Watching some Fallout New Vegas play through, while picking up Whiskey, Vodka and Scotch, the Tuber comments that while in game these items are fine as they are valuable and have certain effects to use in game, “IRL even hard alcohol such as these can go bad.”
I have always assumed that hard liquor might taste funny or otherwise change with age, but the purer the liquor the less change it can go through.
Alcohol is used as a preservative, isn’t it?
I think there has also been some fanaticism over bottles of Whiskey that were well over 100 years selling for exorbitant prices, presumably for drinking.
So, how about it, 100, 200, or even 300 year old Whiskey, bottled by a professional and licensed brewery. In it’s original bottle, original cap and seal. Even the label so you know what you are getting into.
Do you? Don’t you? What is the worst that could happen?
Is this Tuber full of ****?
In my experience, old hard liquor definitely loses its flavor after a while. It still gets you drunk and wouldn’t be poisonous, but it would taste like hard-boiled ass.
But what I really want to know is who the hell would smoke those 200-year-old cartons of cigarettes! :eek:
They only go bad when you drink them.
Depends how they’re stored. Tobacco goes bad quicker if it’s damp, dried tobacco lasts pretty well. It does get powdery if it’s too dry, but bad tobacco is damp tobacco. It’s smoother the drier it is.
If it’s stored in a really dry sealed environment, it’d probably be OK. Any moisture and it’ll start to go mouldy, and - trust me on this - will be the worst thing you’ve ever smoked.
Cite: When I used to smoke, I sometimes had access to home-grown tobacco, and learned through bitter experience that it needs to be kept as dry as possible.
Not in my house.
I figured the flavor would go at some point, so Vodka might still be drinkable, to someone like me. I can’t tell the difference between two brands, not much flavor to go strange.
It would seem to me, people being able to brew their own beer and liquor, that any “old world” stuff would most likely be used as antiseptic, or to start a fire. I like Spam, or rather Cram, but 200 plus years in that can, I am gonna be reaaaaly desperate before I will open that can. Pass the whiskey please!
I will note that New Vegas does have Irradiated (beer/whiskey/Scotch), but all vodka is radiation-free (and also nuked water and Sunset Sarsparilla). Identical to the regular counterparts except they add a small amount of rads. Maybe the tobacco is treated with radiation? But smoking even year old tobacco is kind of gross.
80-proof liquor lasts indefinitely. 60- or 40-proof liqueur types may not last even in the fridge.
I have smoked 20 year old cigars and drank 30 year old scotch…both were quite tasty but also stored the way you are supposed to store those items. I can’t imagine either being any good after a couple hundred years in the desert.
I remember a news report where they had found some jars of spirits that were several hundred years old on a shipwreck on the sea floor. The jars were still sealed and full. The booze was duly tasted when it was brought up. Despite the crew not speaking English, their reaction to the taste did not need translation! 
I had a case of unopened bottles of Mezcal I brought back from Mexico in the late 70’s. I had stored it in my parents basement and forgot about it (I don’t like the stuff and found out none of my friends do either so I couldn’t give it away like I had intended). Sometime in 1996 I rediscovered the case. All of the worms had disintegrated turning the booze into an ethanol sludge. So age is definitely not a good thing for Mezcal.
My parents had some liquor (whiskey, rum, brandy, and vodka) behind their basement bar that they had bought in the 60’s and never used. I tried some of each in 1996 the same time I found that case of Mezcal. All of it tasted “flat” with little flavor. Alcohol was detected though.
if kept tightly sealed and out of the light, they should last a long time. If not tightly sealed, the more volatile ethanol will evaporate away and it’ll lose potency.
In 1965, NY Times restaurant critic had a meal for $4000 in Paris. See: Craig Claiborne - Wikipedia. (They got the date wrong, Claiborne was no longer the restaurant reviewer for the Times by 1975.) Think about $20,000-30,000 today. They had to open three bottles of pre-phyloxera wine (about 100 years old) till they got one that hadn’t turned. They ended the meal with an 1820 Napolean brandy and that was fine. The bottle had never been opened and had been kept in ideal conditions. So 150 year old hard liquor could be fine. 100 year old wine, problematic.
I don’t remember where I heard/read it, but it’s my understanding that hard liquor, unlike wine, stops aging once it’s bottled. So a 300-year-old bottle of whisky isn’t going to be any better than a 2-year-old bottle. With whisky, what matters is how long it spent in the oak keg. I read of a bottle of 50-year-old Glenfiddich selling at auction for the equivalent (at the time) of around US$5000. But it was freshly bottled. It had been in the keg for 50 years.
Meanwhile, my dad has a 50+ year-old bottle of Jim Beam. That only means that it’s been in the bottle for 50 years. IIRC from when he showed it to me, it was standard 4-year-old JB in there.
I gave my brother a bottle of 50 year old scotch when he got back from Vietnam, he wrote on it to open in 2018 50 years later if we are both still living. Thats only about 3 years away I will need to check and see if he still has it.
They should be worth a few more caps; they’ve found a crate of Shackleton’s whisky in Antarctica left untouched from 1907, still sloshing around the bottle. Even New Zealand’s PM couldn’t have a dram, but they analysed it to recreate the blend.
Interesting comments. I have a bottle of Old Taylor Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey with a tax stamp saying 1951 on it. It has a cork stopper! Looks like about an ounce may have evaporated away. I’m not sure as I don’t know how much was in the bottle in the first place.
I don’t plan on drinking it. It’s something handed down to me from my paternal grandfather.
I’ve had whiskeys that had corked bottles. Ezra Brooks used to do that. Don’t know if they still do.
Anyway, none of them ever tasted right. The cork definitely affected the flavor of the product.