Aged Whiskey Quotes

Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.

A woman is like whiskey. She evaporates a little over time, distilled by disappointments and grief. One can never predict if the angels will take the best of her or the worst. Only time will tell is the woman that remains will be bitter, dispirited or aged to perfection..

Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

It (a singer's voice) sounds as if it was aged in a whiskey cask, cured in an Ozarks smokehouse, dropped down a stone well, pulled out damp, and kept moist in the palm of a wicked woman's hand.

It takes a lady of a certain age to contain the stuff [whiskey]. Particularly the Irish. No offense but a bit of weathering and experience are required not to go right off the edge with it. I would heisitate to serve Irish to a green schoolgirl. Mixes and vodka are enough for them to go wrong on. I couldn't look at myself shaving if I poured Irish for the young.

We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.

Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger’s mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two.

This life is cut with trails unrode. There was a time I resented that fact, the cruelty of being stuck to only one. But age like I got teaches you to be grateful for those trails untook. The old mind can wander their lengths and see what the eyes was never allowed, what the eyes would have missed. I’ve had time to wander those trails that interest me.

Old Man River! That seems far too austere a name For something made of mirth and rage. O, roiling red-blood river vein, If chief among your traits is age, You're a wily, convoluted sage. Is "old" the thing to call what rings The vernal heart of wester-lore; What brings us brassy-myth made kings (And preponderance of bug-type things) To challenge titans come before? Demiurge to a try at Avalon-once-more! And what august vitality In your wide aorta stream You must have had to oversee Alchemic change of timber beam To iron, brick and engine steam. Your umber whiskey waters lance The prideful sober sovereignty Of faulty-haloed Temperance And wilt her self-sure countenance; Yes, righteousness is vanity, But your sport's for imps, not elderly. If there's a name for migrant mass Of veteran frivolity That snakes through seas of prairie grass And groves of summer sassafras, A name that flows as roguishly As gypsy waters, fast and free, It's your real name, Mississippi.

My, aren't we bold with well-aged whiskey?

The bookstore had no musty “old books” smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for aging. This was a place where you would age well.

In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You’re two inches shorter than you used to be. You’re ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don’t work as well as they once did and you can’t open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don’t have room for breakfast. You lose close friends and discover one of the worst truths of old age: they’re irreplaceable. People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.

She is better than strong whiskey on a cold night. Better than anything he’s felt in ages.

Turned out I had a rare, deliciously aged bottle of whiskey in my grip, but I slip it through my slick fingers and crash to the floor. And I wasn't the one allowed to pick up the pieces.

Maybe he never did. Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger’s mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over

But as we all learn at a young age, what goes up, must come down. And oh how we crashed.

Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations—whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes—without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

They loved him, or loved the thought of him, what they thought he was: a man who could easily have had a good life who chose instead their life: spite and bitterness and age-fogged glasses of watery whiskey in dark, cobwebbed country bars, shit-smeared toilets, blood-streaked piss, and early death. He could have helped it but didn't. They couldn't help it and loved him for being worse than them. He was the king of the wasters.

maybe if everyone appreciated good whiskey, pretty girls and breathing a little bit more, there’d be fewer suckers out there willing to fight and die in the petty wars begun by the sharp, the mendacious and the wicked.

I learned from a young age the tenacity of ruin. Through the parlor window, with every angry brown spit into his can, with every swig of whiskey, Og reminded me not to trust in appearances for clues to what might come.

I couldn't think of one scenario where he would lose me forever, because a piece of my soul was tied to that boy and I had already lost so much of myself at that age, I refused to let go of what little I still held onto.

The bookstore had no musty ‘old books’ smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for ageing. This was a place where you would age well.

If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

Angels’ Share: In storage, a small amount of alcohol escapes the barrel through evaporation. Distillers call this lost alcohol the angels’ share. Whiskey and brandy makers estimate that the angels get about 2 percent of the alcohol in a barrel each year, although that can vary depending on humidity and temperature. Fortunately, they can afford to lose some, as most spirits are aged at a higher proof than the final bottling.

On one side was Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s right-hand man since the Revolution and the architect of the hated whiskey tax. Hamilton came from humble beginnings in the Caribbean but had pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps to quickly gain acceptance among the elite power brokers of New York finance. During the Revolution, he was assigned to Washington’s staff and impressed the general, quickly becoming one of Washington’s most trusted advisers. After the war, he was appointed as the first treasury secretary at the age of thirty-two. From that lofty perch he championed industry and big finance and wrote the whiskey tax to promote the advancement of larger, more established distilleries on the East Coast, to the detriment of smaller frontier distilleries. His grave today rests in his adopted city of New York, in a cemetery at the top of Wall Street.

