This Booze Hunter Discovered the Ultimate Whiskey Treasure Trove—but Time Wasn't on His Side

In July 2022, Jon Lilley, a California father in his early 40s, hunched over his computer, doing his standard morning loop of websites—searching for leads on vintage liquor.

As a “dusty hunter,” Lilley spends entire days of his life doggedly looking for rare spirits. Like many other men who dusty hunt—they’re mostly men, for whatever reason—he’s trekked to out-of-the-way liquor stores in small towns and sketchy neighborhoods (if the clerk sits behind bulletproof glass, that’s good!) in search of old bottles that never sold, are now caked in dust and, quite often, still stickered with a price from decades ago when first put on shelves.

Lilley had mainly been a collector of contemporary bourbons over the past decade. He’d enter liquor store after liquor store nearly every day when he was sales director for a California distillery, in addition to other jobs for tequila brands, wineries, and distributors. It was easy for him to keep tabs on what was on store shelves and make some good scores.

Lately, though, it seemed like his luck was drying up. Having grown tired of all the effort it took to land allocated rarities of the present like Pappy Van Winkle and George T. Stagg, he moved onto hunting vintage spirits, hoping for greater returns. Eventually, all the stores in his native Napa Valley had also been picked over for dusty booze.

So, Lilley began hunting via Craigslist, receiving more than 200 alerts per day for keywords he'd flagged. He also often tried online auction sites, yard sales, and estate sales. On that summer day in July, however, he happened upon something new.

Having scoured the usual pages—Googling sites like HiBid, and referencing online auctioneers he had luck with previously—an auction site he’d never used before popped up: Sullivan Auctioneers, an Illinois-based outfit founded in 1979 that mainly deals in used farm equipment. Lilley instinctually typed “liquor” into its internal search engine and waited.

Unlike wine, spirits don’t age or change in the bottle. They taste the same as the day they were sealed. In that sense, they’re drinkable time capsules. And, for most vintage spirits lovers, there’s a belief that they just don’t make ’em like they used to. Maybe distilleries have become too automated. Ingredients, too much of a bulk commodity. Production processes more focused on saving a buck than making something delicious.

Whatever the case, to taste spirits from decades past is a delight. Not to mention, there can be an incredible return on investment. All it takes is a little time and some effort, and you might just find a $5 bottle of, say, 1960s Old Overholt that’s now actually worth $2,000 on the open market.

Lilly has had many successes and even more close calls. He once found an entire gallon swing of 1957 Old Fitzgerald at an estate sale. But the deceased’s son had unfortunately opened the perhaps $8,000 piece, taken a single sip—and not found the liquid to his liking. Although cracking a vintage bottle decreases its value, the liquid usually maintains its quality, so Lilley was more than willing to take this world-class spirit off his hands for a song.

On Sullivan Auctioneers, Lilley discovered another promising estate sale, of one Edmund Bickett—“a legend in the southern Illinois and northwestern Kentucky area,” according to the listing. In actuality, Bickett was just a guy who once owned pretty much everything in Old Shawneetown, IL, population 114. He died in 2017 at age 85.

There were several “rings”—categories—among his estate. They included real estate (39 commercial, residential, and recreational lots), farm equipment (14 tractors, a Cat Dozer, fertilizer spreader, etc.), a 28-foot pontoon boat and '83 Cadillac DeVille among other vehicles, and a rummage sale of household items like a SentrySafe digital safe, infrared space heater, Busch beer neon sign, and good-sized scissors collection.

None of this interested Lilley in the least, until he saw the fourth and final ring—the contents of the Shawnee Package liquor store and its storage basement, which Bickett had unceremoniously shuttered in the late-aughts, due mainly to poor sales.

An old, untouched liquor store. Jackpot!

Lilley saw all this on a Friday night. The live online auction was scheduled for Monday. “2,500 miles away from where I live,” he thought. “How can I make this happen?”

