Editors’ Picks
Brewers hate to talk about secondary market prices for the beer they make, and for good reason—there's a strong cultural bias in the beer world against the outlandish retail prices found in other collectable beverage categories such as whiskey or wine. Sure, some brewers release publicity stunt beers from time to time with high price tags, but these beers at best are harmless distractions and at worst are cynical marketing ploys that are easily sniffed out by a critical public. Still, an undeniable gap exists between what beer fans will allow brewers to charge, and the prices that these same beers can fetch on private secondary beer trading and selling markets. While brands like Samuel Adams have pushed the price of their biennial Utopias up to $200 retail per bottle, other breweries like Toppling Goliath face harsh criticism for setting a $100 retail price for a 12 ounce bottle (despite that same bottle selling on the secondary market for as much as $900).
One thing often overlooked in the discussion, however, is the gross difference between relationships of pricing and rarity in the wine world versus the same in the beer world. While beer traders argue about prices and bottle counts, professional wine brokers buy fine wines at advance prices and engage in a complex arbitrage of sorts to produce financial gains for savvy investors, as the wine world offers no such cultural bias against concepts of investment and profit. So where is that top of the wine market, and how rare are those wines? We looked at 2017 en primeur pricing of Bordeaux wines, along with production numbers, to illustrate just how different the worlds are.