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hardcore_gamer

Is super expensive alchol worth it?

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I like whiskey and was browsing though the website of átvr (my nation's state-run liquor store). Out of curiosity, I decided to filter the whiskey by price to see what the most expensive one costs. It was a 25 year old Bunnahabhain at roughly 48.500kr, or 381 dollar (though about 40 bucks of that price is probably taxes). I am pretty sure it's this one: https://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/P-15253.aspx

I know high end whiskey is better than the very cheap ones, but are these highly expensive whiskeys (or alcohol in general) THAT much better? I mean don't get me wrong I am sure it's way better than the cheap or medium quality stuff, but is it hundreds of dollars more better?

Can anyone who has tasted high-end alcohol tell from experience if it's worth it?

EDIT: This isn't intended as a mock post against expensive alcohol by the way. Far from it. I am just interested in knowing out of curiosity.

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Ex-girlfriend's brother owned a high end restaurant. When he bought it, we were celebrating and I got a shot of Louis XIII ($2,000 a bottle). It tasted just as bad as any other booze I've ever had. $5 Vodka mixed with Kool-Aid would have tasted better. It's a status thing.

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hardcore_gamer should receive a medal for the highest amount of seemingly endless thread ideas.

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nope. Buy the cheapest beer with the greatest alcohol per ml, best wine alcohol per ml, best liquor alcohol per ml. No one cares about brand names unless they listen to advertising which is essentially bullshit when you get right down into the dirty details.

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Cheap beer really does taste like piss water tho

...and as far as whiskey goes, $30 per bottle will get you the really tasty stuff. Anything more and you're tossing your money out the window.

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Whiskey, no, you can get a high quality whiskey for as little as $50, if you're spending more than that you're just wasting money. Scotch or wine on the other hand is more likely to be better the more expensive it gets.

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I like whisky. I like Bunnahabhain. I wouldn't pay that kind of money for a bottle. I'd get a younger one.

FWiW, Bunnahabhain is a whisky, not a whiskey. The difference? E is usually for Irish whereas no E is for Scottish.

And, for those wondering...



However, I would dispute that pronunciation a little. The "b" sound near the end should have a more "v"-like sound to it. Boon-a-hah-vin.

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Ed said:

Ex-girlfriend's brother owned a high end restaurant. When he bought it, we were celebrating and I got a shot of Louis XIII ($2,000 a bottle). It tasted just as bad as any other booze I've ever had. $5 Vodka mixed with Kool-Aid would have tasted better. It's a status thing.


This. I don't drink, but I collect wine. I know nothing about it. At first people gave me wine as house warming gifts. Well I never drank it. People thought I collect wine, so they'd keep bringing me wine as gifts. I now have 200. Never bought any of it myself.

Eventually I started bringing it to other houses as gifts. Expensive and old wine. The oldest bottles were 200 years given to me by an ex's parents. Since I'm a collector. We popped it open and they had it... awful.

Then there was the guy that spent a million dollars on a bottle of wine only to discover 6 years later it was a fake.

I remember someone telling me no one collects wine to drink them. They collect wine because they're fragile like Vases, but easy to keep.

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hardcore_gamer said:

is it hundreds of dollars more better?

Short answer - NO.

Long answer - NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Unless you're a connoisseur, you might have difficulty picking the difference between an expensive limited bottling (like this one) and a decent but much cheaper mass-market brand.

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That's the thing about alcohol - cheap or not, drink enough of it and eventually you WILL get fucked up. At least that's been my experience with the stuff.

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TheCupboard said:

nope. Buy the cheapest beer with the greatest alcohol per ml, best wine alcohol per ml, best liquor alcohol per ml. No one cares about brand names unless they listen to advertising which is essentially bullshit when you get right down into the dirty details.


Some of us don't drink just to wake up in a funny place with no memory of how we got there. Why would I keep buying something that tastes like poison?

Once in a while I try a really cheap beer. Very rarely are those ever worth it. I'm picky about beers, though. The funny thing about beers is most of the heavily-advertised ones are crap. Guinness is the only beer I see in ads that I really like. All the other varieties that I prefer don't seem to have much marketing behind them.

My brother is into expensive scotch. It's nice, but not nice enough that I'd buy it very often. Those kinds of tings make great gifts for the sort of people who don't need anything.

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My strategy has always been the lower the alchohol concentration, the more I'll pay for it. Good beer tastes infinitely better than crappy beer. Good wine tastes somewhat better than crappy wine. By the time you get to hard liquor, well, chances are I'm gonna mix it anyway, and after a couple of drinks, I won't really care how it tastes anyway. Although if it's whiskey and you're drinking it straight, probably better to spend a little more to get higher quality. Not like, hundreds of dollars, but you know, it's definitely something where the difference in taste is very noticeable depending on the quality.

