🥃 Control State Spirits Price Lists

🥃 Control State Spirits Price Lists - Complete Reference

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Per the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association, 17 and jurisdictions in Alaska, Maryland, Minnesota and South Dakota adopted various forms of the traditional "Control" model. Those governments entirely control the sale of distilled spirits and, occasionally, wine and beer through at the wholesaler level. 13 of those entities also control retail sales for off-premises consumption; either through government-operated package stores or licensed agents.

Control states are a mixed blessing: consumers get pricing consistency and some assurances on quality, but may pay overall higher prices or see strange product allocation practices. This page will focus on the former advantage, transparency. Most alcohol control boards publish a good deal of price and sales data freely on the internet. Iowa has the most robust feature set and has public APIs for both pricing and actual sales data.

By looking through these datasets, savvy consumers can:

Assess what bottles may be the best price in each jurisdiction
Potentially derive a good approximation for the price direct from the distiller
Indulge in a fun free dataset for basic analytics and data science learning by those of-age

This page lists the various state control entities publicly available liqour price catalogs.

State Spirits Price Lists

Each section below will link a given state with the relevant supporting documents. More states and links will be added as I find them. In general, I recommend sources which allow for full Excel, CSV, or Text file download. None of the below links require a login.

Alabama

Alabama's ABC Board produces both Excel and PDF full files of its spirits price lists. You can can also view calendars for their release of allocated products.

Idaho

Idaho's State Liquor Division publishes price change and information in a PDF as well as additional context and a pricing calculator.

Iowa

Iowa provides an excellent liquor price book that is also available on Data.gov. The data view through data.iowa.com is a nice searchable interface that supports API access and even includes a query builder. Five Stars Iowa!

Michigan

Michigan's Licensing and Regulatory affairs division publishes a monthly price book and list of price changes in both PDF and Excel Formats.

Michigan Spirits Price Book - You can download the retail price information at this link. I prefer the Excel format for easy searching.

Liquor Control Price Search Tool - This online tool allows you to look up specific bottles, though it is much more cumbersome than just downloading the full file.

They also provide directions on how to access the data programmatically from a text file which is updated monthly.

Mississippi

MS makes monthly PDF format reports of spirits pricing activity as well as quarterly price changes on the Department of Revenue website.

Montana

Montana's Department of Revenue makes its product price list (called Price Disks) available on a monthly basis in Excel and Text file formats. There are also reports covering product updates and distillery sales.

North Carolina

NC provides an easy to use price search tool. You can filter and download any selections to Excel. They also provide a handout format pdf.

New York

While NY doesn't make things as easy as others, they do provide a price lookup per distributor. You will need to know who the local distributor is for a major brand, but can likely still find what you're looking for with some trial and error.

Oregon

The Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission makes a large amount of information available online, including current price lists in both CSV and PDF formats. You can also view liquor sales data in an interactive dashboard.

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania produces quarterly price listings in a PDF format which can be used in conjunction with the Annual Report for Method and Rationale for Product pricing to gain a reasonable understanding on what producer direct pricing looks like.

Utah

Utah's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Services has monthly price lists in PDF format, not the most workable.

Virginia

VA provides quarterly price lists in both PDF and Excel formats for download, in addition to monthly specials listings. Alternatively, you can access all products through the web store. Virginia does not upcharge allocated or scarce products, so there are deals to be found!

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