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The other day, Gary Crunkleton brought a group of people to my porch for a whiskey tasting. The members of this group had purchased the trip to Louisville at a charity auction for a school in Raleigh, North Carolina. This caused me to think about charity auctions that I have been involved in in the past and what I liked and disliked about the auctions.

My first experience with a charity auction was at the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History. Back around the year 2000, I came up with the idea of auctioning off signed bottles from the distilleries to raise money for the museum. I liked the auction because it was a live auction and the bids were worth the effort. I also donated tastings to several charities where I would donate a whiskey tasting for 6 couples and let the winner keep what was left in the bottles for their bar. I quickly learned that a live auction was better than a silent auction for raising money. In a silent auction, the tasting always ended for less money than the bottles were worth and my time was wasted for the charity. I quickly set a minimum bid on the auctions to make it worthwhile. Of course, I did not charge anything to the charity for my time, but I wanted my time calculated into the money the charity would receive for the tasting. I set a minimum bid of around three hundred dollars.

I get Facebook notices on a regular basis for charity auctions. Many of them are raffles for bottles, usually Pappy Van Winkle bottles, but I rarely do anything to promote them. I like to choose the charity I support and I am unsure that a raffle will bring much money to the charity. Whiskey can be an excellent source of money for a charity and I suppose that any money brought in for the charity is a good thing, but I think that it should be an amount over the price of the bottles being offered. Charity auctions should be about supporting the charity, not getting a good price on whiskey. 

I don’t do many charity auctions anymore. I am getting old and don’t like the trouble of arranging the details and getting the bottles, and then traveling to the destination for the tasting. I will occasionally give a tasting to a charity that I support, but I always ask for a minimum bid on the tasting. I want the tasting to raise money for the charity, but I want the money to be worth my time and effort too.

Photos Courtesy of Rosemary Miller