Views From A Scapegoat
Interview with a Flipper
Once you start asking around what people don’t like about whisky these days, flippers will soon become a topic that everyone seems to be complaining about. Flippers don’t have the best reputation in the whisky community (to put it mildly). Chances are that virtually everyone holds a grudge against them and is ready to put the blame on them for everything wrong about whisky: inflating prices, sold out special releases, making a quick gain by investing in whisky without any interest in drinking or sharing it, a febrile trade, an increasing velocity, an overheated secondary market, unopened bottles, fisticuffs in front of whisky stores, … you name it. Flippers are our common scapegoat, and it is all the easier to put the blame on them as no one claims to be one themselves or seems to know one in person – flipping is always done by those others whom no one wishes to be affiliated with. So, flippers are quite strange creatures who somehow manage to be both at the same time: on everyone’s mind and quite elusive.
This got me curious, and I wanted to know more. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like flipping and have also called it ‘a pest’, but not least because I’m German and know my country’s shameful history, I tend to beware of scapegoating. So, I reached out to a member of one of the online whisky groups which I am a part of who was repeatedly accused of being a flipper by other members of this group. Let’s call him Porter Ricks to safeguard his anonymity. Whether Porter is a flipper or not depends on whom you ask. Porter acknowledges that he has been reselling quite a few bottles at inflated prices in the past and continues to do so in the present albeit with less bottles than back then (we will get to the reasons for this later), but he would neither consider nor call himself a flipper. Porter kindly agreed to an interview with me, and we had a chat on the phone for over an hour during which we discussed all things flipping and his experiences in the reselling business.
To better anonymize my interlocutor and to sort out our lengthy conversation, I have edited and shortened my transcript of the interview. The questions are mine, the answers are his. I have learned a lot from our conversation and maybe some of its contents are of interest to you as well?
Thank you for this opportunity to have a chat on flipping with you. I’ve asked you for this interview because some members of our whisky group have repeatedly called you out or even blamed you for being a flipper. Do you agree to this? Would you call yourself a flipper?
Some people in our group still have allergic reactions when it comes to this theme, but if I have a look at the reselling-section in our forum, reselling whisky seems to be quite common to me. After all, this is not a crime?! In my early days, you could have called me a flipper. Back then I bought many bottlings twice or thrice following the principle ‘one for me, one for the secondary market, and the third one for Whiskybase or the likes’. The main purpose was to cross-finance my whisky hobby a bit. Otherwise, whisky would be too expensive a hobby for me and my meagre income. All I’ve ever managed to achieve was to subsidise my hobby with this. It would have been nice if I could have financed my own whisky purchases out of my resales, but this has never been the case. More or less, this has always been a small subsidy for buying new bottles for myself. That’s how it all started and how it’s going today.
How is it like for you to be repeatedly called out or even branded as a flipper by other members of our whisky group?
[Sighs.] I have been accused of other things in my life as well, and some don’t have any sense of humour when it comes to this theme. So, I don’t find myself particularly offended or depressed by this. I sell my whisky via eBay, Whiskybase, or privately; and somehow everyone is satisfied. The buyers are content that they got a hold of a desired bottle, but it is also quite enlightening to have a look at their delivery addresses. At times, my parcels are destined for houses behind five-meter-high walls with barbed wire, the best view you can get, and all that. It just doesn’t matter to these people if you take a few Euro extra on the bottle. Meanwhile, I also resell bottles in our group at the costs for which I have purchased them and, sometimes, even below that. So, the truth being told, I don’t feel any remorse because of that.
When it comes to flipping, emotions quickly boil up in our group. Do you have an explanation for this?
Well, flipping is not only a thing when it comes to whisky. Many other things get flipped as well. Everyone speculating on stock exchanges could be called a flipper – those day traders or course manipulators. People flip concert tickets or sneakers, and I think that flipping whisky is quite an exceptional case compared to these businesses. Just have a look at what gets flipped on eBay these days. Flipping is there, and it is there to stay.
What is flipping for you? How would you explain flipping to someone who has never heard of it?
Flipping means that you resell a sought-after product which is in high demand at a higher price than the one at which you bought it.
What is your take on all this?
