Yeah, I might take a pass on the Cream whiskey, too.
Yeah, that’s one exception to the rule that liqueurs and liquors don’t really go bad in the bottle.
We have at last found a point of agreement; I think it is the ‘Disneyworld of Bourbons’ in that it is overpriced, overworked, and ultimately leaves you feeling disappointed that it just didn’t live up to the hype. I wouldn’t necessarily give bottles away unless someone got really excited about it but I would not be adverse to using it in an Old Fashioned (if I made those, which I don’t). I have not tried it since they switched distilleries but I don’t imagine that I’d find it to match the hype. In general, I’m not impressed with the recent trend of super-high-end bourbons, although I have found a few overpriced but boutique bourbons that do some interesting things.
But then, I come from the background of starting with Irish whiskeys and then Scotch and Japanese peated whiskys, and I think my tastes in what makes a good liquor are substantially different than most bourbon enthusiasts.
Stranger
Yep. I had a bottle of South African Amarillo, a type of cream liqueur, that I had forgotten about and discovered like five to seven years later. It was very obviously bad — a disgusting half solidified sludge of what it was supposed to be. I’m pretty sure I nonetheless tasted it and, um, it wasn’t good.
Well, I did give it to people that were very excited about it, and at least one bottle I traded (somewhat lopsided-ly) for something I wanted. But yeah, I don’t like wheated bourbon, and the hype train couldn’t take me past that basic misalignment. Hated is maybe a strong word, but I hated the idea that what to me was an inoffensive, unexciting pour was somehow this gold standard for what sophisticated drinkers should aspire to own.
This whole high-end bourbon explosion and the resulting battle for ‘limited’ production bottles has turned me off the whole category. I mostly buy armagnac now. Which also now I mostly don’t drink, but it’s there for me when I do.
Just be careful with amaretto. There was a murder mystery (I read it a long time and can recall nothing else about it) that involved someone opening a very old bottle and drinking the first pour without any shaking. It turned out the almond oil had concentrated over the years in the top fraction and contained enough cyanide to kill the drinker. I have no idea how realistic the whole scenario was but almonds can contain cyanide, although they will be bitter.
I’m calling a bullshit on that one. (Same for being poisoned by fruit salad because the apple seeds weren’t removed.). You probably get more cyanide exposure from a normal application of table salt than you would from amaretto, most modern brands of which don’t even use almond oil because the traditional infusion process is so time-consuming.
Stranger
You are doubtless correct. My wife thinks it might have been a Peter Wimsey story, so quite old.
That’s my speculation as well. I’ll check my Wimsey collection
(Or it could be a Montague Egg story, Sayers’s alternative detective, who was a liquor salesman.)
I think it’s « Bitter Almonds », a Montague Egg story, but I don’t have this this collection: In the Teeth of the Evidence.
I can attest to this. When my paternal grandfather passed away in the early 1970s, I inherited s few bottles of whiskey & rum. A few had tax stamps dated many years earlier. (Tax stamps are no longer dated.) They had been opened but only a little had been consumed. The corks were solid. They all tasted amazing.
you mean with disdain for the poor?
A bit of backstory to my post:
During his adult life, my late FIL was a bar owner, owned a beer distributorship, and was a union bartender. It was this last position that allowed him to accumulate all this liquor, as he was allowed (more or less) to take the leftovers after his jobs were over. I’m not sure why he would take them, as he was a nondrinker.
I should add I found leftover bottles from my wedding 34 years ago.