What's a drop?
How FWGS Whiskey Releases work — what a "drop" is, when they happen, and how Bottle Hunt detects them.
A drop is FWGS putting a small batch of allocated bourbon or rye onto the catalog at a regular cadence. The official name is Whiskey Release, and it's how PA distributes the most-hunted bottles — Buffalo Trace antiques, Willett single barrels, Stagg, the kinds of bottles that sell out within hours.
Drops happen on a published schedule (usually Friday mornings) but the SKUs and quantities aren't announced ahead. The window is short — bottles are first-come-first-served at the listed stores, and most disappear inside the first hour.
What Bottle Hunt does
We poll the FWGS Whiskey Release page on a regular cadence and detect new entries the moment they appear. Each detection lands in the Drops feed with:
- the product (or the raw entry, if the scraper hasn't matched it to a known SKU yet — those are ghost drops),
- the timestamp in PA time,
- a link to the source on FWGS so you can act fast.
Ghost drops
Sometimes our catalog doesn't yet have the SKU that just dropped. Rather than hide the entry, we surface it as a ghost drop with a "we detected this but haven't matched it" note. The scraper catches up on the next pass and the row gets linked retroactively. You're seeing the raw signal in real time.
What about alerts?
Email and SMS alerts on drops are a Phase 5 feature — they're coming, not shipped yet. For now, the Drops feed is the surface to watch.