At first, Lilley figured he couldn’t. He couldn’t leave his wife, Megan, and ten-month-old son, Julius. He couldn’t take off work. Did he even have the tens of thousands of dollars it might cost to win the auction?

He slept on it, and then did something "stupid" the following morning. He Facebook messaged a few dusty-hunting friends (famed vintage collector Kevin Langdon Ackerman among them) and sent them a link to the listing.

Upon hearing this, Lilley’s wife admonished and prodded him: What are you doing? We can find a way to make it work. She said she would help fund it. She trusted her husband’s business acumen and had seen it pay off before.

In fact, Lilley recently saw a friend buy the entire wine cellar of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, MI—better known as the place Jimmy Hoffa was last seen alive. The friend turned a cool $35,000 in profit.

Lilley quickly unsent the Facebook messages (yes, you can actually do that). His fellow dusty hunters were now none the wiser. Nor was, as far as Lilley knew, any other major vintage spirits collector in America.

“There’s a lot of jealousy in this game,” says Lilley.

If you accidentally blab about a potential score, he explains, you may ultimately gain some enemies and perhaps even lose out on the bounty.

The auction wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. Lilley jockeyed for the top position for an hour—mainly against one other serious bidder. Spending 35 percent more than he'd planned, Lilley eventually won the bid. At just around $5 per bottle, by his calculations, he'd still earned a major steal.

Winning the auction was the easy part. Lilley now only had three days to get all the bottles out of Shawnee Package and back home to California. If he didn’t do it by then, he'd forfeit the lot, and it would be destroyed. He was going to have to call in some big favors.

The late-aughts was the perfect time to shutter a liquor store—at least, for a dusty hunter’s purposes. The modern bourbon renaissance hadn’t fully gone mainstream yet, though the ensuing decade would see an explosion of exciting new products, hyped limited releases, the revival of shuttered heritage distilleries, the arrival of craft distilleries in all 50 states, and countless eager fans fighting to find great bottles. Although Van Winkle and Stagg were already on the market by the late-aughts, they weren’t yet household names and hardly sought after just yet. Likewise, vintage spirits hunting wasn’t commonplace. The hobby’s first mainstream media mention didn’t even occur until 2014 in a Washington Post article.

Thus, despite Shawnee Package being just across the Ohio River from the bourbon capital of Kentucky, it sat quietly in this penurious, one-horse, zero-gas-station town, closing just before dusty hunters cleaned out the entire country. Even back then, Kentucky locals crossed the river mostly to buy lotto tickets, not booze. And here was Lilley over 10 years later, halfway across the country, hoping this was his winning ticket.

After winning the auction on Monday morning, Lilley put a strategy in place. He couldn’t get to Old Shawneetown himself, but “coerced” his brother Matt to fly that very night from Las Vegas to Phoenix to St. Louis, pick up a 22-foot Penske box truck, and drive 149 miles to Illinois. Meanwhile, Lilley’s brother-in-law (also named Matt) took a red eye from San Francisco to Charlotte—his connecting flight to St. Louis was canceled—and then drove a rental car to the package store to help with the loading.

On Wednesday morning, the two Matts cracked open the boarded-up wooden door, defying the "No Trespassing" signs that guarded it for decades, and entered the humble, A-frame store. A simple white board over the door read “SHAWNEE PACKAGE” in red letters, marking the time capsule of every dusty hunter's dreams. This was Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opening King Tut’s tomb—if the pair cared more about bourbon made by defunct distillers like Stitzel-Weller and National Distillers than scepters and golden sandals.

It looked like a mid-2000s liquor store alright. Presumably empty ATM near the front door. Advil and Motrin single-serving pill packs behind the register meant to fend off Bush-era hangovers. BIC lighters at the checkout. Fixtures, furniture, and liquor advertisements from the past. Help-yourself sliding-door beer coolers, stocked with six-packs of Budweiser, Miller Lite, malt liquor forties, and Ja?germeister minis that recalled a past era when they were still a popular party bomb. It was a bit dirty, and it was incredibly hot and humid, being the end of July in southeastern Illinois—though probably not as bad as the Egyptian desert in 1922.

