Every weekday morning, between the hours of 9 and 11 a.m. ET, Rob Bralow sits down at the computer at his home in suburban Connecticut. He logs into a system called Proof, which is the online ordering system for Southern Glazer’s, the largest wine and spirits distributor in the United States. And, for those two hours, every 15 minutes, they offer a new allocated bottle to retailers and liquor store owners.
In many cases, like for a King of Kentucky 17 Year released at exactly 10:15 a.m. on a recent Tuesday in April, there is only a single coveted bottle available. Whoever is fastest to click the button the exact millisecond the bottle becomes available, gets it.
“It is not a secret when those things are sent out,” says Bralow, a former bar owner and the current owner and general manager at Blue Streak Wines & Spirits in Long Island City, N.Y. Southern Glazer’s posts the list every Thursday night at midnight for the following week’s releases.
“I kid you not,” says Bralow, “I am pushing the button every 15 minutes.”
He has a certain method he uses, but he says there are no tricks to it. Bralow claims he is just better at quickly clicking the button at the exact right time than any one else, better than some young intern he might hire to do the job so he doesn’t have to devote 10 hours a week to pushing a button like some lab rat whose only reward is a bottle of Weller Full Proof.
“No joke, and it’s silly, but right now I do this better than almost anyone else in New York,” says Bralow, who indeed got that sole bottle of King of Kentucky for his store. “I am at this point decently known among the sales reps as that guy who can somehow get any bottle.”
Allocations Arise
Southern Glazer’s may operate in 47 states but they aren’t the only distributor in the country nor is New York the only state that offers allocated bottles.
There are 50 different states, including 17 government control states, all with somewhat different methods for allocating spirits courtesy of numerous distributors working with countless distillers releasing who knows how many LTOs (limited time offerings) into the retail and bar world every single week.
And things are always changing, but one thing rarely does:
No one likes how allocations are handled unless they are somehow getting all the allocations.
The concept of allocated spirits didn’t really even exist until, say, 15 years ago. One of the first uses of the term found online is from a 2011 Grantland article about the still-emerging Pappy mania.
“I get my allocation in the very beginning of November,” one liquor store owner explained when journalist Wright Thompson inquired about purchasing a bottle. (How liquor stores sell allocated bottles to their customers in 2026 could fill another story. Bralow, for instance, uses an email list of 700 top customers to offer his allocations at close to MSRP.)
When the Van Winkles were first becoming allocated, all allocations were controlled by a sales rep. If the rep had 15 bottles of something special for the New York market, he or she got to decide where each and everyone of them went. So, back then, it paid to have a strong relationship with your sales rep.
(Although, that isn’t to say dirty deals weren’t also going on, several of which I was told about while conducting interviews, all off the record from retailers and bar owners not willing to speak publicly about such a dicey issue.)
Things have quickly changed.
“In the New York market, each distribution company has a different agreement with their suppliers as to how allocations get done,” says Bralow. “And it changes pretty regularly so that the game always changes and it always forces people to have to spend more money in order to get their allocation.”
Straight-Up Dollars
There are several ways distributors dole out allocations today.
The first is straight-up dollar numbers, i.e., the amount of money one spends on a spirits company or distributor’s “whole book.”
Back in 2021 when I did a deep dive on Buffalo Trace’s Wheatley Vodka, including looking into the commonly held belief that one needs to buy a ton of this so-called lesser product in order to get the company’s more coveted whiskey allocations, I was constantly told, “It does not work that way.”
One retail store owner in California, who wished to remain anonymous, even told me that people in the industry would laugh at me if I really were to claim that buying a ton of Wheatley Vodka was the one thing that guaranteed you would get Buffalo Trace’s allocated whiskeys. (“If that was the case, why wouldn’t every store have Wheatley stacked to the ceiling?” he asked me.)
In a Facebook comments thread about my article from back in 2021, Sean Graves, a former brand ambassador for Sazerac in New York, wrote, “I can attest that there is no correlation between buying Wheatley Vodka and having a better shot at the allocated products.” But a lot of other commenters doubted him, many based on their own experiences.
