The Britannia Blended 8 (50 ml airline bottle)

Tasting notes:
      A recent study whose particulars I lack (blah blah, Journal of Psychology of Addictive Behaviors) suggests that prayer and drinking are inversely correlated; that is, the more one prays, the less one drinks, and the more one drinks, the less one prays.  Now one may debate the merits and wider meanings of a statistical study run by social scientists, but rather than explore that fruitful avenue inquiry, I instead unearth an easy paradox.
      I pray, nay, beseech higher powers for good, nay, great whisky expressions to fall manna-like from heaven into my Glencairn snifter.  With gratifying regularity, due to the kind offices of Stephen’s father and John’s brother-in-law—and the manufacturers with the wisdom to create airplane nip bottles—my prayers are answered.  Hence, the more I pray, it seems, the more I drink.  A refutation?  No, simply a self-referential paradox. (But a disturbing one.)
      The Brittania Blended 8 year old is NOT the answer to anyone’s prayers.  I’ve often wondered how Stephen and John feel when the snarktastic task of writing up a non-starter falls to them. Well, now I have a clue.  It’s not exactly clear to me what Brittania blended—legally, whiskies of at least 8 years of age, I suppose—but the nose hints rather at a poorly-tanned snakeskin belt wrapped around a cedar log with a rabid, near-zombiesque armadillo supine on top.  A second sniff instead unfortunately invites a gobsmacking by a phenolic porcupine surmounted by a wasabi-dabbed sea urchin.  All tossed into a blender.
       In the mouth, a soon-to-be-sunk Lusitania, spewing diesel smoke, with an impossibly anachronistic pair of fowl; a dodo and a passenger pigeon, both perched upon the poop-deck rail. (Or was it the orlop?)  Maybe a malodorous mound of mouldering monkey mucous with a mange-ridden mouse micturating on top, decaying like J. Lo’s career?  All thrown into a Cuisinart.
       The finish impresses, much as eating a lit cigar from the clipped end would impress, especially if a stink bug and a tomato horned caterpillar were held on top of the cigar by mucilage or worse, gutta-percha.  Which is to say, it is impressive(ly awful).  All tossed into a vat of prussic acid.
     
 
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