdrey told the Louisville Courier-Journal. "I expect that with Knob, they'll come back in November right before Christmas with a lot of new supply, and they'll make a lot of noise about it, and price it to move."