Would you buy this for 50 bucks? Could you? Would you give a f#$K? Ah, nothing like a little Dr. Seuss with your whisky, right? But it's a good question, is it not? Eagle Rare is $30 a bottle SRP. People seem to be crazy about it. In our Fine Wine & Good Spirits stores, whenever stock shows up, say 10 bottles, it's gone within 2-3 hours. Why? Is it really that good? My theory is that there are two factors at work here. Possibly three. The first factor is that Eagle Rare sits at the perfect juncture of quality and pricing. Yes, this is good bourbon. It's got a 10 year age statement (which to my mind was going to be the third factor, but I guess since I'm mentioning it now, let's make it the second). But the marketing ploy (if we can call it a marketing ploy) of making it bear out its name in being relatively rare is the coup. After all, if you think about it, Knob just added the 9 Year age statement back to its bourbon, and Knob 9 is $35, which is only a $5 hike over this, and if you're asking me, there's no discernible drop in quality between this and Knob, but people just don't seem quite as crazy about the Knob. Could it be that it's making itself too available? When I first got a bottle of Eagle Rare, it was fall 2019. I managed to nab one in a hole in the wall Wine & Spirits in Philly, a store that had the last 6 bottles in all of Pennsylvania. It was in the back, in a box. "How many do you want?" I had never even considered buying more than one bottle and hording it. "Just the one." But I didn't open it until the following summer, and I thought it was quite good at the time. I went through it in about two weeks. And then it was out of print. Gone. It popped up as an online only sale. Sold out in a few hours. Gone again. Then it popped up in a store 4 miles from me, and I jumped into my car and drove like a madman to get it again. This time, it wasn't on the shelves either. I looked, frantic. Then, one of the clerks was coming out with two bottles in hand. I knew from the site, they had 4 in stock. "Are those for anyone?" I asked. "Yeah, I'm bringing them out for someone who called ahead. But we have two more in back. You can only buy 2. There's a limit. You want these?" "Yeah." Then a few weeks later, I got to the theater early when seeing Dune with a friend, and there was a FW&GS in the shopping center. I popped in, and lo and behold, more Eagle Rare. I still hadn't opened either of the other two, but I bought two more. And this past weekend, I opened it, expecting the same experience I had last summer, a solid bourbon I could go through in two weeks, something really tasty. And all I could think....? This is the bourbon I drove like a maniac to get? I mean, that's hyperbole. I was going the speed limit and obeying traffic signals. I was really only a maniac in my mind because I was scared they were going to sell out. I wanted this! I needed it! But did I? If it was a fifty dollar whisky, would I have felt the need for it? If it were forty? No, part of the appeal here is that this is top of the line at the price point of $30. If they charged any more, I think you'd see interest fall off. And frankly, after this experience, I can't help thinking that I'm probably going to stick with the Knob 9 as my go-to in this price range. Which is not to say, this isn't good. It's sweet, but not too corny, which is always the danger with bourbons. In fact, if you were to blind this and hand it to me and tell me it was a bourbon finished in wine casks, I wouldn't doubt you. To that end, it reminds me a bit of Legent, which was also good and is in this price range, but didn't particularly wow me. The nose is nice but not particularly spectacular. There's berries, a bit of chocolate, something that, after a week of being open smells earthy: if it's oak its not prominent, and might even be likened to water-soaked wood that hasn't started to rot yet, the plank of the deck of a ship you find washed up on the side of a river. The palate again isn't cloying, but soft. For as much as I made fun of the idea of mouthfeel being a selling point in my tasting of Maker's FAE 02, Eagle Rare has a nice soft mouthfeel and the flavor is again of chocolate and berries, maybe a bit of baking spice, with a finished that fades fairly quickly. I've read a few reviews of this that mention it's easy to find, but I guess that all depends on where you live. The community rating, as I write this, has this up around 4.03, which strikes me as high for what this is, unless, of course, you are taking cost into account. But then, if you're taking cost into account, there are a number of equally good $30 bourbons out there, that aren't getting this much love. I guess in the final analysis, I'd say, buy it if it's in the store in front of you as it was when I wandered in before the movie. Don't hop in your car and drive with your hands clenched on the wheel to try to get the last bottle at your local store. And as the great hip-hop jester Flavor Flav once said, don't-don't-don't don't-don't-don't believe the hype. Because I'm pretty sure hype is what fuels the manic quest for this bottle; at least on the east coast, in regions where it is, indeed, rare.