As long as it’s all about luxury goods like Rolex watches, stupid sneakers, or tickets for some silly artist, I don’t give a fuck. But when it comes to people’s daily needs like frying oil, toilet paper, or petrol, I find these developments quite alarming. At some point, we will once more have a black market like we had after World War II, where people sold their last belongings out of the sheer necessity to have something to eat in the evening. This was also some kind of flipping, but quite reprehensible and a whole different story in comparison to reselling luxury goods. No one must die when they pay twenty, thirty, or even forty Euro extra on an already overpriced whisky, which they can apparently easily afford. My customers gladly do this, express their gratitude, and leave good ratings on my profile. So, in this sense, I don’t see any ethical reprehensibility when it comes to reselling whisky.
When did you start this business?
I got into whisky about ten years ago. Before that, I was completely against anything alcoholic, and I am not drinking any beer or wine up to this day, but my brother, who was working at a local whisky store back then, got me hooked on whisky. He poured me an Aberlour A’bunadh, and that’s how it all started. For the first two years, I was just buying a bottle of whisky for myself every here and then. But one day, I found myself having one bottle too many. It was a one-litre bottle of the Lagavulin Distillers Edition to be precise. And from there, it somehow gained momentum and took on a life of its own. Now, people are calling in and asking me whether I have this or that bottle for sale before I could even put it on the market, but most of the time, I don’t have the requested bottle myself. I have just about sixty bottles on my shelf at the moment while others who are selling on Whiskybase must have a room filled with bottles in their homes?! So, all this has taken on a life of its own. Back in the days, I have also pushed my business with the yearly special bottlings from Ardbeg and Laphroaig when these were not sold in the regular stores, but this is over now. However, I was never selling that much – maybe about two bottles per week.
What do you mean by ‘has taken on a life of its own’?
[Hesitates.] Apparently, people who have purchased some bottles from me were satisfied and called without me putting any bottles online, when they were searching for this or that specific bottling, asking if I had it or could get it for them, which sometimes was the case. So, they became more satisfied and called in again when they were looking for something special. And so, one thing came to the other. But it is not solely about selling bottles, wrapping them up, and sending them out; it is also about the interesting stories that come with it. Once, I sold a bottle to someone in South Korea, and I had to hand the bottle over to a dock worker in the nearby harbour using google translate and all that. On another occasion, I had a customer in Colombia, and when I asked him about the customs in his country, he replied that they would not cause any troubles as soon as they read his name on the package. I mean, this guy had bought a bottle for 200 Euro and the delivery costs were about 60 Euro, none of which seemed to bother him. Such experiences are more interesting to me than my desire to sell another bottle. I do all this for stories like these.
Open your bottles indeed
In your experience, what have been the major changes in the whisky flipping business over the last ten years?
First and foremost, more people are flipping whisky these days, and the whole business has become more professional not least thanks to sites like Whiskybase, which enable customers to receive the bottle for inspection before deciding to buy it and thereby reduce the amount of risk for them. Over the last year, even regular traders have become involved in this business as you could observe with those bottlings which were in high demand like special releases or everything Springbank. Just the other day, I sold a Springbank 12 Cask Strength Batch 15 with an old price tag on the bottle. The price tag dated to 2017, amounted to 70 Euro, and was clearly visible in my pictures, but this guy bought the bottle without hesitation for 230 Euro. The buyer was one of these Chinese guys with a delivery address here in the country, and the price didn’t seem to matter to him. So, you could clearly see how the prices have exploded over the last years but, nonetheless, there are still people out there willing to buy whisky at these inflated prices. Never have I received any complaints about my prices being too expensive. Otherwise, I would have thought about whether I have overdone them and reduced the amount of money I ask for. But probably, many others have also thought about it and determined before what they are willing to pay for a certain bottle. Their personal price limits seem to be aligning just fine with what I ask for. Of course, there are also those who complain and are unwilling to pay my prices, and that is totally fine. But there are also those who can afford it and are obviously eager to get hold of a certain bottle.
So, you just sold a 70 Euro bottle at 230 quid?
Yes, without any hesitation or complaint on the buyer’s end. Just half a year ago, I had two bottles of Springbank 15 on offer for 75 Euro each, and no one wanted to buy them. Now, I could sell them for 150 Euro and people would be scrambling to get them. Somehow strange, isn’t it? It must be a trend or something like that.
Hopefully, just a trend so that we will soon be able to buy and enjoy Springbank again at reasonable prices.
