86 proof Bottled in Bond??

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86 proof Bottled in Bond??

Unread postby MikeK » Wed Feb 14, 2007 11:23 am

I just noticed the following Ebay auction from the UK.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270088924320&ssPageName=ADME:B:EF:US:11

It is a miniature of Kentucky Tavern, clearly marked as 86 proof AND Bottled in Bond. What gives? Is this an example of US regulations not mattering if you export the product?

Thanks,
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Unread postby bourbonv » Wed Feb 14, 2007 11:42 am

Mike,
This is clearly not a bonded whiskey or else it would have the tax stamp. I think this might be a case of taking advantage of foriegn ignorance of American laws. Overseas the fact that all American whiskey warehouses are bonded ware houses and the bottling operations were monitored by the government to meet the bonding regulation, they made the claim of "Bottled in Bond" on the label.
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Unread postby cowdery » Wed Feb 14, 2007 2:32 pm

I know British proof is different from American proof. Is it possible that 86 British proof is the equivalent of 100 US proof, i.e., 50% abv?
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Unread postby gillmang » Wed Feb 14, 2007 3:16 pm

British proof was different than U.S. proof but now is obsolete. Since the 1980's Britain follows the system of Gay-Lussac (alcohol measured by the volume it occupies in the container). However under the superseded British (Sykes system) of proof, 175 proof was 100% alcohol. So 86 proof Sykes is essentially half that, or 50% abv.

100 Sykes was 57.1% abv, that was proven spirit in his system (mixed with gunpowder it would light). The American Old Grand-dad 114 proof is in my view a hearkening back (probably unconscious, no pun intended) to the Colonial-era full proof.

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Unread postby cowdery » Wed Feb 14, 2007 6:01 pm

Eureka! Don't you wish all mysteries could be so easily resolved?

(I'm still scratching my head over that 1/2 pint label on a full pint bottle.)
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Unread postby EllenJ » Wed Feb 14, 2007 6:18 pm

Mike,
Without trying to cast inappropriate aspersions at this particular seller, I would recommend ignoring any ebay offerings from ebay.uk

This example appears to be clearly a counterfeit.
Not necessarily by the seller, though; it could easily have been originally distributed as Kentucky Tavern.

Anyone here old enough (okay, I am)
AND wealthy enough (okay, I ain't)
to have flown internationally on BOAC, or AirChance, or LeftWaffle, or some other European airline in the '70s? Was Kentucky Tavern something you might have seen on such a flight?

My main reason for avoiding ebay.uk sales is that there's a bunch of phishers that use a copy of that website (it shows up in Google searches) to get your ebay information.
Mouse over the link targets VERY carefully and if you find they all point to the same address, DON'T CLICK ON ANY OF THEM!!
If you already have, log into Ebay and change your password RIGHT NOW.
Then don't buy anything for a few weeks.
If you use PayPal, don't forget that, too.

A real Ebay page (or any other) will, of course, have different targets for each of the links on the page. The phish site's targets are all the same (the target itself varies from example to example, of course).
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Unread postby gillmang » Wed Feb 14, 2007 6:53 pm

Asssuming the bottle is genuine, there are a couple of possibilities. One, it corresponds as mentioned to Sykes proof. Actually, when I use the converter, I get 49.1% abv but I suspect that was close enough under tolerance rules. True, no stamp, but maybe that wasn't necessary at the time for minis, and bear in mind if this was sold outside U.S. it didn't have to correspond to any U.S. rules.

But here is another possibility. It was in fact 86 U.S. proof but the maker put Bonded on it anyway, as a selling point. I.e., the label didn't have to mean Bonded in the U.S. sense because it wasn't sold in the U.S. I've seen the term Bonded on some Canadian whiskies for example, here it must be just a kind of sales talk (essentially). I'll try to find examples but I know I've seen it on a Canadian whisky label once or twice and it was 40% abv.

Kentucky Tavern definitely had an international market, I recall seeing it in Ontario 20 years ago, for example.

It might be useful to check that Japanese miniature bottle site, I'l try to find it again, he would have examples of this whiskey.

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Unread postby MikeK » Wed Feb 14, 2007 8:16 pm

Excellent, a couple of good possibilities. This link was from regular ebay.com, not the UK version. I never bid on any alcohol outside the US because I don't want to deal with any import issues should they arise, plus the shipping. Single miniatures tend to get pricey on ebay as well with shipping. I sometimes pick up a medium to large lot of whiskey miniatures because then the price per mini is quite reasonable.

I got a KY Tavern mini very similar to this one a while back that was BIB with tax stamp and from the 1950's. It was excellent :)
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Unread postby gillmang » Thu Feb 15, 2007 9:02 am

At http://www.ne.jp/asahi/miniature/smallw ... urbonk.htm is a collection of mini whiskey bottles. His collection of Kentucky Tavern shows 5 bottles from different eras. The dimpled bottle shown in the thread above seems to be similar to the Japanese site's bottle from 1947, however that site's bottle shows 100 proof. So do his 3 other bottles marked Bottled in Bond. While it is hard to read the labels, in his table just underneath he states the proof as 100 in each case. Only the fifth bottle pictured (from left to right) shows a lesser proof, 80, and it is not marked Bonded.

My conclusion is that the bottle pictured on the BE thread above, which ended up in England, was marked to comply with the proof requirements of the day in the U.K. and 86 British proof was essentially 50% abv. which was and is American bonded strength. Another reason I think that is in photos of American whiskey bottles I have seen in U.K.-published books from the 70's, again we see lower proof markings on some bottles than was current in the U.S. at the time, e.g., I saw a Jack Daniels bottle marked 78 proof which is 90 proof in the U.S., which JD was at the time.

Alternatively, the Kentucky Tavern bottle may have been 86 U.S. proof but the manufacturer left the Bonded statement from the U.S. bonded bottle design on on the basis that it might have some selling effect and since the bottle was sold outside the States such usage did not contravene any rules. But I think the former interpretation makes more sense.

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Unread postby bourbonv » Thu Feb 15, 2007 10:47 am

Kentucky Tavern was used on a lot of airlines in the 60's. Glenmore made a push to get the brand on airlines.

John does have a point about counterfeit bottles. When I was at United Distillers, Nicholas Morgan, the British archivist went to a whiskey auction and bought two 4/5 quart bottles of Kentucky Tavern that were billed as prohibition bottles bottled in bond in the early 1930's. Chris and I knew that if these were prohibition bottles then they were rare because about 95% of the spirits sold during prohibition were pint bottles. Sure enough when these bottles made it to the U.S. Chris and I noticed that they were fakes. The tax stamp had been removed and the dates altered before putting them back on the bottles. You could faintly see the original dates on the stamp and those dates were early 50's dates.
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