Mystery Drop Follow-Up: Two of the Same Bottle

If you read my last post, you'll know I went into the September Mystery Drop properly excited. A themed drop built entirely around Bunnahabhain, Tobermory, Ledaig and Deanston, with a £13,000 Bunnahabhain Andrew Brown 35 Year Old as the headline prize, was exactly the kind of thing I'd been hoping MoM would run, and I bought in without a second thought.

I bought two boxes. Both arrived, both opened, and both contained a Bunnahabhain 12.

Not a Bunnahabhain 12 and something else from further up the range. Not one 12 and one surprise. The exact same bottle, twice.

The odds of that

Out of 6,158 boxes in this drop, 1,200 were Bunnahabhain 12, so roughly a 1 in 5 chance for any single box. Work out the odds of both of mine landing on that same bottle, and it comes out at about 3.79%, a little under 1 in 26. Not a one-in-a-thousand fluke, but not exactly the expected outcome either. Just one of those things.

Value-for-money wise, nothing to complain about. Bunnahabhain 12 is a genuinely good, honest whisky, and at £36 a box against a bottle that retails comfortably above that, the deal still stacks up. If I'd bought a single bottle of Bunnahabhain 12 at full price, I'd have been happy with it.

But value-for-money was only ever half the appeal. The other half, the bit I wrote about with real enthusiasm last time, was the discovery: not knowing what you're going to get, and the chance of something you'd never have picked up (or been able to pick up!) yourself landing on your doorstep. That part didn't happen for me this round. Two boxes, two identical outcomes, zero surprise.

Would I do it again?

Without hesitation. Out of 6,158 boxes and over a dozen possible bottles, my two landing on the same solid-but-unspectacular bottle is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you're dealing with genuine randomness, and I'd rather have real odds and an occasional dud than a "guaranteed variety" gimmick that isn't actually random at all.

The July drop gave me a Maker's Mark London Edition and a Yamazaki 18. This one gave me two Bunnahabhain 12s. That range, from brilliant surprise to quiet repeat, is honestly part of what makes the format fun. You're not buying a bottle, you're buying a moment of genuine not-knowing, and that's worth £36 on its own merits even on the rounds that don't go your way.

Roll on Mystery Drop 4.0, whenever it lands, I'll be first in the queue.