Over the years I have been chasing a complete run of the same brand of prohibition whiskey bottle sizes: quart, pint, 1/2 pint, 1/4 pint, and 1/10 pint. As it turns out, my quest is impossible to complete, which I will detail here in a minute. Because of this, I have done the next best thing by including two post-prohibition bottles and one brand that doesn’t match but fills in the 1/4 pint slot. Whiskey Bottle Sizes: Quart My original...
Forrest Cokely who writes for Old Liquors Magazine was kind enough to reach out for a short interview and include me in this very informative article he wrote named The Last Call – Tasting History with Pre-Prohibition Bourbon. Give it a read as I’m sure you will not be...
The biggest thing I have learned from collecting prohibition medicinal whiskeys is that the brand doesn’t matter the vast majority of the time. For example, I have a 1/2 pint Old Fitz and a 1/2 pint Waterfill and Frazier. Both were distilled by Mary M. Dowling (one of the most fascinating female distillers of all time. Read this: http://pre-prowhiskeymen.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-mary-dowling-outwitted-national.html). The juice in...
In this post I want to share one of my favorite brands: Old Sunny Brook. It isn’t particularly hard to find and doesn’t excite many collectors but I’m a big fan of the evolution of this brand and its mascot, The Inspector. In the photo above we have four bottles that represent very different eras in whiskey history. The half-pint bottle second from the left is from the pre-prohibition era and was actually distilled by The...
It has been yet another long while since I’ve posted to this blog so I thought I would focus on some of the more obscure bottles in my collection. Today I want to share a beautiful example of vintage label design. Not only does the color pop with rarely seen yellows and blues but you also get to feast your eyes on what must have been the equivalent of 1920’s soft porn. Va-va VOOM! For those of you who have followed my blog...
Hello Whiskey Benders! I have decided to widen the scope of my blog and basically include anything about whiskey that tickles my fancy. Today’s post is about, you guessed it, whiskey decanters. I remember when I was a kid and my Dad had a nice collection of decanters on the bar at the house I grew up in. Some people use decanters to put bottom shelf booze in so guests aren’t all judgy about what the host is serving. Not my Dad. He...
Today’s post is a salute to distiller Stitzel-Weller and the brand Old Fitzgerald. These bottles, all unopened, range from the prohibition era up to the mid sixties or maybe a little later. I’m more in the mood of posting photographs rather than storytelling at the moment, so for an exhaustive and fun historical read, please visit The Coopered Tot’s Old Fitzgerald post. I find myself continually visiting this article for the...
Hello fellow Whisky Benders! This time I’m going to let the pictures do the talking as I share photos sent in for appraisal or general information during 2014. Some are good, some bad, and some ugly. All of them interesting. Scroll down to see last year’s crop. Thanks to everybody who sent photos to me last year! Please keep them coming so we can learn more about these old dusty whiskeys and share with other enthusiasts....
A fellow whiskey enthusiast and a reader of this blog (aka a “WhiskeyBender”) sent the following amazing specimen of a pre-prohibition bottle of Golden Wedding Whiskey. For those of you who remember my Dad’s Golden Wedding post, this is quite the polar opposite of those examples. Distilled by Jos. S. Finch & Co. of Pittsburgh, PA, this beauty has held up well over the years and looks like it would be Mmmm mmm good. You...
Here is one of my favorite bottles in my collection. I’ve seen two others out there that are sealed and unopened and one is a permanent guest at the Getz Whiskey Museum in Bardstown, Kentucky. Scroll to the bottom of this blog post from the Alcohol Professor to see one of them (among some other great bottles). Obviously, the Old Rip Van Winkle brand has been around a long time. In fact, according to the ORVW website: The Old Rip Van...