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All these plebs. Fine alcohol is an art. Lots of people don't just go out of there way to find exotic teas and coffees just for the caffeine induced buzz. Alcohol is civilization in a bottle. Each unique to people's and their traditions.

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I think alcohol does gets better with price, at least to an extent. For example, take this:



Plastic bottle, costs about US$1.00, and it shows. People tend to mix it with very sweet flavored water ("aguas locas") to soften the flavor. Drinking it straight will probably lead to vomit. And don't get fooled by that background image or the name, it's not mezcal, it's cane liquor.

I think that quality=price is true up to a certain point. It's very easy to tell the difference between that garbage I linked above and a regular vodka, but after that quality tends to be good/very good.

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I reckon the sweet spot for great whiskeys would range between $40-80 in Australia, any more than that is probably excessive if you want to be financially pragmatic . Jameson's is around 40 here and I find it to be one of the best whiskeys to drink. I find Tullamore Dew and Teeling to be really nice too, and they're under $50. Any spirits under $40 is likely to be shite.

I did however try some really expensive liquor before and they were mindblowing. I had a mouthful of Penfolds Grange (1991 I think), best wine I've tasted; they're typically 500-1000 bucks a bottle though and won't even plan on buying one. I also had the privilege of trying a 50 year old Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey aged in a ceramic bottle, and it was just so good and so smooth. Even with an empty glass, the smell would just linger and linger; I basically sniffed the glass all night heh.

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Some of us don't drink just to wake up in a funny place with no memory of how we got there. Why would I keep buying something that tastes like poison?

You are ingesting poison. Jesus, why would you want to encourage yourself any further? Ingesting alcohol should rarely ever be a pleasurable experience. It is a habit-forming body-destroying mind-warping piece of garbage. At least find some other drug to consume which is worth your money, your time, and your health.

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like anything else: depends on your palette and how "into" it you are (i.e. where you are on the [utilitarian] <---> [pretentious craft snob] scale). To answer the OP: in my experience $$ is roughly proportional to quality up to a point (which varies by type of alcohol). ofc there are outliers, good stuff that's cheap and expensive stuff that's shit.

- beer: you can get great stuff for nearly same price as BMC piss-water. you can get amazing stuff for slightly more. the "high" end stuff (e.g. $20US+ per 22oz) tends to be gimmicky and not worth it (e.g. 16% abv triple IPA!!, quadruple bourbon barrel aged coffee habanero wild ale!!)

- vodka: cheap shit is horrid. great stuff is like $30 a handle. I'm seemingly unable to discern much beyond that.

- whisky (bourbon, american, irish, canadian): I've found these tend to top out around $30-40, above that the cost tends to outweigh any perceived improvements. Though I recall being particularly impressed with a rather pricey bottle.

- whisky (scotch): higher-tier stuff here is worth it imo. mid-tiers and blends are ok.. e.g. JWblack, dewars, (~$20-30) etc. but spend a little more and you can get some amazing bottles from ardbeg, laphroaig, lagavulin for $60-80. The way scotches work when it comes to pricing is usually related to its age. i.e. that full retard $3000 bottle is going to be a 30-year old macallan or something. the weird irony is that as scotch ages it gets a lot more mellow, so it almost feels like you're getting less for your money. yeah it might be "smoother" or whatever, but arguably at a loss of complexity/intensity. honorable mention for surprisingly good & cheap: black bottle

- wine: damn, I don't drink wine, I'm uncultured swine!

that's about all I drink straight, anything that gets mixed I could give a damn about getting the ritzy stuff. Sometimes it's really hard to disassociate whether you actually like something, or you convince yourself you like something because you went into it knowing it's supposedly really good or expensive or rare or whatever -.-. I try to do comparisons and shit via blind tastings, hard to shake the snob vibe at that point. tl;dr: spend decent money (particularly on scotch), don't ever go full retard.

brb getting a drink...

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I had 25 year old whiskey a few days ago. It wasn't my thing. Then again, I don't like whiskey anyway.

I don't have very particular tastes when it comes to alcohol.

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TheCupboard said:

You are ingesting poison. Jesus, why would you want to encourage yourself any further? Ingesting alcohol should rarely ever be a pleasurable experience. It is a habit-forming body-destroying mind-warping piece of garbage. At least find some other drug to consume which is worth your money, your time, and your health.


Hahahaha! You sound bitter! Is that your alcohol problem you're ranting about or somebody else's? If you think it's so awful why are you telling people to buy the sort of liquor that's only used for binge drinking?

Innis & Gunn makes some tasty beers.

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There's a big difference going from a cheap $10 bottle of whisky and eg. a 15 year matured bottle of single malt. But my experience has been that going from that 15 year single malt to a 35 year bottle was a similar step up. Big noticeable difference.