“In the New York market, each distribution company has a different agreement with their suppliers as to how allocations get done. And it changes pretty regularly so that the game always changes and it always forces people to have to spend more money in order to get their allocation.”
Five years later, suddenly everyone I talk to seems to mostly agree that this actually is the best way to get allocated bottles in most states and the doubters were 100 percent right.
“You know, to them [the spirits companies] it doesn’t matter any more. We’re talking about businesses,” says Bralow. “And in the short term, which is how these businesses are starting to be run more and more, it’s less about creating relationships and it’s more about the bottom dollar number.” In other words, leveraging their LTOs to get the most sales of their other products.
But even this system is constantly changing.
Prior to 2023, when Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC) was Sazerac’s distributor in pretty much every state, all that mattered was how much a retailer spent on its entire American whiskey portfolio. Similarly, in New York, where Sazerac’s distributor was Empire Merchants, its portfolio included not just Sazerac but lines like Jack Daniel’s, Woodford Reserve, and Old Forester.
The amount of money you spent, in turn, put stores into different ranked quadrants of which you were automatically prescribed a certain number of allocated bottles. Back then, Blue Streak ranked in the top 10 most Empire sales in all of metro New York City — and Bralow in turn got all that he desired.
“I played the game and the game got me lots of allocations,” he says. “I was on every list. I was one of the first people they called for new products because I would buy it. I would buy a case of whatever it was to hit the number of SKUs needed to stay in that top vicinity.”
(All distributors I reached out to declined to comment for this story.)
Shelf Turds for an Allocation
It’s rumored, though, that Sazerac was unhappy RNDC was using it in order to sell non-Sazerac products. “One of the stories I heard was that Saz was pissed about their bottles were being ransomed to sell non-Saz RNDC turds (sic),” claims one Redditor. While another tells of a liquor store owner buying “cases upon cases of shelf turds” to get three bottles of George T. Stagg. “You could tell it pissed him off.”
But since that high-profile split in 2023, and now that Sazerac has contracted with other distributors, most have made it strictly about buying just Sazerac products. Under this new system, Blue Streak isn’t near the top of Sazerac’s mystical list and Bralow claims the company doesn’t really maintain a relationship with him whatsoever any more.
Instead, stores of little repute that simply sell truckloads of cheap flasks of lower-end Sazerac products like Georgi and Svedka Vodka, Benchmark Bourbon, and maybe even Fireball are being offered the full line of Van Winkles, the full line of Buffalo Trace Antique Collection (BTAC), and even more rare Sazerac releases like Mister Sam Tribute Whiskey, a high-end blend of American and Canadian whiskeys that is well regarded and rarely seen.
“That gives them the competitive edge over fine wine and liquor stores who are really more discerning and don’t have the clientele that are looking for those kinds of sub-premium basic products,” says Bralow.
Often, these tiny stores that win allocations ultimately don’t even take them, because they know they don’t have the customer base for them. When that occurs, the products get redistributed back to the general pool for anyone to buy; that’s true even for highly coveted stuff like BTAC 2025, which was getting redistributed in New York as recently as this April.
Of course, when these lower-end stores do take their higher-end allocations, they often don’t exactly know how to price them and, thus, jack things up to a level higher than even secondary pricing, often leaving them to gather dust on the shelf. Any New Yorker can surely recall walking into some hole-in-the-wall and seeing a bottle of, say, George T. Stagg behind the register at an ungodly price. Now you know how it got there. There’s a store a block from me that has had a Fortaleza Winter’s Blend 2023 (MSRP $199) sitting there, priced at an absurd $1,500, since it was first released.
(For what it’s worth, the distilleries don’t seem to care if liquor stores sell their products way above MSRP — if anything they revel in it as a sort of advertising ploy. They only truly care when stores try to sell their stuff at below MSRP as was the case for the recent Old Overholt Cask Strength 11 Year, which struggled to move at $100 and has found some liquor store owners now putting it on clearance.)
