“Our shit might not be that good, but you’d still suckle it like a calf at her mamma’s tit after going long enough without any other type of bourbon…”
~Jim “Gotchya Drunk” Beam
AFFotD has spent time in the past discussing the glorious American spirit known as Bourbon, and after a thousand words you’d probably have assumed we were done talking about it. Well, you assumed wrong. Much like the shakes most Americans get in the morning after they wake up but before they shotgun their first beer in the shower, we were starting to have some bad withdrawal from covering so many topics that weren’t whiskey or bourbon related. Every day that went by with us talking about the goddamn Rapture, glorious old-timey mustaches, or poop felt like the moment of resigned clarity each American faces when they wake up to find that the so-called “people who care about” them had cleared out their liquor cabinets, just before the delirium tremens sets in. America is full of epic alcoholics, is what we’re trying to say.
We think it’s safe to assume that most of you reading this assumed we were referring to the beer, and not the horrific side effect of alcohol withdrawal.
We missed talking about bourbon, and you missed (drink) having AFFotD (drink) write articles that very (drink) subtly and subliminally (drink) told you to go out and drink (…d..drink). That’s why we are here to add…
AFFotD’s Appendix to the Original Guide to Bourbon (in America)
We’ve discussed the rules for producing bourbon, how much alcohol has to be in place, what sour mash is, and how Buffalo Bill absolutely invented it, no matter how many people try to say things like, “That’s blatantly false, AFFotD” or, “Come on, let’s go, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about” or, “Oh God, you just puked on my shoes, you drunk asshole.” But we’ve not talked about the importance of bourbon, and about how bourbon is an integral part of the American alcohol scene now more than ever.
There has always been a sharp divide between Americans who want to drink something that tastes good that gets them drunk, and those Americans who don’t want to betray their Americanness through getting a frilly fruity drink. Every time you drink a fruit beer, for example, someone kicks the Lincoln Memorial straight in the groin. There’s a reason why they give fruit beers a non-English name, after all.
God, even the names of people who WRITE about it are obnoxiously French
As a result, we’ve had to come up with drinks that were both A- American but B- delicious and fancy. The answer was to use Bourbon. Many can attribute this to the Mad Men effect, which has done wonders for the popularity of Manhattans, Old Fashioneds, and sexual harassment. That’s right, there are bartenders using Bourbon as a mixer. That’s incredible.
But of course, the current trend of Americans to indulge in exotic Bourbon based cocktails is only part of the reason we feel we need to talk about Bourbon. Bourbon, as science has told us, makes you more attractive to members of the other sex, and actually stops the physical effects of aging. It also increases the amount of Americlorines that go through your blood system by several degrees. For these reasons, and many others, there are currently more barrels of Bourbon aging in Kentucky than the amount of people who live in the state.
Yes, just consider that for a while.
That does not include the increasingly popular and ever-American bourbon aged beers.
Bourbon is more than just an effective and delicious way to get Americans drunk (and given that it, by legal definition, has to be more than 51% pure alcohol, it is quite the effective way to do so), Bourbon is an American institution, the one form of distilled alcohol that reeks of pure American tradition. Vodka, Scotch, Gin, all of these are delicious and necessary alcohols that Americans should have intimate knowledge with, but none will ever hold a dangerously flammable candle to…Bourbon.
