Whiskey Wednesday: Knob Creek 15 Year and the Comic Book Theory of Whiskey Collecting

A pretty good, char-forward whiskey. Also, Jim Lee's X-Men #1.

For this edition of Whiskey Wednesday, I want to talk about Knob Creek 15 Year, a limited-edition collector’s edition bottling with a unique age statement. But first, I want to talk about comic books. Specifically, X-Men #1. 

Released in the summer of 1991 at the peak of the pre-movie comic book boom, X-Men #1 sold a staggering eight million copies. It was, and remains, the best-selling single issue of any comic book of all time. It wasn’t too unusual for individual comics to sell in the millions at the time — just months before X-Men #1 came out, X-Force #1 sold five million copies, briefly holding the single-issue sales record. But even still, the sales of X-Men #1 stood out.

Partly, its success was a result of the fact that it was a major event comic book featuring the most popular comic book characters of the era — a little like the Avengers films of the last decade. And partly, its success was due to the fact that it was written and (even more importantly) drawn by Jim Lee, one of the most popular comic book artists of the time, and a defining influence on the X-Men. In 1991, a Jim Lee X-Men comic of any kind was nearly certain to sell pretty well. A Jim Lee X-Men event comic launching a major new series was always destined to be a blockbuster. 

Even still, X-Men #1’s sales were rather remarkable. And a big part of the reason was that X-Men #1 was such a mega-hit was that the issue successfully targeted the collectors market that had driven the comic book boom with a clever marketing gimmick.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, comic books didn’t just sell because people liked picture stories about over-muscled guys and gals in spandex. They sold because people thought they were going to be valuable. 

Valuations for rare comics — Action Comics #1 (the first appearance of Superman), Amazing Fantasy #15 (the first appearance of Spider-Man), Detective Comics #27 (the first appearance of Batman), you get the idea — had gone through the roof.

It seemed as if nerdy adolescent dude — and it was, it’s fair to say, mostly nerdy adolescent dudes — had heard some (probably apocryphal) story of someone from an older generation either reaping a huge cash windfall by selling their comic book collection or finding out, in horror, that their old comics had been tossed, losing a small fortune in the process. 

So big special issues sold a lot of copies because, as crazy as it sounds, people bought them as investments. And they didn’t just buy one copy. They bought two, or three, or a dozen, and then bagged them in clear poly bags and never touched them again. 

And so of course the marketing masters at Marvel realized that they could encourage and exploit this habit by releasing comics with special covers and in multiple editions. So X-Men #1 came not with one possible cover or even two, but five, released in sequence over the course of a month. And the covers weren’t standalones either. They connected. If you had all five covers, you could put them together and form a special super-sized cover. Only by showing up at your local comic book store five times to buy slightly different versions of the same comic book could you truly get the complete picture. Which, for a certain type of comic nerd, was important, not only because you could see it, but because then you could show your friends that you had the whole set. As much as anything, it was a status game. 

I was just nine years old at the time, a fairly enthusiastic comic book fan, but not exactly a hardcore collector with a lot of disposable cash. (Also, I was more of a Spider-Man fan.) But I recall that as a mere comic book, X-Men #1 was fun and drawn with Lee’s characteristic verve — it wasn’t truly great, but it was pretty good for what it was. It more or less delivered on the promise of Jim Lee’s X-Men #1. 

As a marketing gimmick, though, it was genius. Truly the stuff of legend.  

And so of course it was repeated over and over again in various, increasingly desperate forms — multiple covers, variant covers, hologram covers, die-cut covers, foil covers, and so on and so forth, all of which were opportunities to both goose sales and mark up cover prices. Some of it was fun, much of it was silly, and most of those comics are not worth very much today. But they made an impact anyway. 

X-Men #1 and its peers and imitators helped teach a generation of marketers, and perhaps more importantly, a generation of nerdy dude consumers, to love special editions generally and special edition gimmicks specifically. So in the early 00s we got marked-up special edition DVDs with elaborately designed packaging and cheap toys — sorry, collectible figurines. And then as we aged out of DVDs, we started getting colored vinyl and limited edition sneakers and, bringing things full circle, impressively heavy, giant-sized hardcover reissues of our favorite comics.  

And this, of course, brings us to whiskey, and to Knob Creek 15 Year. 

If you know anything about the world of whiskey in 2022, it’s that it has gone somewhat collector crazy. Bottles that used to be everyday bargains now cost double or triple what they cost as recently as five years ago. Highly desirable bottles are allocated by lottery, and some can fetch thousands of dollars at retail or on the secondary market. It’s common for collectors to buy bottles they intend to never open — in some cases to have them, in some cases to resell them for a profit. Special releases of all sorts flow forth from the nation’s distilleries. Gimmicks and quasi-gimmicks (toasted barrel, Tabasco barrel finished, and other forms of barrel-based silliness) that may or may not actually enhance the flavor of a bottle of whiskey are common. 