Yes, hopefully. But in my experience prices rarely come down, they will stagnate on a high level for a few years before they finally start decreasing. Look at such shelf warmers like the recent Glendronach single cask releases, which just stand there like sour beer and don’t get sold at all. They have really overdone their prices, but even these prices come down only at a very slow rate and only step by step as people want to get them out of their stores to use the storage place for other bottlings. So, prices won’t come down anytime soon.
What has been the most memorable bottle that you have sold in all those years?
Oh, this South Korean guy is really into dark and high-percentage bottlings, probably because they like this kind of stuff in South Korea. And that Colombian guy has bought a Macallan from me, probably to put it on display to boost his own image. But I also had this guy from northern Sweden who must have been hunting or something like that in the faraway countryside. My parcel was addressed to a hunting lodge deep in the northern forests, and it took it several days to get there. This guy must have spent half the year hunting and drinking whisky in the woods. Once, I had a vintner from France buying one of my bottles. With the help of google translate, I reached out to him because I was curious about the wine that he was producing, and he replied that he would prefer whisky to his own wine any time. But most of my sales go down something like that: Someone replies to one of my advertised offers, buys the bottle, pays for it, and I send the parcel their way without any further communication. Yet, sometimes, funny stories come up, and that’s what I like about this business.
Where do you buy your bottles?
All over the place. I spend a lot of time checking different sites online and clicking myself through their shops. I have some shops which I visit on a regular basis, but I am also constantly looking out for small businesses where I might make an interesting find. For example, I just found out about this small shop nearby that had some of the Bunnahabhain 12 Cask Strength left for sale at 75 Euro and some other interesting bottles in store. It’s fun to make discoveries like that and to conduct business like in the old days. Normally, the regular online shops sell out fast.
But you purchase most of your bottles online?
Yes, I buy my bottles almost exclusively online. There are not that many stores nearby, and it is rather difficult for me to get to them, so I buy from them online as well.
Where do you sell your bottles?
Porter: Mainly on eBay and Whiskybase, but also in our forum. Most of the time, I advertise a bottle on these sites and people contact me via private messages asking whether we could trade the bottle off the record to bypass the buyer’s fee. Then, they pay me via PayPal, and I send the bottle their way. But I am often surprised how far these people are willing to put their trust in a total stranger, send him their money, and then count on getting their wares.
Whiskybase Market April 2022
Do you have any idea why they are willing to trust you?
Probably because I have good ratings and reviews on these sites. I have conducted a lot of transactions on these sites. At least, if I were a buyer that’s what I would be looking for. If a seller had only two reviews, I would never do business with them.
Do you have an eye on any particular markets or do you just advertise your bottles on eBay and Whiskybase and then wait for whatever comes your way?
Oh, I just put them online, and that’s about it. At times, I have them on offer on different sites and operate on a first-come-first-served basis. So, no one can complain about me keeping bottles away from them. As for those bottles which I don’t sell, I will, after a certain while, put them on auction on eBay where they usually sell off rather quickly in comparison to Whiskybase.
How come?
Maybe because there are more people on eBay looking for gifts and also those who are not that deep into whisky but already on the lookout for interesting bottlings. The professionals know and scan all sites on a regular basis, there are more amateurs on eBay.
How do you set your prices?
Well, most of the time, mine are the cheapest. I look at the prices that other people ask for the same or similar bottlings, and then I offer them all inclusive for about ten to fifteen Euro less. Of course, I don’t sell below my own purchase costs, but I am constantly on the lookout to be the cheapest seller on those sites, because that is what people look for first. Next, they look at your ratings and reviews which also help to build some trust on the buyer’s side. While eBay does not really allow for private messages between me and my buyers, the messaging system on Whiskybase has no such restrictions, which also helps to conduct my business.
When it comes to buying whisky, how do you know which bottlings might be profitable for your business?
