The Primordial Soup

“Excuse me, we can’t let you do that here,” said a voice not far behind my back as I was placing a coffin of Booker’s 25th next to a bottle of Heaven Hill Select Stock “Bottled for the Bourbon Bar,” which I had just moments before placed next to the empty orange juice container on the breakfast bar at a mid-market hotel in Buckhead, Georgia. Here began the series of events that led me to become a Bourbon Crusader. The voice belonged to the hotel evening manager, who must have been shocked more than anything to discover seven gentlemen pulling bottles of bourbon and rye from various bags and setting the bottles disorganized onto any available counter space. Sazerac 18 was nearest the cereal dispenser, and a Willett 25 year rye was, I believe, standing guard in front of the forks and knives. I was in Buckhead for an impromptu whiskey tasting spurred by a random tweet from a well-known truthspeaker. It was an easy 90-minute drive and an even easier excuse to try a lineup of whiskeys as grand as I may ever again taste.

Rather than take the defeat to heart, our tasting group retreated to the confines of my hotel room and transformed the desk into a temple of brown spirits.It was somewhere around the Willett red ink that one of our group said, “Hey, we should try to do this again in Kentucky.” “Yes! Definitely! Say when!” echoed in response. I, at first, took it to be the typical words of jubilation that inherently start from multiple pours of whiskey churning in the stomach like spent mash with the words rising up and stripped into buzz-inducing alcohol vapors in the brain before being condensed and flowing down and out the mouth as the verbal equivalent of harsh, unrefined low wine distillate. Yet, just weeks later, the same truthspeaker put out a 140-character clarion call for a once-in-a-lifetime “fantasy camp” trip to the Bluegrass State, an immersion experience like no other for bourbon lovers. Two others in the Buckhead tasting and I responded and shortly thereafter, having dropped off the dog, I found myself driving up I-75 on April 9th into a five-and-a-half day Crusade that will never be replicated.