Old Liquor

[Martin Hash]

My dad, though my mother was Mormon, had a liquor cabinet. I knew they both would drink “grasshopers,” a minty drink, but I never raided it as a kid. My grandfather had whiskey in porcelain decorator flasks that he kept on their dishes display cabinet. When he died, I kept the gold model T with tiny glasses and a decanter, but gave all the collectibles to my Uncle Bill like my grandfather always said he was going to do. Someday, I’d like to buy the vintage ones I remember off of eBay but in the meantime, I’ve got quite a collection of modern ones given to me as gifts over the years.

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Recently, my wife’s almost 99-year-old uncle died. The rest of the family knew my proclivities, and told me to take all of the liquor which my teetotalling uncle had accumulated over the years. Most of the bottles had been opened but some still had the seal on them from decades before. Looking online, it appears to be almost 5 decades. Both of the bottles of mescal still have a worm floating in them. The Jim Beam is in an old-fashioned box, and the Old Crow, which I remember from my dad’s stash, still in factory giftwrapping, went out of business in 1988. In all, there’s a half-dozen of these half-century-old never opened bottles of spirits. Apparently, there’s a market if I wanted to sell them, but I don’t; I want to display them with my decanters on my grandmother's dishes display cabinet that I now have.

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