Everything hype. Those whiskies just skyrocket as has recently been the case with the Springbank Local Barley which I could have easily sold for 500 Euro in the Whiskybase, but I rather wanted to see it opened and enjoyed. So, I offered it for a bottle-split in our group which many people wanted to participate in, like this one guy who was repeatedly asking about a sample whilst having three unopened bottles in his own collection in the base... When others asked him to share one of his bottles, he kept nagging about the price and his possible financial losses. So, I just came up with the idea to share my bottle at retail for people to enjoy the whisky. [Adamh: More than fifty people put their names on the list, and the bottle was shared at retail.] Hyped up bottlings always sell well. Other bottles which normally sell well are special releases from the likes of Ardbeg and Laphroaig or dark sherry whiskies with an age of twenty years or more within a payable price range. Single casks are also sought after, but small batches do not fare well in resale unless their price rises with the following batches. Normally, I wouldn’t look at the retail prices but at what I am interested in and what I find to my liking. If feasible and affordable, I buy two or three of these bottles out of which I would normally need only one for myself. The others will end up with a surcharge on the secondary market or in our group where I sell them at retail so that no one in our group could complain about me ripping them off. That’s how I normally go about my business so that no one should be pissed in the end. Sometimes, I get the impression that people cannot afford my prices, so I offer them a reduction or take the bottle out for a few weeks for them to gather the money because I don’t want to put any pressure on them or to get a bad conscience myself.
Ebay whisky
You do this business on your own?
Yes, I do it on my own. Mine is a very small business and the biggest part of my work is to take a picture of the bottle and to advertise it online. Thereafter, I just check how many clicks I get, compare my prices to those that others ask for, and adjust them accordingly. I have a small packing station, and it only takes me a minute to wrap a bottle up. I bring the parcels to the post office while I do my groceries. This business is quite simple and not that work intensive.
How much time per week do you spend on this business?
Well, it depends. Sometimes, it takes a lot of time to chat with my customers, sometimes not. Most of the time, I just collect my customers’ addresses and their payments via PayPal, give them a heads up, and that’s about it. Researching the market and buying bottles takes about twenty to twenty-five hours per week, conducting my business a few more. All in all, I might be spending about thirty hours per week on all this – sometimes more, sometimes less.
How many bottles do you sell per week?
I sell most of my bottles around Christmas and Easter or towards the beginning and the middle of the month when people get their pay slips. After all, whisky is an expensive hobby, and one needs money to afford it. Normal people would tap their foreheads when you tell them that you just bought a bottle of schnapps for 200 Euro. The price that you can ask for is like playing vabanque. I always try to be the cheapest, and if I notice that a bottle doesn’t go well, I will adjust my prices accordingly or try to sell it at a later point.
What is the volume of your business per week?
Hard to say. If I sell regular bottlings only, I have a turnover of 200 to 300 Euro per week; if I sell some special bottlings or to customers like the one in Colombia, my turnover can amount up to 1.000 or even 1.500 Euro per week. The volume of my trade fluctuates. Meanwhile, I make a bigger gain from the cheaper bottles than from the ones which I sell for about 500 Euro because you cannot ask for a big surcharge on bottles which are already expensive at retail – except for Springbank. Also, there are not that many people out there who are willing to buy a bottle of whisky for 500 Euro. This is a rare exception for me. Usually, I sell my bottles for between 100 to 200 Euro as people seem more able and willing to buy bottles in this price range. Normally, I make thirty to forty Euro on a bottle.
All in all, is this a profitable business for you?
Hm, I’ve also incurred some losses over the years especially with those expensive bottlings, which no one seems to be interested in after a short while. Just recently, I had to resell this older Islay bottling which I had originally purchased for 310 Euro at 250 Euro because nobody wanted to buy it. Sometimes, you must adjust your prices, but in general, I make some profit with my sales. Yet, I am far away from being able to fully finance my whisky hobby through this and even further away from buying a Porsche any time soon. I do this to raise a little extra income and to reduce the overall costs of my whisky hobby. Isn’t this what other collectors do as well? Someone who collects coins or stamps will also sell part of their goods from time to time so that they can add new ones to their collection. It is standard procedure among collectors that people give away some of their pieces and purchase other ones in return.
Are you running a licensed business?
No, all of this is done in private. If I were doing books, there would not be a big gain made in the end.
Are you afraid that customs or finance authorities might find out about your business?
No, not really. The volume of my transactions does not amount to that much, and I sell on different platforms so that my business shouldn’t be that easy to find.
No doubt, a prime incoming target
Is your business model to search for those bottles which are of interest to yourself and to buy two or three of them, keep one for yourself and to resell the others?
If feasible, yes. So, when the resale doesn’t work out, I’m still left with bottles which are of interest to me and not an entire failure. You cannot score a hit every single time.
