🥃 TREMOR RESERVE IV Order by 9/11 — Order Details in post #259

[marine_wi]

Just another perk of my work from home job!

 

[DblZero7]

I bought my SD Tremor from a dealer in Moab, but I won’t be able to make the meet up. Thanks again Mike for your amazing effort to coordinate all of this.

 

[mattagc]

I like where you are going with it. Definitely not XLT price range

Or should it be Tremor Reserve: Pheasant Edition, because they’re the ones smart enough to spend the money on the good stuff?

 

[The Evil Twin]

Tremor Reserve: Pheasant Edition,

That would be hysterically awesome!

 

[HBTFD]

Or should it be Tremor Reserve: Pheasant Edition, because they’re the ones smart enough to spend the money on the good stuff?

Yes. I’m glad more are aligning with me.

 

[DTX2023Tremor]

Here ya go ya "cheap" bastards:

Tremor Reserve: The Pheasant Edition

A few of you have asked whether we'd ever go after the really rare stuff — the bottles that run $200 to $600 and come from stocks old enough to vote. The answer is yes, and it now has a name. I'd originally kicked around calling it The Platinum Edition, partly because Ford doesn't offer the...

www.fordtremor.com

 

[DTX2023Tremor]

Engraving Update

Following up on the laser engraving idea that came out of the topo map discussion. I had a great conversation with Tim at The Whiskey Blendery, and I've got real answers. Short version: not happening, but I learned a lot about why.

That Found North look comes from the factory. Tim confirmed it's done by the bottle manufacturer, not by anyone etching afterward — and the minimum order is 20,000 bottles. Makes sense for Found North since it's a feature across their whole lineup. Not a door that's open to us.

Could we buy empties, engrave them, and hand them over to be filled? Technically yes. Practically no, and the reason is a genuinely interesting bit of industry education: any change to the bottle a distillery uses requires approval from both the federal government and the state agency the distillery license holder is in, in our case, the TABC. It isn't expensive, but it takes months. Without that approval, the only things the Blendery can customize are the name on the bottle, proof and ABV details, and how it's sealed — wax color and the like. Literally everything else needs a sign-off.

And here's the honest part. We're roughly 300 bottles a year to Tim — likely a fraction of what he moves in a single week. Nobody's said no to us, but asking him to spend months on approvals and then carry a separate bottle SKU for a customer our size just isn't a reasonable ask. We're also the first group to ever want this from them, so there's no approved engraved bottle sitting there we could piggyback on. If we were buying a barrel or more a month, the conversation would likely look different.

What about engraving after the bottles are filled? No compliance issue — what we do with bottles after purchase is our business. But the practical hurdles are real. Our Lennox bottle is oval, so the sides we'd be engraving are the most sharply curved part of it, and a laser can only hold focus across a narrow strip on a curve like that. Each bottle would need repositioning and refocusing five or six times: roughly 25–35 minutes each, or ~90 hours for a full barrel. That's a real time commitment and whomever does this work would likely want to be compensated for their time. I wouldn't mind doing it if I had the equipment to do so, but this is an investment in $5K range that I would have no other immediate use for to justify.

So we're setting this one aside. Between the vinyl wrap experiment and this, we've now learned a lot about what's actually possible on a bottle — and I'd rather know than keep wondering.

Fortunately, we've never needed engraved glass to make these bottles feel like ours. Just about every pick group out there does a custom label or "tater sticker" — I've got some genuinely cool ones on my own shelf from other groups I'm in. What I think sets ours apart isn't that we make a label, it's that we've built a series. Spring belongs to the Tremor of the Year winner's truck. Fall is the Rally Edition, celebrating that year's marquee meet-up. Stand Reserve I through IV next to each other and you're looking at a record of where this group has been — not four unrelated bottles.

There's a lot of room left to run with that. If we ever grow to where a custom bottle makes sense for Tim, we'll revisit. Until then, we'll keep letting the label tell the story.