Less knows so well the pleasures of youth - danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger's mouth - and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age - comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunset over water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two. There is his own distant youth, that daily humiliation of rinsing out your one good shirt and putting on your onw good smile, along with the daily rush of newness: new pleasures, new people, new reflections of yourself. There is Robert's middle age of selecting his vices as carefully as tiles in a Paris shop, napping in the sunlight on an afternoon and getting up from a chair and hearing the creak of death. The city of youth, the country of age. But in between, where Less is living - that exurban existence? How has he never learned to live it?

When rum goes into a barrel, the same wonderful interplay of alcohol and wood that makes whiskey so mellow and smooth also happens with rum. But in the tropics, it happens much, much faster. A barrel of rum (often a used bourbon barrel) loses a whopping 7 to 8 percent of its alcohol per year as the wood expands and softens in the steamy heat. What might take twelve years to accomplish in Scotland happens in just a few years in Cuba. For this reason, dark, well-aged Caribbean rums are astonishingly rich and complex after just a short repose in wood.

I looked back and forth from my glass to hers. “Why does your tea look different?” “Because my tea is whiskey.” She grinned proudly. “Whiskey?” I stared at it incredulously before checking the time on my phone. “It’s ten thirty in the morning.” “Lawrence, when you’re my age, you learn to do things when you want to do them, not when it’s socially acceptable. Hell, who knows if I’ll still be around at dinner time? While we’re on the subject, I had half a tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner last night. Cheers!” She raised her glass again and winked at me.

Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

If, when you say whiskey, you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacles of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degredation and despair, shame and helplessness and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it with all my power. But if, when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the stuff that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty morning; if you mean the drink that enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrows, if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm, to build highways, hospitals, and schools, then certainly I am in favor of it.

The Drunken Fisherman" Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah's bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar to tell the day; A handkerchief to wave away The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm Pouching a bottle in one arm; A whiskey bottle full of worms; And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms To mete the worm whose molten rage Boils in the belly of old age? Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean. Children, the raging memory drools Over the glory of past pools. Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls Its bloody waters into holes; A grain of sand inside my shoe Mimics the moon that might undo Man and Creation too; remorse, Stinking, has puddled up its source; Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage. This is the pot-hole of old age. Is there no way to cast my hook Out of this dynamited brook? The Fisher's sons must cast about When shallow waters peter out. I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.

But if, when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the stuff that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty morning; if you mean the drink that enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrows, if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm, to build highways, hospitals, and schools, then certainly I am in favor of it.

Less knows so well the pleasures of youth— danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger’s mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two. There is his own distant youth, that daily humiliation of rinsing out your one good shirt and putting on your one good smile, along with the daily rush of newness: new pleasures, new people, new reflections of yourself. There is Robert’s late middle age of selecting vices as carefully as ties in a Paris shop, napping in the sunlight on an afternoon and getting up from a chair and hearing the creak of death. The city of youth, the country of age. But in between, where Less is living— that exurban existence? How has he never learned to live it?

After Standard Oil Company founder John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in the world, he offered gardening advice to a group of young men at a Brown University Bible study. He told his admiring audience, “The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” Rockefeller's audacious winner-take-all metaphor about the American Beauty rose was a description of how Standard Oil had bested its competitors. The clumsy reference to God at the end of the remarks was a meager attempt to morally sanction the ideas of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had recently seduced the robber baron community by adapting scientific ideas like “survival of the fittest” into a loose form of Social Darwinism that defined Gilded Age business.

