Whiskey gifts, sorted by what you want to spend

This is the budget half of the site. The other half is by recipient, and most people end up using both - work out who it is for, then work out what you want to spend, and the intersection is usually a shortlist of two or three.

Budget pages are the ones most damaged by stale prices, and almost every budget gift guide online is broken in the same way: the prices were typed into the page once, at publication, and nobody has checked them since. A page headed under $50 that lists a product now selling for $71 is not a slightly out-of-date page - it is a page that fails at the one job it has.

So these pages do not carry a hand-curated list. Each one has a ceiling, and every pick is checked against that ceiling when the page renders. Anything over it is removed automatically. Where our live price feed has a current figure, that is what the filter uses; where it does not, the page falls back to the price band each product sat in when we read its listing, and it tells you on the page that it is doing so. We would rather show you which of the two you are looking at than quietly present an unverified number as today's price.

The usefulness curve in this category flattens early. A fifteen-dollar nosing glass delivers essentially the entire functional benefit that glassware can deliver - the taper concentrates aroma, and a hundred-dollar glass tapers no harder. Above about fifty dollars you are buying material, weight, hand-finishing and a maker's name.

Those are real things and they are legitimate to want, particularly for a milestone. They are just not the same as buying a better drink, and this section tries to be clear about which one you are doing at each rung. Why decanters are so expensive is the fullest version of that argument.