I only tried that 35 year whisky once and fortunately I wasn't paying - I don't know what the price was but I dread to imagine. So although it was nice I can't answer whether it was worth the price. At the very least it's probably sensible to work your way up from less expensive whiskies first - try a bunch of different moderately-expensive ones ($50-100) first and decide if you actually like the stuff before you drop some ridiculous amount of money on a bottle.

TheCupboard said:

nope. Buy the cheapest beer with the greatest alcohol per ml, best wine alcohol per ml, best liquor alcohol per ml.

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RUSH said:

hardcore_gamer should receive a medal for the highest amount of seemingly endless thread ideas.


Up next, the DoomWorldForumwards...

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Cheaper alcohol CAN be decent but it really depends on what kind.

Beer?
I think the best beer I've had was a $10 pint of Rogue Breweries Double-Chocolate Stout. Beer can definitely get better the more expensive it is, but it really depends on what kind of beer you like. I consider myself a beer snob, but there's some cheap beers that are just fine too.

Wine?
The year has more to do with how good the weather was than how old it is. Good weather = better grapes = better wine. Depends on the region it was grown/bottled because of that. But generally you can get pretty decent wine for around $10 (even boxed wine can be pretty decent, don't let the snobs fool you) and unless it's a status thing it's really not worth getting a super expensive bottle.

I really couldn't vouch for any other kind of alcohol. Ultimately it comes down to personal tastes. If you don't care too much for hard alcohols, a $15 bottle probably won't taste much different from a $1500 bottle.

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TheCupboard said:

You are ingesting poison. Jesus, why would you want to encourage yourself any further? Ingesting alcohol should rarely ever be a pleasurable experience. It is a habit-forming body-destroying mind-warping piece of garbage. At least find some other drug to consume which is worth your money, your time, and your health.

You're the dude that has pummeled his brain with all kinds of mind altering chemicals and you have the gull to go on a rant against alcohol.

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The super-expensive historic stuff is all about status. It gets outright absurd with shipwreck wines. Even if a 200 years old bottle of bubbly was marginally better than all the regular ones in the world, and I think the opposite is more probable, throwing away 100k euros for one is just a way to make yourself feel special among your similarly bored high society snobs.

I am, however, willing to splash money on something pricier than average. It usually does taste a bit better and hey, it also keeps me from binging on it, heh.

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RUSH said:

hardcore_gamer should receive a medal for the highest amount of seemingly endless thread ideas.


It would be better than my current custom title...

Anyway I took a trip to my local alcohol store to try out a bourbon. To bad that they only had 2 kinds at their exact store. There was Jack Daniels which I heard isn't that great (would not mind tasting it though just out of curiosity), and this thing http://www.manydrinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/jim_beam_bourbon_70cl.jpg which I was told is ok. I haven't tasted it yet (will probably within the next 30-40 min though), so I hope it's good. I haven't had a bourbon before (so far I have only tasted blends as far as I know) so this will be a new experience for me. I intend to try out a single malt at some point, but they cost so much compared with most others that I think I will spend more time with my current whiskey before I start getting into anything too fancy.

EDIT: Ops, Jack Daniels isn't a bourbon. Sorry about that. I guess that means they had only one! That's pretty lame since their store actually has a pretty ok selection of other whiskey.

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In my experience, no. Unless you're some sort of self-important ponce with an irrational fear of being seen with a drink which doesn't cost a small fortune, then you're probably like me and drink because it's a way to relax -- alone or socially -- and after a while it gets you pissed as a decent bonus. You don't need to remortgage your house to find a good quality beer/wine/whiskey etc.

There's obviously a difference in quality between some dirt-cheap chemical piss masquerading as a drink and a reasonably-priced bottle of whatever, but the further up the price goes it all just starts becoming a demented joke.

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Specifically on whisky, Ardbeg/Laphroaig ($70-$80) is better than Glenlivet/Glenfiddich/Glen Moray ($40-$50) which is much better than Johnnie Walker/ Chivas Regal ($30). Age doesn't seem to make a difference on the above brands (except Glen Moray) other than on your bank balance. And the hangovers are better too ;)

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Fuck that Jim Beam. It tasted like nothing and burns pretty badly. It's not very smooth to swallow either. I can't believe that this is literally the only bourbon my local store sells (well technically that's a lie, other stores sell other kinds, just not my local one). Even worse is the fact that this fucker actually costed me like 50 bucks (though a lot of this is taxes, but even factoring that in I could buy a better whiskey for this money). When I first tasted it I thought I must have added too much water into it my mistake or something, but nope. Even when drank completely straight it doesn't really taste of anything.

Oh well, at least it will get me buzzed +_+

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