But, eventually, these Georgi-moving retailers probably just end up selling their allocated bottles to friends or the better bars and liquor stores that truly have the clientele demanding these sorts of things.
“In the long run, these stores are not going to keep buying these LTOs, which is, in theory, like the whole purpose of how things are currently set up,” says Bralow.
The 10 Percenters
But don’t worry if you’re a store owner with no interest in buying case after case of crap, because there’s a second way to get allocations.
In some states, 10 percent of all products sold, if they’re allocated, must legally be set aside for new business. So, if there are 100 bottles of Old Rip Van Winkle 10 Year coming into New York, 10 of them have to be set aside for new business, which is done on a first-come, first-served basis, like through Southern Glazer’s button-pushing system.
Of course, there are lots of things that are technically allocated that may surprise you. Stuff that isn’t particularly rare, limited, or even that coveted, like Bulleit Bottled in Bond, Eagle Rare, and the standard Buffalo Trace bourbon.
“You know, to them [the spirits companies] it doesn’t matter any more. We’re talking about businesses. And in the short term, which is how these businesses are starting to be run more and more, it’s less about creating relationships and it’s more about the bottom dollar number.”
“Why is that on an allocation? And why is even that allocation difficult to get?” says Bralow, who was able to get two cases of the flagship Buffalo Trace last time it was offered, though it has yet to even sell out in his store. “But because of the number of avenues in New York where it could go, you have to put it on allocation so that [a behemoth liquor store like] Astor doesn’t buy all 100 cases.”
This strategy doesn’t always work for certain brands, however, and some companies have to walk it back and take certain things off allocation, like Heaven Hill once did with its Elijah Craig Barrel Proofs, which are released three times per year. Retailers told me these were on allocation for years, a one- or two-case max per store sort of thing, but after too many releases sat unsold, they had no choice but to allow stores to buy as many cases as they wished. That is until Heaven Hill had another coveted Barrel Proof release that retailers clamored for: barrel C923, a 13-year-old which came out in September 2023, and which again became restricted to one or two cases per account, based on how much Heaven Hill product they had purchased in the past.
(A rep for Heaven Hill disputed that, claiming: “ECBP [Elijah Craig Barrel Proof] has never been on allocation and is not currently on allocation.” But you can look up most control states’ full allocated lists and find “ECBP” on them at this very moment. Here are Alabama’s and North Carolina’s full lists — both with ECBP on them, for example.)
As I said, things are always changing and different companies are always trying to maximize their sales and where their allocated products go, though companies seem to always be looking toward Sazerac for the playbook.
“The Sazerac line is its own beast and it sets the tone for what everyone else does because they’re in such high demand,” explains Bralow. “But Heaven Hill has their own way of doing things, and so does Brown-Forman, and so does everyone else.”
Right Bottles in Right Hands
When we speak of allocated products, we are, of course, mostly talking about American whiskey.
Some Scotch is allocated today, notably Springbank and Campbeltown Loch, as is some Japanese whisky like Chichibu (though, surprisingly, mostly not Yamazaki, which seems to have finally reached a point of being overpriced and now readily available), a little tequila like Fortaleza, and even stuff like Crown Royal Peach, the Empirical Doritos spirit, and Fireball Dragon Reserve, the barrel-aged version of the cinnamon whisky. There are allocated wines, a few high-end gins, and VAP (“value-added packaging”) products like, for instance, rosés that come with a set of wine glasses.
Conversely, just because something is limited in supply doesn’t mean it is allocated, as was the case for the recent Barrel Aged Malört. Similarly, smaller distributors are more able to keep limited releases non-allocated than a big dog like Southern Glazer’s. But even that system can get exploited, like when Charleston-based craft distiller High Wire released a Jimmy Red 7 Year Old, a buzzy wheated version of its standard bourbon made with Julian Van Winkle using the classic Stitzel-Weller mash bill. Because it wasn’t allocated, a few accounts in the city were able to sweep in and grab all the bottles.
“I played the game and the game got me lots of allocations. I was on every list. I was one of the first people they called for new products because I would buy it. I would buy a case of whatever it was to hit the number of SKUs needed to stay in that top vicinity.”