But the basic thought behind this is that you only buy bottles which are of interest to yourself and not those which would make you a quick gain?
Yes, of course, because I also need to guess whether a certain whisky might be of interest to other whisky drinkers and whether they would purchase it from me at an inflated price. So far, my own interests and experience have been of good guidance in all this.
How does flipping affect the whisky market in general?
The private flippers have become less while the commercial ones have grown in number [laughs]. I mean those regular traders who no longer sell sought-after bottles at retail but add at least 50% to the suggested retail price. Nonetheless, they sell their bottles fast. And I get it, the traders face pressures from many different ends and must keep their business running, so they calculate their prices differently.
Are you saying that regular traders are taking over your business?
Hm, I mean that my trading has declined in numbers. Back in the day, I had about 150 bottles on my shelf, and now I am down to about sixty. So, I am selling much less than before. That is also because many of those bottlings which you could formerly only buy in the UK are now sold here on the mainland as well. Before Brexit, I bought most of my bottles in the UK, and these bottles were rare and hard to find here, so that I could easily sell them on. All that is gone. The traders themselves are flipping now, and the distilleries are selling their rare bottlings online. Hence, my business has declined. Now, I am only looking at bottles that are of interest to me and no longer purchase any bottles solely based on the suspicion that I could sell them on. That is long gone.
How do you think this will continue? Is the bubble about to burst or is there still room for further inflation?
Oh, I mean, look at this Chinese guy who has just bought the over-priced Springbank 12 from me. I sell my expensive bottles almost exclusively abroad. If the price is above the 200 Euro mark, the bottle will surely be sent abroad – France, Italy, Spain. Strangely, they have money over there. Or the bottles go overseas to the crazy collectors. I believe that this will continue. The Chinese do it, the Koreans do it, and I have this guy from the US who is a frequent customer. This American buys bottles via the base and stores them some place here in Europe before he has them shipped over – it is possibly cheaper to send them in bulk. Or he flies over and takes the expensive ones with him. The Chinese do the same thing; they rent a storage room here and have the bottles sent there before they collect them in bulk and send them over to China.
So, it is all becoming more internationalised and that is why this business will continue to grow?
Yes. I mean it doesn’t seem to cause these people abroad any pain to pay over-expensive prices while the Europeans are only complaining about it. These foreign guys must be earning a lot of money. Therefore, I think that at least the higher-priced bottlings will continue to become more expensive while the prices for standard bottlings will most likely stagnate where they are as they can’t increase these prices any further. I mean, drinking whiskies will always remain set at affordable prices as you can see with the Bunnahabhain 12 whose price has remained quite stable over the years. The bottles that you buy out of your pocket will roughly stay the same.
Where do you find your international buyers? On the base or elsewhere?
I find them on the base or eBay. Unless people are too shocked by the international shipping costs and step back on the deal. Once, I’ve even sold a bottle to Australia via eBay. Nowadays, most international shipping goes through the base as it reassures the international customers to have a look at the bottle before they pay for it. On eBay you must pay straight ahead which might be quite risky. The base steps in as a trustee, you make a deposit, and they keep the money on hold until the buyer approves the bottle. I find this quite good for all parties involved. It makes perfect sense for buying rare or collectable bottles worth a few hundred Euro so that the buyers can take their time to check the bottle before they release their payment. And they commonly take their time for a few days after the parcel has been delivered to their doorstep. In the end, everybody is satisfied, and the base makes a gain from their fees as well.
Lochlea was a flipping target
In your view, should we try to prevent people from flipping whisky or should this just go on as part of the business?
I mean, it’s not illegal. If it comes to things like medication or other necessities, flipping should be outlawed, and that’s what we have laws for. But as long as it is a small and personal business… I mean, that is how eBay originally started, and nowadays everybody on there could be called a flipper if you look at their prices and business. They sell in private without paying taxes – another big theme –, but they sell their stuff on there. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do that? If it is something rare that everybody is after and you can take a small surcharge on the price, I find that to be quite okay. But there are also other things on eBay which are on there for months or even years, and no one wishes to buy them because they are too expensive. I am roughly aware of the regular and secondary market prices, calculate the fees in, and then try to set my price as low as possible. Normally, this goes quite well so that I sell my bottles rather fast.