Most importantly, shelf after shelf after shelf of neatly stocked bottles from the past were lined up single file on the dusty racks like soldiers—unbothered for years.

“Everything was pristine. The tax stamps were perfect,” says Lilley, referring to the sticky federal strips required to go overtop the bottle caps prior to 1985 (when the repeal of the Deficit Reduction Act ended their use). Lilley video-called his brother, assessing the collection. “Finding something like this just doesn’t happen.”

There were 11 cases of 1984 W.L. Weller Special Reserve 375 mL bottles, and a whole case of Old Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond from 1987. An unopened case of Old Grand-Dad Bonded from 1998 was in the mix, plus a sealed Old Forester Bottled in Bond, and six Old Fitzgerald Primes from 1985. Nearly a hundred 200 mL bottles of Old Forester 86-proof were also unearthed—which Lilley could easily flip for $75 a pop.

“In terms of dusty hunting, this is ‘the hunt.’ It’s an awesome amount,” says Zev Glesta, assistant vice president and whiskey specialist with Sotheby’s auction house. “This isn’t like a coin collector finding a valuable quarter. It’s like them reaching in a bucket of change and pulling out thousands of valuable quarters all in one fistful.”

They weren’t all winners, of course. Lilley was now the proud owner of tons of junk: 1980s blended Scotches, bottom-shelf vodkas and gin, 1990s Everclear, crappy mixto tequila, and a case of 1986 DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps leftover from sex on the beach’s heyday.

Lilley didn’t care. After the Matts loaded up the Penske, a single layer of cases covered its entire 264-square-foot floor with dusty—valuable—booze.

Lilley’s brother-in-law, who long held the cockeyed dream of becoming a long-haul trucker, drove the payload back to Napa Valley in just 42 hours. It cost $1,200 in fuel to move what Lilley estimated as a quarter million dollars of booze, which would reside for the time being in a small locker that cost a few hundred bucks a month to rent.

Lilley made his money back by September 2022, selling bottles to vintage spirits collectors across the globe. At that point, he’d sold only five percent of his haul.

It’s not easy to part with the bottles. Like many dusty hunters, Lilley can’t help being beset by a certain melancholy about the hobby. Vintage booze is the only collectible consumed by its collectors, who willingly take part in making the liquid magically disappear. Indeed, Lilley was already lamenting many of the bottles he had sold—like those 1980s Wellers he’s certain he’ll never see or taste again. Maybe that’s why two years later, Lilley still has a good bulk of the collection in his storage unit, waiting to be sold—or savored.

He also laments how ruthless dusty hunting has become in the last couple of years. It's so competitive that every collector wishes they had a time machine. They wouldn’t use it to change world history or make millions on the stock market. They’d only go back a few decades, even just to the mid-2000s, and buy everything on liquor store shelves.

Lilley is one of the lucky ones. He did go back in time, even just once, without bending the laws of physics. Today, the entire incident has made him even hungrier to top his last score, like a bank robber looking for one more legendary heist before calling it quits.

“Every fucking day I look for another one of these scores,” he says.

He’s still looking.

In Aaron Goldfarb’s latest book, Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits, he writes about a coterie of eccentric collectors searching the world for old bottles of whiskey, rum, and other libations from the past. He details pre-Prohibition ryes uncovered found in old Pennsylvania farmhouses and World War II-era bottles of rum located in shuttered San Francisco restaurants. He follows one man, Kevin Langdon Ackerman, hot on the tail of a collection that was supposedly sealed shut in Howard Hughes’ Los Angeles office after the entrepreneur’s 1976 death.

Related: This Bottle Was Bourbon’s Greatest Mystery—and Worth a Fortune. Then They Drank It