Like the comic book industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s, whiskey is in the midst of a massive, massive boom, fueled in part by a genuine interest in the product — people genuinely like both whiskey and superheroes — and in part by collectors who think of their whiskey shelves partly as forms of investment. And like the comic book industry of my youth, the whiskey industry caters to a lot of nerdy dudes who were in their adolescent and teenage years then and now, in their late 30s or mid 40s, have a little more disposable income. 

There are substantive differences in the markets, of course: Whiskey truly is scarce in a way that comics aren’t; there’s only so much of any particular barrel or small-batch blend. You can print another run of a comic, or circulate a digital edition, or just read the same comic again and again. Whiskey disappears after you consume it.

And yet, I can’t help but feel like I’ve lived this movie before. The collectible cases, the special-finish gimmicks, the markups and crazy valuations and feverish obsessions amongst dudes of a certain type…a type that, to be clear, I resemble. 

So of course when I found a bottle of Knob Creek 15 at what an insane person would think is a fairly reasonable price, I had to try it. 

And you know what? It’s good. Maybe even quite good. You can taste Knob Creek’s signature vanilla note plus strong notes of milk chocolate, brandied cherry, coffee, caramel, walnuts, and aromatic spices.

The barrel char is quite prominent — almost but not quite too prominent — but it’s remarkably well-balanced and mature, with a ton of aged character but no obvious flaws. I’m particularly fond of the fact that it’s bottled at 100 proof, so it’s neither too pushy nor too thin. Unlike some higher proof whiskeys, it doesn’t come across like it’s trying to knock you out. It has just the right amount of body and presence. 

But this bottle carries a suggested retail price of about $100. I paid just a little more than that. Even in today’s market, that is truly a lot of money for a bottle of whiskey. It’s honestly kind of hard to justify, especially since bottles of Knob Creek 12 Year, and Knob Creek Single Barrel (at 120 proof), both of which are excellent, can typically be found for less. 

And the price gap may increase. I’ve already seen bottles of Knob Creek 15 marked up to $250, and in some cases beyond. Whether or not many people are actually paying those higher prices is another question, but it seems at least plausible that some are. And you can certainly imagine prices drifting higher. This is, after all, a limited edition age-statement Kentucky bourbon from a venerable major distiller. And, of course, it comes in a inexpensive but nifty looking collectible case/box, just like my old Lord of the Rings Special Edition DVDs. There’s a sliding plastic window that you have to move to get the bottle out. Like a full set of X-Men #1 variant covers, it makes for a great display object. It’s something to show your friends.

I should be clear: I believe prices are incredibly useful as discovery mechanisms and for allocating scarce resources. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the whiskey world as it exists today. I like bourbon, just as I liked (and still like) superhero comic books. And I think people should buy and drink what they like and what they enjoy. I try not to judge individuals for their tastes and preferences.

But sometimes the whole culture that’s built up around whiskey, and Kentucky bourbon in particular, does seem kind of silly — and, for those of us who spent the early 90s searching through comic book store bins, more than a little familiar. 

In a recent Punch piece on bourbon-nerd terminology, whiskey writer Aaron Goldfarb (who gave us the easiest fake Pappy) observed that bourbon jargon these days isn’t so much about flavor, but about price and provenance. It’s not about what any particular bottle tastes like, but about the rarity and cost of the bottle, and how you got it. Bourbon enthusiasm is being driven by fans and collectors who live for peer status — many of whom, I suspect, were pretty much exactly the age to be awed by the gimmickry of X-Men #  and the world of mass-market pseudo-collectibles we’ve lived in since. 

I’m not saying Knob Creek 15 Year is the whiskey version of Jim Lee’s X-Men #1, exactly, but I suspect that many of the people who now constitute the target market for Knob Creek’s limited releases were previously part of the market for X-Men #1 and its peers. There’s more than a little crossover, and I definitely feel like I am experiencing a similar sort of boom again. 

In any case, here’s my review: It’s a good whiskey, and it more or less delivers on the promise of something labeled Knob Creek 15. It’s rich, complex, and you can definitely taste the age and the time in the barrel.

But most people are probably better off picking up a bottle of the wilder but less charred 12 Year or the intense and highly variable Single Barrel. Or, I dunno, buying a copy of X-Men #1 off of eBay for a few bucks. 

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