Drink the Bottles

  There are certain bottles that come with a reputation before you ever pour them.   Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey is one of those bottles. Mention Skrewball at a party and there's a pretty good chance someone will immediately think of a shot. The distinctive bottle has become almost synonymous with the sweet, nutty whiskey that helped make peanut butter whiskey a recognizable category.  And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But here's the thing: Skrewball is capable of doing considerably more than occupying a shot glass. After spending some time looking at the whiskey from a cocktail perspective, we think it's time to reconsider what this unconventional spirit can bring to the bar.  Because once you stop thinking of Skrewball as the peanut butter whiskey you take shots of and start thinking of it as a cocktail ingredient, things get considerably more interesting. A Peanut Butter Whiskey That Started With a Cocktail Skrewball's story is almost...

We don't have an opportunity to taste many flavored whiskies, but it's always fun and interesting to see how one brand compares over another.  Flavored whiskey is great for the novice whiskey drinker who wants to try whiskey without getting the familiar burn or "hug" from the bottle.  It is also fantastic in festive and summertime cocktails and for creating your own signature drink.  This is  Firefly Distillery Steel Feathers Blackberry Whiskey  and it is definitely one of the better flavored whiskey offerings we have tasted in a very long time.   Jim Irvin and Scott Newitt are the co-founders of Firefly Distillery, bringing their experience from years working in the wine business to a venture that included not only traditional distilled spirits like whiskey, rum, gin and moonshine, but also ready-to-drink cocktails.  The Steel Feathers Blackberry Whiskey is a selection from their Tom and Huck Distillers series and it features "good ol' southern c...

  If you don't vacation on the east coast, you may  not know that Ocean City, MD is a hotbed of tourist activity in the summer months.  But it is also a one-of-a-kind distillery, producing award-winning rum, whiskey, vodka and gin.  We were fortunate to taste these  Seacrets Distilling Company  flavored vodkas, just in time for the hot summer weather and they are really something special.  Whether or not you consider yourself a vodka consumer, we think you'll be pleasantly surprised by what Seacrets is producing here.   If you've been around here for awhile, you know that we taste everything  neat - at least initially.  It can be tough to taste vodka and gin neat, as they are at the lower end of our "hey, lets' drink that today" list.  And too often you have to filter out the dozens of flavored vodka that sit on the shelf produced by the companies who are sloshing out a zillion barrels per year.  So when we had the opportu...