On June 6, 2023, I committed to a year of not buying whiskey. As of this post, that year is now officially over. How was it?
Back in early December 2023, around the halfway point, I posted an update about what I’d been noticing up until then. Several motifs had struck me already. In the six months since, similar themes have continued to develop.
Why did I do this again?
The why has been well covered in both my initial and halfway-point posts. But in brief, in the event you’ve stumbled onto this post out of context…
In order to keep my whiskey journey a conscious and enjoyable one, not to mention healthy, I’ve periodically made shifts to my behavioral patterns to keep myself on my toes.
For example, in 2020 I established a strategic combination of regular and irregular drinking patterns. For the regular aspect, I take quarterly dry weeks—one full week every three months. This I prefer to the widely promoted Dry January, a very long and tedious stretch of time! In between my quarterlies, from week to week I make conscious choices to switch up my day-to-day drinking pattern, so that I don’t fall into any set habits, like always drinking on Friday and Saturday nights, for example. So my quarterly dry weeks ensure I get four solid breaks from alcohol each year, and my irregular weekly pattern helps me to keep aware and mindful of my day-to-day intake.
Another pattern shift was in 2021, when I committed to bunkering less. This has been great. The key benefit is a much more eclectic range of whiskeys on my home shelf, rather than half a dozen+ of one thing taking up space. Bunkering less also helped free me up substantially from the clutches of FOMO and the false assumption of scarcity. I gradually realized that indeed there is no such thing as rare whiskey. New “limited editions” come out every week. Good whiskey is everywhere, every day!
There are other examples, all intended to heighten my awareness and deepen my understanding of why I’m on this whiskey journey at all, while also helping me to maintain a healthy balance in what could easily evolve into a destructive habit if left unchecked.
Ultimately, my personal whiskey journey is about (1) the pure sensual pleasure of sipping, (2) the gift-giving impulse by which I share whiskey with friends and here on this blog, and (3) curiosity.
And it’s that last bit, curiosity, that is the main thing. No surprise then that what stands out for me most in my Year of No Buying is what I’ve learned.
Window shopping works!
It really does. Though in the first few months of No Buying I found whiskey shelves and online new product feeds to simmer with temptation, that quickly cooled. The number of times I returned to shelves and websites only to see the same bottles still sitting there demonstrated that there really isn’t a huge need to impulse buy.
And yes one could name the inevitable Buffalo Trace products and Heaven Hill annual releases that indeed get bought up in a nano-flash. There will always be such brands. But window shopping, and taking the time to notice what is there rather than what isn’t, drew my attention anew to equally great brands and bottles that are always readily available (e.g. Westward, Woodinville, Four Roses Small Batch Select, Wild Turkey 101) and to small craft whiskeys that seem to always be somewhere despite limited distribution (in my area for example, Home Base Spirits, Tom’s Foolery, St. George).
So no rush. Missed that overpriced-by-10x “limited edition” whatever? There are innumerable other options that might have less cachet on an Instagram post yet taste just as great in your glass.
Uncork’m if yuh got’m!
Another learning, and so obvious, is that if you have 162 bottles of whiskey on your home shelf like I did when my No Buying year commenced, you have a lot of good stuff already. And boy did I. Here are some highlights I uncorked this past year, which I may very well not have done had I still been stockpiling more new stuff:
Arran Malt 15 Year Sherry Single Cask (2013) 🔗
Jefferson’s Presidential Select 20 Year (2016) 🔗
Knob Creek Single Barrel aged 15 years 3 months (2020) 🔗
Longrow Red 11 Year Tawny Port Cask Matured (2022) 🔗
Maker’s Mark Private Select – Save More Pick (2019) 🔗
Maryland Heritage Sherbrook 14 Year Rye (2022) 🔗
Redacted Bros Williamson (Laphroaig) 12 Year (2022) 🔗
Redwood Empire Haystack Needle Cabernet Finished (2022) 🔗
Wild Turkey 101 (2001) 🔗
Wild Turkey Master’s Keep Decades (2017) 🔗
By the end of my No Buying year, my 162 bottles had been reduced to 125. And that’s with an influx of 16 new bottles over the year—9 gifted to me, 6 that I bought on a trip to Japan (a caveat I’d allowed myself when I committed to my No Buying year) and a bottle of St George Single Malt Lot 23 (my other caveat for the year). That means in one year I polished off 53 bottles total—one for every week, plus a bonus! I didn’t do it alone, mind you. I had help. 😉🥃 And roughly 30 of the original 162 were already open at the start of the year, just as 30 are currently open now, so, this isn’t exact math. Nevertheless, gulp! 😳
More important than thinning out my home shelf, my freer hand with uncorking helped me to feel less clingy and precious about “the good stuff.” For various reasons—availability, cost, age—a bottle might get earmarked in my brain as something for special occasions only. Having a few of those on hand is useful, of course. Celebration is a good thing. But uncorking something special can also make an average Tuesday above average, or a burdensome Wednesday less burdensome. None of us know how long we have in life, and when we go we can’t take anything with us. Why not make the present as enjoyable as possible?
Mix it up!
Another thing I learned more about is cocktails. In hindsight, I think the itch of novelty formerly scratched by new bottles got assuaged instead by experiments in mixology. This got my partner clinking glasses with me more often, too, as she greatly prefers whiskey in a cocktail than on its own.
Mixology did add other non-whiskey bottles to my shelf. Various bitters, liqueurs, mezcals, non-alcoholic mixers, cocktail cherries… But in terms of whiskey, I worked with what I had. This heightened my attention to aroma and flavor in a new way. Riffing on cocktail templates like the Old-Fashioned or Blood & Sand or Highball, I learned a lot about blending. To match the right ingredients, I’d nose the various options to notice which seemed to pop and complement.
And so, how I enjoy my whiskey expanded. I used to pretty much drink everything neat, rarely adding water or even ice. I’m now much more likely to mix it up. And as with my uncorking habits, I also feel less precious about mixing “the good stuff.” My favorite Blood & Sand riff involved Westward’s one-time sourdough release, for example. And I can attest that Elijah Craig 23 Year makes a great Bourbon & Coke!
Going Forward
So now we’ll see how this thrifty year will continue to reverberate into the future. I certainly intend to keep on with the learnings noted above. How they go without the restriction on buying will be interesting to see. What will stay, what will fall away, and what will evolve?
And of course there’s my bank account. Naturally I anticipated noticing a difference there. Of course it’s not possible to tally up money I did not spend. And saving money wasn’t the motivation for my committing to a Year of No Buying anyway. But I’ll just say that when I did my taxes this past April I was able to contribute much more than usual to my retirement!
Cheers!
Past Whiskey Journey Posts
Part 1 – Getting Started
Part 2 – Checking In
Part 3 – Why I Whiskey
Part 4 – On Weller Antique 107 and the Art and Practice of Letting Go
Part 5 – What have three years of writing whiskey notes done to me?
Part 6 – Nosing The Grind
Part 7 – What would happen if I didn’t buy whiskey for a year?
Part 7.5 – halfway through The Year of No Buying
Part 8 – Turning-Point Bottles Pinned To My Journey’s Map
The Right Spirit 