As for bottles so incredibly limited and so wildly priced, like say the 315-bottle $6,000 Michter’s Celebration, most retailers I spoke to actually had no clue how something like that makes it into the marketplace, though most were also certain these sorts of bottles aren’t necessarily going to the “correct” people. But maybe that’s just sour grapes because they believe they are the “correct” people and they never get it.
“I think that all of these producers would do better if there were some other way of making sure bottles landed in the hands of the right people,” says Bralow, specifically citing On the Rocks and Travel Bar, two acclaimed New York whiskey bars that are too small to be volume buyers of companies’ flagship products and, thus, are often shut out on allocations their customers would love.
“Because you sure as hell want your product on their shelves,” says Bralow.
Traveling for Allocations
“I have to work so hard to get these bottles, it’s crazy,” says Mike Vacheresse, longtime owner of Travel Bar in Brooklyn.
According to Vacheresse, there is supposed to be a 30-70 channel split, as they call it, between bars and retailers in terms of having access to allocated products. But he sees no evidence that is actually true.
He orders bottles through what is known as a “combo” or “full book” from Empire and Southern Glazer’s via a sales rep. In some ways, that is good for him, as he doesn’t have countless sales reps for individual brands calling him all the time. But, mostly, it’s bad because there are so many products in these portfolios that Vacheresse often knows about them before the sales reps, whose only job is to sell him as much product as they can.
Perhaps that’s why Travel Bar focuses on smaller, more interesting whiskeys from tinier distributors like PM Spirits (Dark Arts, Amrut, Blackadder), Skurnik (Pinhook, Fort Hamilton, Proof and Wood), and Small Victories (Reveries, Seelbach’s) that offer more hands-on selling to him.
Of course, Vacheresse would love to stock a Pappy Van Winkle 23 Year Old, but he has never once even been offered one in over a decade of business. A few years back, after buying four entire single barrels of various Sazerac whiskeys, he had moved up to No. 38 for Empire in the entire metro area. (Some estimates put it that there are around 25,000 bars in the city.) Still, he got no more allocations than he typically does, which admittedly still often lands him one or two BTAC bottles per year and an occasional Van Winkle 10, 12, or 15 Year.
The thing that irks him even more than that, however, is that the system isn’t set up for him to even know who did get that bottle of 23 Year Old, or how many total bottles were available in the state, or what he can even do to improve his allocation standing.
“It’s all a mystery,” says Vacheresse. “That’s the biggest thing I want you to get out of this whole f*cking thing is that it’s all a mystery. There is no system. This is how you do it, A to B. With allocated bottles, I think what most bars and liquor stores simply want is transparency.”
Allocating for Change
Things are changing a bit in New York, at least. In March, the law was changed so that stores and bars can buy up to six bottles a month from another store or bar.
So far, Vacheresse has mostly used that law to supplement an important cocktail modifier he’s run out of — say, Campari — while in the midst of service. But he could just as easily start using it to acquire those high-end allocated bottles that might excite customers a whole lot more at Travel Bar than some random liquor store in Park Slope.
Until then, like Bralow, he’ll keep clicking the button every day between 9 and 11, trying to land an allocated bottle here and there.
He’ll continue doing what he can do to survive in a system that has been set up to benefit the liquor companies and not the bars and liquor stores. He gets it.
“These distributors are publicly traded companies,” says Vacheresse. “They’re massive. And whose interests are they looking out for? It’s certainly not a tiny whiskey bar in Brooklyn that doesn’t show up on their sheets.”
Mostly, he’ll try to be happy about what he does sell as opposed to what he doesn’t. He’ll keep providing unique, interesting whiskey and other spirits for his committed clientele, many of whom, like me, have long moved past desiring the same tater allocated bottles anyhow.
The same goes for Bralow, who understands that complaints are futile.
“I hate all of it,” he says. “I hate it so much. It’s just so silly because there’s no…”
He trails off before finally completing his sentence.
“…better system.”