You don’t do auctions but sell at fixed prices?
Normally, I only do fixed prices. Auctioneering can be too risky. I also try not to sell during vacation time but just before the holidays like Christmas or Easter.
You don’t use auction houses?
So far, I haven’t. At some point I wanted to check them out but as I mainly sell middle-class bottlings, I don’t think that my bottles are of interest to these auction houses which focus on real collectors and high-end bottlings.
Well, some of these auctions end with very high bids on a bottle.
Porter: That’s what I thought. I mean, look at the Local Barely which we are currently sharing in our whisky group. According to the notes that I’ve read on the base, every Springbank 12 must taste better. In the end, many people will be disappointed when they pour the Local Barley into their glasses and expect a whisky worth 700 Euro or whatever. For the ballot run by the Whisky Exchange, the price of the Local Barley was set at 86 Euro, and Master of Malt sold it for about ninety Euro. That is about the regular price for this bottle.
Why is everybody so eager to get a hold of this bottling?
Oh, it’s like everybody wanting to go to the concert of a famous artist. It’s a collective hysteria. I think that these crazy prices will come down again, they cannot possibly remain that high. This must be one of these short-lived hypes, and they are really overdoing it this year.
What can be done to inhibit flipping?
Hmm, you’d have to prohibit any kind of private sales and allow only stores to sell whisky. You’d need to control the trade.
Something else that you have mentioned before is that the traders are now flipping themselves which has negative repercussions on your business.
Yes, I mean look at the Springbank 12. This is a very fine whisky and, back in the day, you could buy it all over the place at reasonable prices. Now, you must chase it yourself and pay inflated prices of up to 200 Euro. As they now sell out quickly, people are willing to pay that much at retail, and that is how these high prices get fixed. For the traders, this means good business, and it seems to work just fine.
Yes, like this stupid unicorn which everybody was chasing the other day. [A 6-year-old Ben Nevis finished in a Sherry cask and bottled at 46% that had a unicorn on the label and was the most recent hype at the time of our interview.]
Yes, but the thing is: for how long can this possibly go on? Look at the current state of our economy and the inflation, it cannot continue like this. If it goes on like that, no one will be willing or able to pay 200 Euro for a bottle of whisky soon. I don’t have any debts to pay, and my rent is not that much, so I can sit this out. Everyone who has been into whisky for a while must have collected more bottles than they could ever drink during their lifetime by now so that they could also go on for years without buying new bottles. But if the traders continue like that, private flippers like me will not be left with much to sell on. What am I supposed to do? My business model was to buy bottles at a cheap rate and to resell them at medium price, but now you hardly find any cheap bottles out there, and when these are gone, it is low tide for me.
Do you make a living out of this?
This is part of my whisky hobby, and I would never do that for a living. I see this as a part of my hobby which I support by reselling some of my bottles. Previously, I resold a lot more, but this has come down also because there is less business left for me to do. The Laphroaig Cask Strengths now sell in every regular store and offer no big potential for flipping any more. In the long run, the market will sort itself out, and private flipping will further decline.
Let’s see to that.
I wouldn’t be sad about it. From time to time, I resell one of the guitars which I am playing, and I could see myself doing that as well. Another of these too expensive hobbies which I can support like that. That’s my motivation behind all that.
And that’s how it all came about.
Yes, it started with one of those bottles of which I had too many and which I did not want to possess any longer. So, I put it online, and I was surprised how fast and easy it was to sell it on. And off we go! After a while, I was even selling empty standard bottles, and, to my surprise, they were among those which sold fastest. I mean, what can you do with an empty bottle? These weren’t these expensive bottles that you could do any fraud with but regular Ardbeg bottles. Home decoration or what do I know. People just want to show off. Otherwise, I would have put them in the trash, but when it comes to whisky, it seems that you can sell whatever.
And one thing came to the other..
Yes, and one thing came to the other. If you have a look at the base, there are many other flippers on there like this guy [gives a username]. Compared to guys like him, I’m just a small fish. I don’t know how he does it. He always has the rarest bottles, is way more expensive than I am, and still makes more than 500 sales. There are always extremes, and guys like him have me upset as well. If you only look at the extremes, everything seems black and white, but there are many shades of grey in between. Not everyone selling bottles must be a flipper, and not every flipper must be a good person. It’s all relative, and there is lots of grey to it.
