Building connections through Bourbon

The sun wasn’t up yet, but bourbon drinkers were. Hundreds of them stood outside Kentucky stores, waiting for their number to be called in hopes of being able to purchase a bottle of bourbon.

Two bourbon collectors, Anthony Limperos and Steven DeLucia, each stood in line at Total Wine & More, not yet knowing the path that bourbon would take them on together. The two wouldn’t meet until years later. 

DeLucia remembers the old lotteries liquor stores had when they got new bourbon, he said, they would bring familiar faces together to meet and talk.

Now, the industry looks a little different and a little more expensive, he said. 

DeLucia first started drinking bourbon when he was in college at the University of Kentucky. Growing up in Lexington, DeLucia said bourbon is always around.

“You may not even have bourbon on your mind, but you’ll see plenty of people in your surroundings drink it, consume it, talk about it, especially nowadays,” DeLucia said.

Every year on his birthday, Limperos would receive a bottle of Blanton’s bourbon, until one year, his wife couldn’t find a bottle of it anywhere.

Limperos said if there’s too high a demand for bourbon producers to keep up with, they might put bottles on allocation, so it’s only available for a limited time or in a limited amount, as Buffalo Trace did with Blanton’s, he said.

This experience led Limepros to become a collector of bourbon because he thought he might not see bottles again.

“The products that were available at the time I moved here that I came to like and love at a price all of a sudden became scarce things that nobody could get their hands on,” Limperos said.

Now, 10 years later, Limperos and DeLucia are both avid collectors and host a bourbon podcast called “The Mash Up.”

The hosts, DeLucia, Limperos and Kenny Mills review different bottles of bourbon, bringing in other bourbon collectors. Their podcast, Limperos said, has over 300 episodes. 

While Limperos said he and other collectors joke about never counting their own bottles, he has somewhere between 500 and 700 right now. 

“I do not have enough space for it,” Limperos said. “It’s everywhere. It’s in the closets. Anywhere where I can find space to put it is where I put it.”

Limperos said he’s met people who collect bourbon just to look at the bottles and not even drink them. For him, though, it’s more about the bourbon than the bottle.

For bourbon newcomers, Limperos suggests skipping the phase of trying everything and “buying a bunch of stuff.” Instead, he said to find people with a similar palate and listen to other people’s stories.

“Be open-minded to the different stories and unique stories because after you go on your first two distillery tours, you think they’re all the same, but they’re really not,” Limperos said.

He also recommends trying rye, which is bourbon with at least 51% rye grain, giving it a drier or spicier flavor.

Limperos has a different palate than the others on his podcast, and he said they disagree all the time, but that makes for better conversation.

“We are like the perfect, I would say, compliments or foils to one another,” Limperos said.

A big trend right now is independent whiskey media, Limperos said. The marketing in bourbon is a big deal, he said, and sometimes “you’re buying a story more than something that tastes good.”

Some bottles doubled or tripled in price since Limperos moved to Kentucky.

“The demand and the market forces drove the cost of bourbon up, and the reason why I say it’s a double-edged sword is because now you don’t have as many people entering the category,” Limperos said.

Limperos said he likes the “ultra premium stuff” that he knows someone’s had a hand in selecting and cares about, and he doesn’t just “trust whatever big guys put out.”

“We always say it’s a lot easier to talk about brands when the people that are making the whiskey or sourcing the whiskey are people that you actually like and have really interesting stories to tell,” Limperos said.

Limperos said sometimes when he hangs out with friends, and they decide to open one of his bottles, everyone who drinks it has to sign it, and then someone gets to take the signed bottle home.

“When we get together to share this thing that we love, it brings everybody together,” Limperos said.