For a couple years the headline story about Chartreuse was that it was becoming impossible to get (which is annoying because it's an important ingredient in a bunch of super-popular cocktails, most notably the Last Word), owing to the monastery allocation scheme. But last I heard, you can pick up both the Yellow and Green at Binnys, which is the neighborhood liquor store chain in Chicagoland.

The Carthusians make an interesting story, but what I think is the bigger story is the collapse of the liquor market broadly. I think but can't cite sources that what's happened is post-pandemic shifts pushing bars out of business, and bars in turn significantly cutting back orders. Whatever it is, Eagle Rare was supermarket whiskey in 2010, was an back room allocation whiskey in 2021, and is back on the shelves again. Pretty much every whiskey is now gettable in a way it wasn't just a couple years ago.

Jim Beam even had to halt production due to the oversupply: https://www.fooddive.com/news/jim-beam-pauses-production-ken...

We stock Chartreuse at our bar, not easy, and we occasionally have to modulate the cocktails on the menu to slow customers down a bit. The Bay Area itself gets an allocation each month, which is then further allocated to individual establishments.

The pandemic introduced so many weird shifts in demand for so many things, we're still not back at normal.

In this case, I think another factor is that the monastery decided to not ship to countries outside of Europe at all any more, and to reduce volume altogether. That introduced some shortage to panic buying alone, but it also meant that all American suppliers now had to import from EU resellers, which is not a big deal, but takes some time.

I think part of it is new information showing no benefit from alcohol consumption, but possible harm even at low levels of consumption. In 2026, alcohol is a health risk.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2026-06-09/...

...and I still make the Last Word with subbed-in Génépy des Alpes to this day.