Final Thoughts
Amongst other things, whisky means business, and there are tons of money to be made. On the other hand, whisky means passion and enjoyment, and there is a lot of romanticism or even idealism to it on the drinkers’ side. I assume that most of us drink our whiskies to unwind and enjoy and not to be bothered with some unpleasant issues – as if we hadn't had to deal with enough of those already. Hence, these different sides of all things whisky do not fare well with each other, and while everybody seems to know that, only few would openly acknowledge it to be the case. A lot of unresolved tensions seem to result from that. The industry is aware and avoids talking prices like the plague. Instead, you get a lot of romanticism from their advertisements, feel-good moments from their events, and a fine playing on emotions from their end. We as drinkers know this to be the case as well but tend to discuss prices and enjoyment separately from one another. How could we possibly talk both together at the same time? Something along the lines of ‘this subtle touch of overripe Sicilian blood oranges in the aftertaste is certainly worth a 30 quid’?
I don’t condone flipping. I dislike this practice and its consequences as much as you do. Whisky is already quite expensive as is, and flipping is a nuisance to us all. Traders lose their valued customers, collectors miss out on single releases, hundreds of bottles become objects of mere speculation, the market has turned mad, and we as drinkers are not left with much to enjoy (at least when it comes to the hyped-up and sought-after releases). So, who is to blame for all that? Scapegoating seems to be as old as mankind, as it certainly helps to release some tensions to clean houses and send someone out into the desert every once in a while. So, we readily put the blame on those who put money first and keep the good stuff away from us: cask investors, greedy retailers, and flippers. Meanwhile, these people also feel uncomfortably close to us. After all, they’re also into whisky and part of our community. So, it becomes even more urgent to draw a sharp line between us and them so that we can oust them from our flock. The result is the figure of ‘the flipper’, this strange guy whom no one seems to have met but whom everyone seems ready to put them blame on. It’s all fine in black and white, and it’s reassuring to know on which side of the line we find ourselves.
Meanwhile, I don’t know of many fellow whisky enthusiasts who are not holding back on some bottles from their collection whilst having an eye on the secondary market. Talking to Porter was eye-opening for me. Not so much because I learned new things about flipping whisky but because I got to know a kind and fellow human being. We had a nice and friendly chat, and I found myself talking to a fellow whisky aficionado who is doing some illicit business on the side to support his whisky hobby. Otherwise, he would not be able to afford his whiskies, but he is also more than ready to turn a blind eye to the fact that his side-business is part of the present problem with quickly rising prices and to deflect the blame on his buyers. Thanks to our conversation, I also learned that lines are not always as clear and sharp as I would like to have them. Porter is an active member of our forum where he offers his bottles at fair prices for resale or bottle splits, and he also shares his rare finds with others. Porter is actively flipping whisky, but he is doing many other things as well, and it is not that easy for me to put the blame solely on him after I’ve gotten to know him and his motivations better. Maybe things are more complicated, and maybe there are more shades and grey to it than I had previously imagined or would have liked to admit. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Postscript: Measures against Flipping
Over the last weeks, I’ve gathered the following list of countermeasures against flipping whisky. The measures suggested might seem a bit silly and helpless, but they do have an effect, and they show that people care. Please add whatever you deem missing in the comments below!
In my experience, decapsulating and drinking work best. The next best thing we can do to put an end to flipping is to keep away from it.
Possible countermeasures against flipping:
share and enjoy the whisky,
allot bottles to patrons who open and enjoy them,
break the seal or decapsulate the bottle,
install ballot systems like the one run by the Thompson Brothers,
launch two editions of the same whisky – one labelled as ‘special’ or ‘rare’ for the investors, the other one for the regular drinkers (as done by Lindores with their first release),
overcharge at retail,
put a ban on auctioneering certain bottles (as recently done by Springbank for their Ukraine charity bottling),
register the bottle under the buyer’s name,
tear off the label or significantly alter it in some other way,
write the buyer’s name on the bottle or personalise it in some other way.
Always remember: When you’ve missed out on a certain bottling, just keep calm and relax. Your local pub might have the whisky on offer so that you can still enjoy a pour of it in good company. Meanwhile, the next great bottling is just around the corner, and you might have saved some money on this occasion to spend it on the next one.
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