How to Hunt Allocated Bourbon in NC: The Pro Member's System
April 20, 2026
Hunting allocated bourbon in North Carolina is a timing and information game. The hunters who consistently find bottles - the Pappys, the Buffalo Traces, the lottery releases - aren't just driving more miles. They have a better system. These three Pro tools are that system.
Hunts lets you plan and track multi-stop runs without keeping a mental checklist. Sighting Alerts put the community's intel in your pocket between your own trips. Favorites Finder tells you which NC ABC boards are actually worth the drive right now, based on real delivery data. Use them together and you stop hunting blind.
Hunts: Plan Your Run Before You Drive
Reach for Hunts whenever you're about to make a serious multi-stop bourbon run - whether that's three boards across a county or a full weekend sweep through western NC. Instead of keeping a mental checklist and burning gas on boards that are already dry, you build the hunt once and the dashboard tracks every bottle for you.
A hunt ties a list of bottles to a location and a search radius. Every board within that radius becomes part of your intelligence map. When you open the hunt detail view, you see where each bottle has been spotted and which boards are most likely to still have it. That's the difference between driving with a plan and driving on a guess.
Setting Up a Hunt
Open the Bottle Hunter tab in your dashboard and tap New Hunt. You will fill in three things:
Hunt setup fields
Hunt Name
Give it a name - "Western NC Weekend" or "Triangle Run March." Makes it easy to track multiple hunts at once.
Your Location
Set a center point for the hunt. Tap "Use my location" for GPS, or enter a zip. This anchors the radius to where you're starting from.
Search Radius
Choose 10, 25, 50, or 100 miles. The default is 25 miles - enough for a focused run without pulling in boards that aren't worth the detour.
Adding Bottles to a Hunt
After naming your hunt, add the bottles you're chasing by searching the catalog or tapping Import from Wishlist to pull in bottles you already have saved. If you're running three bottles this weekend and have twelve on your wishlist, import them all and trim to what matters for this run.
Each bottle in the hunt tracks progress automatically - when you or another member logs a sighting at a board within your radius, that bottle gets marked found without any extra steps from you.
What You See When You're Ready to Roll
Tap into any active hunt and you have everything you need to make decisions about where to drive. The detail view shows:
- Progress bar - bottles found vs. total bottles in the hunt at a glance
- Radius indicator - confirms the search radius and anchor location
- Per-bottle status - each bottle shows whether it has been found, with the board name and date if a sighting was logged
- Likelihood scores - for each bottle, boards within your radius are scored on how likely they are to have it on the shelf right now (more on this below)
- Add / remove bottles - you can edit the hunt at any time without losing progress already logged
The likelihood scores inside a hunt are where Hunts and Favorites Finder overlap - even before you open the Finder, the hunt is already telling you which boards on your route are worth prioritizing. When the run is done, tap Archive Hunt to close it out. Archived hunts stay in your history so you can reference past runs or reactivate one the next time you're working the same area.
Sighting Alerts: Let the Community Hunt for You
The bottles you're chasing don't always show up on your trips. They show up on someone else's. Sighting Alerts are how you capture that intelligence without being the one who walked the board. When a Pro member spots a bottle and logs a verified sighting, every member who has that bottle saved gets a notification.
This is the most passive advantage in the toolkit: save your bottles, stay active in the app, and other hunters' legwork feeds your watchlist. NC bourbon drops move fast - a sighting alert on a Saturday morning can be the difference between making the drive and missing it entirely.
The other side of this is logging your own sightings. When you find something during a run, log it. You're feeding the same system that notifies you, and verified sightings from your boards improve the likelihood scores that Favorites Finder uses for everyone.
How to Log a Sighting
You can submit a sighting from the Bottle Hunter tab or directly from within a hunt. Tap Log a Sighting and fill in the details:
Sighting submission form
ABC Board
Start typing to search boards. Required - this is the board where you spotted the bottle.
Date Found
Use the calendar picker to set the date. Helps us know how fresh the sighting is when scoring likelihood.
How Was It Found
Select: on the shelf, drop event, or lottery event. This context helps other members know whether the bottle is likely still available.
Photo
A photo of the receipt or bottle is required. JPEG, PNG, WebP, and HEIC are accepted up to 10MB. This keeps sightings verified and trustworthy.
Optional: store name/location and notes (shelf price, quantity visible, anything useful).
What Happens After You Submit
Once you submit, the sighting enters a review queue. An automated system checks the photo and details first, and edge cases go to manual review. This usually takes a few minutes. Once approved, alerts go out to any Pro member who has that bottle saved.
If you logged the sighting from inside an active hunt, your hunt progress updates automatically - the bottle gets marked found if the board is within your radius. Everything stays in sync without any extra steps.
Favorites Finder: Know Before You Drive
Before every run you ask the same question: is it actually worth going? Favorites Finder answers that. It scores every combination of your saved NC ABC boards and saved bottles by how likely each bottle is to still be on the shelf right now, based on distribution data we have been building for months.
Open it before you plan your route. If your top board is showing "May be depleted" on everything you're chasing, you know to restructure the run before you pull out of the driveway. If two boards are showing "Likely in stock" on the same bottle, you can prioritize the closer one and loop in the other if you have time.
How the Likelihood Score Works
Each board and bottle combination gets a score between 0 and 100 based on historical delivery data:
Likelihood levels
- Likely in stock (40–90) - delivery detected within the typical shelf window for that board. Score degrades as time since delivery increases.
- Pre-shelf (55) - delivery was detected but based on the board's average lag, it hasn't hit shelves yet. The display tells you the estimated day it typically surfaces.
- May be depleted (5–35) - delivery was detected but the board is past its typical shelf window for that bottle. Still worth a call, but don't count on it.
- No recent history (0) - no detected delivery for this board × bottle combo. Check another board on your list.
A consistency bonus is applied when a board has received the same bottle three or more times historically. If a board reliably stocks Eagle Rare every few months, that pattern is reflected in the score - it's not just recency, it's track record.
What You See in the Dashboard
Favorites Finder surfaces the top three boards for each of your saved bottles, sorted by the highest likelihood score. For each board you see:
Board name
The ABC board, with a link to its timeline in the distribution dashboard.
Days since delivery
How long ago we detected this bottle at that board - "3d ago", "12d ago", etc.
Likelihood badge
The score and a plain-language label: Likely in stock, Pre-shelf, May be depleted.
Detail line
Units on shelf, shelf window status, or expected arrival day if pre-shelf.
The view updates automatically as new delivery data comes in. The scores you see reflect current state - not last week's data.
Make It Work Harder for You
Favorites Finder is only as useful as the lists behind it. The boards you saved when you first signed up may not be the boards you actually hunt. Trim it down to the boards you realistically drive to, and save the bottles you're actually chasing right now. The tighter your list, the faster the signal surfaces and the less you have to filter.
The natural workflow: open Favorites Finder, see which boards are live for your bottles, then build a Hunt around those boards to track the run. You're using distribution data to pick your stops and the hunt to manage the trip. That's the full loop.
The System Is Live in Your Dashboard
Hunts, Sighting Alerts, and Favorites Finder are all available now under the Bottle Hunter tab in your Pro dashboard. Use Favorites Finder to scope your next run, build a Hunt around it, and let Sighting Alerts fill in the gaps between trips. That's the system.
Not a Pro member yet? These three tools - combined with instant drop alerts covering 30+ NC ABC boards - are what the upgrade is built around.