Less is not known as a teacher, in the same way Melville was not known as a customs inspector. And yet both held the respective positions. Though he was once an endowed chair at Robert’s university, he has no formal training except the drunken, cigarette-filled evenings of his youth, when Robert’s friends gathered and yelled, taunted, and played games with words. As a result, Less feels uncomfortable lecturing. Instead, he re-creates those lost days with his students. Remembering those middle-aged men sitting with a bottle of whiskey, a Norton book of poetry, and scissors, he cuts up a paragraph of Lolita and has the young doctoral students reassemble the text as they desire. In these collages, Humbert Humbert becomes an addled old man rather than a diabolical one, mixing up cocktail ingredients and, instead of confronting the betrayed Charlotte Haze, going back for more ice. He gives them a page of Joyce and a bottle of Wite-Out—and Molly Bloom merely says “Yes.” A game to write a persuasive opening sentence for a book they have never read (this is difficult, as these diligent students have read everything) leads to a chilling start to Woolf’s The Waves: I was too far out in the ocean to hear the lifeguard shouting, “Shark! Shark!” Though the course features, curiously, neither vampires nor Frankenstein monsters, the students adore it. No one has given them scissors and glue sticks since they were in kindergarten. No one has ever asked them to translate a sentence from Carson McCullers (In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together) into German (In der Stadt gab es zwei Stumme, und sie waren immer zusammen) and pass it around the room, retranslating as they go, until it comes out as playground gibberish: In the bar there were two potatoes together, and they were trouble. What a relief for their hardworking lives. Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage. Because of this, they learn to love their teacher.

Cassidy had been created by Clarence Mulford, writer of formula western novels and pulpy short stories. In the stories, Cassidy was a snorting, drinking, chewing relic of the Old West. Harry Sherman changed all that when he bought the character for the movies. Sherman hired Boyd, a veteran of the silent screen whose star had faded, to play a badman in the original film. But Boyd seemed more heroic, and Sherman switched the parts before the filming began. As Cassidy, Boyd became a knight of the range, a man of morals who helped ladies cross the street but never stooped to kiss the heroine. He was literally black and white, his silver hair a vivid contrast to his black getup. He did not smoke, believed absolutely in justice, honor, and fair play, and refused to touch liquor. Boyd’s personal life was not so noble. Born in Ohio in 1898, he had arrived in Hollywood for the first golden age, working with Cecil B. DeMille in a succession of early silents. By the mid-1920s he was a major star. Wine, women, and money were his: he drank and gambled, owned estates, married five times. But it all ended when another actor named William Boyd was arrested for possession of whiskey and gambling equipment.

I hope at 50 I'll be dancing like Gianluca Vacchi Party, whiskey, Bellini, Martini, Bloody Maries Bad & Boujee, Tutti Fruity booty, type that really moves me Kundalini rising, energy fill me completely I hope at 50 I'll be writing books like JK Rowling Pen and paper take me places, countries far and foreign Find a cafe up in Edinburgh, write in Scotland Let the stories in my head come out, bloom and blossom I hope at 50
I'll be wealthy like Carlos Slim Buying yachts and mansions and my mother shiny things Encrusted diamond dial on a new Patek Philippe Chill in Maldives but do charity in Ardabil I hope at 50
I'll be funny like Stephen Colbert Cracking witty jokes, making everyone laugh in tears Laughter it goes round and round like a carousel Chronic comic sonic sounds of haha everywhere I hope at 50
I'll be stoic like Robert De Niro Zeno school of thought put an end to my evil ego I hope at 50
I'll be fit as The Rock, Dwayne Johnson Hard rock abs to be paired with an even harder mindset I hope at 50,
I'll be wise like Denzel Washington
Wisdom, knowledge and the faith of God under my skin I hope at 50,
I'll find real love like George Clooney
Amal Alamuddin clone is the type that really moves me

Hackworth took a bite of his sandwich, correctly anticipating that the meat would be gristly and that he would have plenty of time to think about his situation while his molars subdued it. He did have plenty of time, as it turned out; but as frequently happened to him in these situations, he could not bring his mind to bear on the subject at hand. All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, singlemalt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain deaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

When whiskey was supposed to be taxed at $2 a gallon and sold for $1.25 a gallon, it did not take advanced math to guess something was amiss.

Bourbon just isn’t bourbon without some quality time spent in a charred-oak barrel. The aging process lends whiskey much of its distinctive color and taste.

Having that much whiskey is never a choice. At a certain point, the whiskey gods just take over and have their way with you, whether you like it or not.

White horses are a symbol of death, as well you know. And is half your fault, I suspect.

How long has it been, mistress? Just think: I offer what another cannot. I am what I am, and no apologies. I will not lie to you, promise to protect you, take my use of you, and leave. I cannot, and you will always have control of me.

You change in my arms and change again, and all I can do is hold you.

Carel, there’s a unicorn eating your lily buds.

Whiskey pricked up his ears, arching his neck, knowing himself displayed.

I turned back so he would see me smile through the shadows, and Whiskey bore me into the trees before I so much as shifted my weight.

