Why American Bourbon Can Be Cheaper In The UK

Why is American bourbon more expensive in the United States than in the UK? While American bourbon enthusiasts are filling out lottery forms for a bottle of Blanton's Gold Edition, a Brit is dropping one into a basket for about £105 (around $140), somewhere between the crumpets and the washing-up liquid. Even though it has a suggested retail price of $120, it's just that — a suggestion: most Blanton's Golds move by lottery or private allocation, and if you want a bottle to drink now, you'll have to go to the resale market, where it can reach $300 and up.

Has the world turned upside down for British drinkers to have been quietly hoovering up a great, under $60 whiskey bottle that Americans spend their weekends hunting? Essentially, yes. But the reason for the cheaper cost of rare bourbons in the UK isn't because of tariffs or taxes, despite what you might've heard. Britain scrapped its 25% duty on American whiskey back in June 2022, and the current rate of import duty on whisky entering the UK is a round zero. The July 2026 agreement that lifted American tariffs on Scotch restored what Scotland's first minister called a zero-for-zero arrangement, so nothing is being added at either border.

The real culprits sit elsewhere: the way American law forces whiskey to travel from distillery to shelf, and the way British law mugs it once it arrives. American whiskey can't go straight from the distillery to your local store. Instead, it has to go to a licensed distributor first, who allocates the supply to the stores on the list. Seventeen states go further and act as the wholesaler themselves, adding their own markup before anything reaches a till. At each step, the bottle gets more and more expensive and rare until the bourbon becomes either prohibitively expensive or near-impossible to find.

In contrast to what America does, the UK has no such middlemen-filled distribution scheme. Bourbon, after it's imported into the country, is put into national accounts, and the importing company (Age International, in the case of Blanton's Gold) can set one recommended price. This price is used by retailers to charge the same across the entirety of the country. It further helps that since Scotch absorbs most of the attention, bourbon releases often slip past unnoticed, both at retailers and from online flippers. All of this makes high-end bottles comparatively cheap and easier to find in the UK than back home.

However, this isn't the case for the everyday stuff, like your Jack Daniel's and your Evan Williams Black Label, a bottom-shelf bourbon actually worth trying. For every liter of pure alcohol in a bottle, the British taxman takes £33.99, which works out to £13.59 of duty on a one-liter bottle at 40% ABV, with 20% VAT riding on top. That's how a liter of Jack Daniel's No. 7, a juice you could find for $18 for the 750-milliliter, arrives at £35 in Tesco, with £19.42 of that going straight to the government. The American charge on that same liter is a shade over $4.

Britain isn't selling American whiskey cheaply so much as selling it before the taxman has finished with it. If you want a bottle you can't get at home, and you're happy to bet on wider UK distribution and a thinner resale market, book the flight. For everyday bourbon, the cheaper trip is the one to your local liquor store.