We’ve all done things we regret. Such is the human condition: You make a mistake (or maybe it’s intentional), and then later realize that it wasn’t wisest choice… but there’s nothing you can do about it. One person who is decidedly not suffering from a case of second thoughts is Jeremy Johnson, the owner of Louisville bar Meta. Ten years ago, he shocked the whiskey world. Johnson took the holiest of holies and did the unthinkable. He turned his bar’s allocation of Pappy Van Winkle into Jell-O shots. That’s right, he used what is now one of the most collectible whiskeys and made what is arguably the lowest form of a “drink.” And then he did it a few more times over the following years. He was called idiotic. He was accused of being sacrilegious. He was cut off from ever selling Pappy at his bar again. But Johnson was making a point about a bourbon boom he thought had gotten ludicrous, and a decade later he has no remorse about preposterous stunt he pulled.
Not that long before 2014, Pappy Van Winkle wasn’t some ultra-coveted whiskey that rendered it unattainable. There was a cult around the bourbon, for sure, but in the aughts you could still get a pour if at the right airport bar if you missed your connecting flight. But as the cult of Pappy grew, it became harder and harder to get—not just for civilians, but for retailers and bar owners, too. To secure their allocation they had to carry a lot of lesser liquors to gain favor with the parent company. And when people would secure a bottle of Pappy with a sticker price of $249, they’d turn around and sell it for astronomical prices. That situation didn’t sit right with Johnson, a Kentucky native, who is not shy in arguing that unicorn bottles that sell for thousands on the secondary market are antithetical to what bourbon is supposed to be about. “When I was growing up, bourbon was about community, it was about people drinking together,” Johnson told me when I recently reached out to him. “The exclusivity factor is really against what bourbon is. It was never about being snobby, it was about having people over and making a punch, enjoying a race, or just sitting on the back porch.”
So in 2014, around the time Pappy was on its way to unicorn status, Johnson got some Pappy 15 for the cocktail bar he’d recently opened and decided to poke some fun at how serious bourbon had become. He grabbed some gelatin and created Old Fashioned-flavored Jell-O shots with the sacred spirit, and then sold them for $10 a pop. People flooded into the nascent bar and ordered more than 100 of his concoction. But his heresy had consequences.
The reality is that there are ramifications for pissing off a major whiskey brand that could hurt a bar’s bottom line. According to Johnson, Buffalo Trace didn’t just cut him off all at once, but instead decreased allocations year after year until it got to the point where he could not buy enough to get the next year’s allocation—a pretty clever way of exacting revenge, actually. “I don’t entirely blame Sazerac,” he said, referring to Buffalo Trace’s parent company. “I think there were gatekeepers at RNDC that had a lot more control over the allocation than they wanted to let on [RNDC was Sazerac’s distributor at the time, they have since parted ways and are suing each other]. I think I think the problem was pretty systemic. But ultimately it gave us a lot of publicity and it put me in the good graces of a lot of other brands.”
Not only is Johnson not pining over not being able to serve Buffalo Trace products at his bar, he says that ultimately his Pappy caper was a boon. “At the time, we were a new business,” he told me. “We were definitely struggling, and it put us on the map. It also gave me a platform to show the knowledge that I have and, more importantly, the opinions that I have that I think are really worth something.”
Now, I don’t know if there’s more to this story beyond what Johnson shared with me. I reached out to a representative for Sazerac for comment, but they declined. Still, it’s easy to paint Big Whiskey as being the bad guy, especially when said Big Whiskey Brand is responsible for making some of the most sought after, highly allocated expressions. It’s frustrating for many whiskey drinkers who can’t find a bottle and can’t afford one when they do, but this wasn’t created in a void. There’s a reason people love brands like Pappy, Weller, and the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection—they are really, really good. That is ultimately why they have become such coveted collector’s items, but of course that’s been helped along by limited availability and allocation.
Johnson told me that he reached out to Sazerac in the years following his Jell-O shot stunt to see if they would bury the hatchet, but that hasn’t happened yet, and at this point it probably never will. After Sazerac switched distributors last year, Johnson met with the new rep and was told that all he could get was Fireball—not even the company’s baseline Buffalo Trace Bourbon would be heading his way. Shortly after that, he posted a “Why I’m Quitting Sazerac” letter on the his bar’s Instagram account, saying that he could now sleep at night with the knowledge that he’s not exploiting his customers. “The truth is, I gave them a bunch of publicity too,” he said. “I didn’t intend to break the internet when I did this. I literally did it out of frustration, and it just hit the right nerve at the right time.”
Johnson’s bar, Meta, is still open for business, and he is satisfied with the whiskey brands he still offers there that, in his opinion, are doing things the right way: Wild Turkey, Wilderness Trail, Old Forester, and Michter’s to name a few. Johnson says that, as a business owner, he understands the need to allocate a product when it’s extremely popular. But he also believes that Sazerac is using the unicorn status of brands like Pappy to manipulate the whiskey market, ultimately at the expense of the customer. “I will say this—all empires fall,” he told me. “I don’t wish any ill on Sazerac, but I think there will come a day where someone is more popular and all of a sudden, they will say, ‘Holy crap, we didn’t sell out of all of our Pappy.’ Eventually, they will need to ask people for some favors. And I can’t think of a single person I know in the industry that would say yes.”