Everyone was waiting for something: an arrival, a departure. It made a pleasing sort of allegory.

His poet would never disappoint him.

Of course I love him. I made him. And he came back through history to unmake me. You don’t get to fall out of love with the Devil.

Somewhere, he found a smile that was positively sunny, and gave it to her.

The devils bowed to one another, one cruel-eyed and smoking, rose petals sizzling under his footsteps, the other white and fair and wearing a crown of dancing shadows on his brow.

Pray let us greet our host and the guest of honor, that I may receive my measure of scorn from each and we may be away.

Marlowe patted Matthew on the shoulder, and Matthew found himself grinning in naked relief; notorious rakehell, sodomite, and playboy he might be remembered as, but lately Christopher Marlowe was the only person who seemed willing to touch Matthew without some implication lying predatory behind it.

When all else failed, her grandmother Mary would have said, good manners never deserted one.

A dark-haired young woman in bright sunflower barrettes brushed by Matthew; undressing him with a look that he profoundly ignored, though he wouldn’t have if he’d felt the fey iciness that a very particular, very exhausting sort of spell cloaked from both him and Kit.

Jane, he realized now, with an old familiar chill, had never lost her grip on his leash.

We’d prefer to see Faerie driven entirely from the iron world,” Jane said, abandoning her pretense of being an observer when the Bunyip stared at her. “And I want Matthew back. Unharmed. He’s too useful to be left wandering around uncontrolled.

It was an old sick power, rich and nauseous and irrestible as any unhallowed love he’d ever known. It ran shivery caresses up the inside of his skin, weighed a stone like desire in his gut and groin.

His gratification was a chill stone on her breast.

Every question is the answer to someone else’s dilemma.

Whatever confidence came to her when she gripped a knife didn’t serve her here.

One does not call down archangels in my city, Detective, if one cares to go unnoticed.

The light through beech limbs dappled her long indigo-black torso, leafy transluscence, creating a diffuse green glow broken by dancing radiant rays.

Loose crimson trousers wrapped her lower body, her bracelets and necklaces tinkling like glass bells as she breathed.

The atmosphere of money enfolded Peese like cling film when he entered Jane’s apartment. It coated his skin, thick and silken; it slid down his throat like buttermilk. It intimidated. It was meant to.

In any case, Prometheus is in the process of reinvention. I’d like to plead our case.

Jane did not rise, and the angel did not settle. But the silence dragged taut between them as if they struggled over a rope, and in Michael’s eyes Jane saw all her sin and malfeasance, the small selfishnesses and the hubris that had nearly wrecked the world, reflected. The chill settled into her, hard and sharp as swallowed glass. She had failed and failed again, and all her failures were naked in her angel’s eyes.

Christian smiled the sort of smile that vampires might affect, to hide their fangs.

Good Goth girls knew these things. Good comparative religion grad students knew them, too.

She tossed her hair behind her shoulder. Not a coquette’s gesture, but a queen’s.

If anything meant home and strength and heart and culture more to him than the New York Public Library lions, he couldn’t have named it.

She had controlled him. Down to the breath he drew. He’d thanked her for it, and it hadn’t been enough for her. Fair enough. He had, after all, defied her in the end.

The Queen’s voice had dropped, softened. Carel recognized it: the voice of the woman, not the Queen, unheard in seven years. In another circumstance, she might have found it beautiful.

She smiled and leaned on him. It would have been nice to earn that smile. Nice to feel the trust, the partnership, the old friendship they had had. Nice to smile back, to reach out, and take her hand.

Lies are stories.

Kit bumped Matthew with his shoulder, the way, once upon a time, he might have nudged another friend.

Such a pretty thing, and so flawed at his heart: it made the Devil’s fingers itch to mend him.

I’d changed my gown for trousers and a chain haulberk, and I had a silver sword I hadn’t the faintest idea how to use strapped to the saddle that Whiskey had grudgingly accepted.

A weapon is only a weapon with a will behind it, and a chain is only a chain when someone holds the key.

I nudged Whiskey down the far side of the rise, and came among them like Death on my pale horse.

After what felt like ages and aeons and probably centuries, Pyrrhus took a long swig from a glass of whiskey and after winking at his reflection left the room, feeling taller than he was when he entered, way before he put on a façade of cunning and a shield of apathy and masqueraded amongst all others as a person of sane tenor.

