“The sales record and the buy record,” McGregor wrote on social media. “Thank you to you, the fans.”
Former UFC lightweight champion, Conor McGregor, has nearly 30 million followers on Instagram, so when “Notorious” announced he was the proud owner (and chief marketer) of Proper No. 12, his new Irish whiskey, a bunch of them probably ran out and bought it.
Many, I’m sure, soon regretted it.
Personally, I think all whiskey tastes like poison, which according to my manliest of friends, makes me a bad person who should stick to Appletinis. So, clearly my review of the product would be about as worthless as everything else I write.
Fortunately, there are cigar-smoking, tie-wearing connoisseurs who can tell the difference between good whiskey and bad whiskey and one of the best things I’ve heard about Proper No. 12, based on this review from Jim Vorel at Paste, is how it’s “basic” and “that’s not necessarily a negative.”
Brin-Jonathan Butler at Bloomberg was not as kind:
Further tasting notes from my informal panel included “watered-down,” “obviously artificially colored,” and “notes of turpentine interlaced with the musk from a crowded, poorly-maintained Turkish bathhouse sauna.”
Alan Dawson at Business Insider didn’t fare much better:
“It smelled like ethanol and tasted only marginally better,” our fintech guru Oscar Williams-Grut said. “A small initial sip was deceptively okay, but subsequent snifters were like vanilla flavoring trying to cover up rubbing alcohol.”
Not even the bottle gets a pass, according to Matt Healy at Potstilled:
My immediate concern with this product is the glass … has an incredibly strange and slippy texture and ended up with a strange gloss finish to it, making the whole bottle look weird from afar. Rubbing your fingers across the front label reveals crackling and popping of air bubbles below the label that do not go away. The packaging feels cheap and sub-premium as a whole. Very strange for something trading on reputation rather than price.
That reputation may have taken a hit, albeit momentarily, following last weekend’s submission loss to Khabib Nurmagomedov at the record-breaking UFC 229 pay-per-view (PPV) event in Las Vegas, Nevada (highlights here).
By this point, based on volume, McGregor may be fast approaching that billion-dollar mark estimated by UFC President Dana White. That said, it will be interesting to see if whiskey drinkers come back for another bottle, or if Proper No. 12 drops out of the top 10 like a blockbuster movie that opens huge — then tanks when people realize it’s junk.
Anyone readers out there enjoying Proper No. 12? Let’s hear from you in the comments section below.