About a year ago we kicked-off our Taste ´n´ Stats series with an article on the Devil´s Punch Bowl series from the Arran distillery. Now it is time to revisit these bottles to see what has changed over the past twelve months.
It was back in September 2015 when Whiskystats.net went online. From there on we analyzed the auction prices from many single malt whiskies. Since the market is active all the time and we keep our database updated each month things can change. That is why we plan to occasionally pick up some of our old articles to recheck on the results. First off is an article from the 5th of August 2016.
The Devil´s Punch Bowl by Arran was our first attempt to link our technical price analysis to some measures of taste. Since there are a lot of great resources on the web for tasting notes and the like we decided to use this existing knowledge rather than coming up with own tasting notes. For this devilish trio from the Arran distillery we teamed up with Words of Whisky, a dutch whisky blog. We here do not recap the tasting notes but rather focus on the new price observations we made since we wrote those article.
Chapter I
The first chapter of the Devil´s Punch Bowl series got 86 out of 100 points from Words of Whisky. Back in August 2016 we concluded that this bottling “experienced quite a rally since prices climbed by more than 170% percent over the last four years”. We also observed that prices observed at ScotchWhiskyAuction.com (SWA) tended to exceed the ones at WhiskyAuction.com (WA).
One year later it looks like this gap closed down. The overall price level seems to stabilize slightly below 400 Euros. To recheck on this we use our new smoothing feature which allows us to display the six months moving average price.
Here we clearly see that prices for the Chapter I climbed to an all-time peak of more than 400 Euros in late 2015. Since then they slightly decreased to stabilize at the above mentioned region of below or around 400 Euros.
Chapter II
From all the three chapters the second one got the lowest rating by Words of Whisky with 84 points. In August 2016 we observed the auction prices for the second chapter of the Devil´s Punch Bowl series to drop back to their initial level of around 150 Euros.
One year later we see that prices climbed again with single observations even exceeding 200 Euros. But we also see that in the last couple of months the prices dropped again to 150 Euros.
A look at the smoothed price history confirms seasonal up- and downwards movements. It seems like the late spring and early summer months always see prices for Chapter II dropping.
Chapter III
The third chapter of this series got the same Words of Whisky rating like the initial chapter (86 points). Nevertheless, the third chapter traded and trades only for about half of the price.
What strikes our eye when looking at the single price observations are the differences between SWA and WA. Especially in the last couple of months prices varied by up to 80 Euros within a single month. Thereby it seems like the bidders at SWA are willing to pay more for this closing Devil´s chapter.
The smoothed price graph shows that the overall trend tended upwards until February 2017. Since then, the average market prices for the final chapter of the Devil´s Punch Bowl series declined to now stand at 150 Euros.