Quality? Hell, the only time our whiskey aged was when we got a flat tire. Rex Walls, the author’s father, who ran bootleg liquor in the late 1940s and early 1950s

I’ll tell you,” she says, heading to the kitchen. “But first we will need coffee.” “Make mine with whiskey.” She brings me coffee made of coffee. Passive-aggressive little shit.

They say every year a batch of whiskey goes without being bottled, each year it’s aged, four percent of alcohol evaporates — and that’s the Angel’s share.

Each year, roughly seven thousand cases were released, just enough to get it nationwide attention with a few bottles in most of the country’s higher-end liquor stores. It had presence, but not so much as to undermine its own sense of exclusivity. This careful positioning, combined with a catchy name and the flashy age statements, put Pappy into the marketing sweet spot bound to attract the celebrity chefs, food writers, and other various apparatchiks of the foodie-industrial complex who are responsible for converting their fetishes into national obsessions.

This common industry arrangement is usually called “sourcing” or “contract distilling” and those companies on the receiving end are typically called NDPs, short for “non-distiller producers” (you can tell them apart on the liquor store shelf by tiny print reading “produced by,” or some similar variation, rather than “distilled by,” since they’re not technically distillers and government regulations prevent them from saying otherwise). For many upstart distilleries, sourcing is simply a way to become established while they wait for their own whiskey stocks to age, although most, understandably, don’t advertise that fact.

All American whiskeys are made in a similar fashion. Cereal grains, predominantly corn, rye, wheat, and barley, are malted—a process wherein grains are germinated, converting their starch into sugars—and then fermented and distilled in either pot stills or continuous column stills. Most are aged in oak barrels.

If I’d known back then about the Angel’s tax, I would have laughed. They say every year a batch of whiskey goes without being bottled, each year it’s aged, four percent of alcohol evaporates — and that’s the Angel’s share. It really was funny, then, that I’d neglected to bottle Jamie up for myself and so he’d been stolen by a woman named Angel.

The barrel had aged him well, and even with the Angel’s tax, he’d only gotten better over time.

Quality? Hell, the only time our whiskey aged was when we got a flat tire.

1794: The great Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania.

Hackworth took a bite of his sandwich, correctly anticipating that the meat would be gristly and that he would have plenty of time to think about his situation while his molars subdued it. He did have plenty of time, as it turned out; but as frequently happened to him in these situations, he could not bring his mind to bear on the subject at hand. All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

I’ve no soul to love with, mistress, nor kindness to give. I am of the Fae so old we blur into things that are ancienter still, and I will tell you that there is nothing in me that cares for you.

I am but a petty godling, it’s true, but I am the god of the dark depths of passion, the sea that draws and gives back life. Tell you don’t crave the attention.

Tell me nothing in you chafes at the cool certainty of Faerie. That there is no human soul in you, craving touch, craving passion and emotion.

Oh, human memory is shorter than I thought.

In addition to generous quantities of whiskey, brandy, and still wines, Cornelia Bradley-Martin’s guests consumed sixty cases of a Moët & Chandon champagne that a local historian recalled as “the most expensive sparkling wine known in the United States in 1897.

In that moment, wrapped in his arms under a woven blanket, I felt euphoric. But as we all learn at a young age, what goes up, must come down. And oh how we crashed.

WHEN I IMAGINE where I want to live, the first thing that comes to mind is where I want to have that coffee in the morning. I picture the breakfast nook or the chair and the book and the coffee and the view. My second dream is where I will have a beer. I see afternoon light getting low and angled, sending yellow rays through the tree branches. Maybe on a back patio, or on a grassy bluff over the Pacific Ocean. The imagined locations of our happy places say something about us. About how we recharge or what we crave. I want a cottage on a boulder mountain. A bed and a quilt and an old stove with a teakettle on it. A telescope and a chart of constellations. Books everywhere. Removed from the world but also in it, caring about it and for it. Being old and thoughtful with a pipe to smoke on the porch and a few squirrels who trust me. A raven would be even better. And friends stopping in. Nieces and nephews making the trek to the mountain for a night of stories and some whiskey in their Dr Pepper. I’ll pour it and say, “This never happened.” Of course, I’m too social for that fantasy. I like being in the thick and churn of society. So I’d probably get up to that cabin on a mountain and leave after a month or two. But who knows what age will do to me. Who knows if I’ll slow down, less hungry and more content. Who knows if I’ll find a raven who’ll have me.