The Collingwood 21 Year Old Rye Canadian Whisky

100 ml bootlegger's hip flask--or hipster's boot flask

Tasting notes:
The Collingwood 21-year old Rye Canadian Whisky nose opens like a varnished hen begging for a cocktail. Like varmints who vanish falling into a giant downy, grassy duvet on a waterbed stuffed with rose and tulip leaves, engulfed and degaussed. [John: Bill, “degaussing” means “demagnetizing.”] And that’s what I meant, John. Figure it out. Anyways, lots of flowers, almost too many to identify, like walking into a Beverly Hills flower shop, kind of a giant magnitude vector that can’t be multiplied by a scalar, if you know what I mean. [Stephen: No, Bill, we don’t.]

     On the mouth, it’s like tundra: no wood, which while not odd for tundra, is odd for a 21 year old dram. There’s a little tar, like crackerjack candy made with rendered clove cigarettes instead of caramel. And, if instead of pop-corn, it was pop-alfalfa. And, if instead of candy, it was the fluid used to cryogenically store the heads of Ted Williams and his son.
     The finish is the world’s best fruitcake, a lively vivacious precocious 21 year-old held back by helicopter parents. It’s a gentle burn, like a Canadian tourist thinking of a way to insult a Park Slope scruff-chinned artisanal shoelace-maker. Penuche fudge—a favorite—and Marge Simpson spilling a bottle of Tabasco® in Mel’s Diner, and no one is sure if it was an accident or intentional.

  

Rating:

–On the scale of pormanteaus-constructed-on-the-spot–
The Collingwood 21-year old Rye Canadian Whisky is Joan Collins having a cameo in “Deadwood”–A Collingwood! [John: That’d be a Collinswood, not a Collingwood.] Fine! Then cross Joan Collins with a calling card and Woody from Toy Story—and don’t you dare tell me that that would be a Collingwoody, even if that’s what this delightful dram yields at the Viagara Falls.    
    
    

   
      
    

   
                                  –Bill
    
    
     
     
      
     
  
–Our thanks to Andrea Duvall, Elizabeth Bingham, and Brown-Forman for the sample.

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