Old Commonwealth Distillery opened 6 months ago. Its reputation is already being ruined on the secondary market.

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The opening of a new distillery is usually a marked by plenty of celebrations, media events and trying to get as many bottles into the hands of customers as possible. After all, what is the purpose of a business that makes alcohol if people can’t drink it?

That’s not exactly what’s been going on at the Old Commonwealth Distillery. It’s only been open for half a year and yet every new label release (three by my count) has been mired in scandal on the secondary market. The main issue at hand is that a handful of flippers (people that sell products at higher prices than what they purchased it at) have used their early bottle access to control prices on the secondary market.

Some of you might be asking yourself “what else is new?” Some of you might be thinking “serves ’em right for buying at those inflated prices,” but the issue goes much deeper. What makes this different is that the same people on the secondary (or their friends) have led the way on setting the secondary prices. Is this a coincidence? Because even randomized online “drops” feel rigged. Many around the community have noted that they click on a link within seconds of receiving a notification only to notice that it has been sold out.

The ongoing joke on a certain secondary market banter group is that it doesn’t matter how fast you are, you’re never going to get any bottle Old Commonwealth’s drops. One reason might be that they don’t have a lot of bottles produced. But people in the know have seen that Old Commonwealth has enough liquid on hand to literally release thousands or tens of thousands of bottles right now. So it seems like a choice that the drops only range from a ten to 250 bottles at a time.

Fake bidders, artificially high prices and market control

Once the “chosen ones” get their bottles, they descend on the secondary markets in a coordinated effort to resell the bottles. These efforts comprise of extremely inflated ask prices, popcorn bidding propped up with shill bidders, collaborators excessively (suspiciously) dropping “UV” in the comments (“unsolicited vouch” – jargon for “They’re a trustworthy seller. Just trust me, bro”), shill accounts hyping up the bottles and – lastly – using the bottle’s uncanny resemblance to highly desirable vintage bottles from decades ago to trick unwitting buyers. In fact, I just wrote an article trying to warn people about this exact thing here.

All of this inevitably reels in less-knowledgeable enthusiasts with more money than brains to get some FOMO and buy or bid on the bottles. As soon as the first sale ends (usually with a selling price in the low four digits), more bottles pop up asking for similar prices. I’m not kidding when I say that the markup I’ve seen is usually six times more than what these bottles go for at retail (if they ever hit a shelf, that is). Why is that happening for bourbon that would have such little secondary value when other producers bottle it?

Why isn’t this being stopped?

At this point, you may be wondering why people aren’t chiming in to alert bidders and potential buyers to this scam. That’s because almost all secondary market groups have rules against “threadshitting” – i.e. badmouthing a seller or posting discouraging information that could reduce interest in the sale.

Additionally, I’ve seen sellers get extremely angry when a buyer tries to back out of a deal once they realize the bottle was not as it seemed. Backing out of a deal is a death sentence in groups like these because the standard punishment is removal from the group (and a stain on your name in other groups). Sometimes the punishment can extend to whoever invited/vouched for the person (that backed out of the deal) to be allowed into the group in the first place. There may be no honor among thieves, but they’ll slice your throat if you break their rules.

Bottom Line: Don’t Buy Colonel Randolph, Kentucky Nectar or Old Commonwealth

I would love to out the people who are most responsible for this mess in the first place. From the people connected to the distillery who sell these bottles to friends with a history of malicious flipping. Even the scam-y flippers who aren’t selling these bottles but are in bed with the main culprits and help them out (you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back).

The crappy part is that it would probably result in me getting banned from these groups as well. I generally think secondary groups are full of decent people and see them as more of a way for the market to correct itself. I also use them for education and general information. But when I observe the same thing happening three times in a row from the same distillery and the same flippers, I feel the need to call them out. I just want people to wake up and stop getting tricked.

Colonel Randolph is nothing more than proofed down Buffalo Turkey (a $250-300 bottle from any other NDP). Kentucky Nectar is Wilderness Trail. And Old Commonwealth is either 10-year-old Barton or Heaven Hill (made with a different yeast strain – it’s complicated). These are not magical elixirs that you’ll never find anywhere else – they’re all relatively common. Paying even double their retail price is absurd.

Is Old Commonwealth to blame?

I want to make something clear, Old Commonwealth isn’t the first producer (and they’re not going to be the last) to be associated with secondary behaviors like this. Maybe their hands are clean in all of this mess. It could be that the main perpetrators in these scummy secondary market practices have outwitted them with bots (which OC has acknowledged is an issue). Bots are now commonplace among many enthusiasts and come in all different shapes and sizes. Most are no more than fancy URL scrapers that refresh a website link at certain intervals and alert an email account when something new pops up.

If this is the case and Old Commonwealth chooses to combat it, there are many options that could ensure fair and equal distribution of bottles. Some involve lotteries where users have to enter personal data that verifies one person gets one entry. Others include established techniques like scanning drivers licenses to track how many times a person has won over a period of time. Heaven Hill has used this method to great success by capping the amount of allocated bottles a person can get. What’s funny is that some of the same scammers that I am talking about in this article have a history of having distilleries identifying them as gaming the system and telling them to stop.

Until Old Commonwealth shows some transparency to the public and acknowledges their releases are being pirated more aggressively than other modern bottles, then they will remain a part of the problem. The scammers have had their success, people have been taken advantage of and reputations have suffered. It’s time to end these shenanigans.

Conclusion

The only thing we can do to combat this Old Commonwealth flipping scourge is by collectively saying “no” on the secondary to these bottles. I truly believe that there are parties within the producer and on secondary groups that just don’t care. They want to keep availability scarce and hype high. If one brand is consistently at the helm of shitty deals, people are going to start to complain. I just don’t want another mass culling of secondary groups like there was in 2019 when there was too much attention drawn to them because bad deals are going down.

Until then, we can all agree this nonsense needs to stop and the distillery needs to acknowledge it. In the meantime, spread the word and tell your friends to stop buying anything released by Old Commonwealth on the secondary market.