This is another “first” for me. The first “first” was my review of the 21 year old edition of Ballantine’s, a blended Scotch whisky. The second “first” is this review of a six year old edition of Canadian Club bottled in 1955. Take note of the carefully removed tax stamp in the image provided which documents my claim. The following are my thoughts.

Picking your nose in public was just as inappropriate in the 1950s as it is today. “Separate but Equal” laws were ungodly in the 1950s and they remain so today. “Duck and Cover” instructional filmstrips regarding proper head protection techniques during a nuclear attack are just as useless today as they were in the 1950s. Born an abomination in the 1950s, Soap Operas continue to be pumped through our TVs as worthless jip.

Can you guess where this is going? Certain things were crappy in the 1950s and, well, they still are.

I retrieved a rather old bottle of Canadian Club from my private stock of antique beauties. I never intended to drink this whiskey, but intended to eventually sell it. Nevertheless, after a few drinks, I wandered to the secret stash and retrieved this esteemed senior citizen beloved by so many throughout the world. It’s not Scotch, and it’s Canadian, but really, how bad could it be, right? And besides, why not go ahead and provide something unique, perhaps more of a novelty for a visiting group of fellow whisky drinkers?

Pleasantly surprised that I would share this assumed gem, the group emptied their glasses with haste and set them before me as soldiers being bugled from the barracks to action. I poured. All around the room, with every sip and at varying moments, each brother-in-arms gagged and gurgled death, ultimately being felled by the hand of this wicked foe. I’d led the men into a trap and it was to be our doom.

The nose of this edition was so incredibly harsh that I had trouble describing it with a mark of precision. Instead, I felt as though it hovered within a spectrum. Its ghastly perfume billowed somewhere between melted plastic and a carcass irradiated at a secret nuclear test site in the desert of New Mexico. The palate, well that wasn’t as hard to identify. Since I’d been to Russia, I knew right away what it was — stale lead-laced paint chips from the walls of a Chernobyl bunker — not that I actually know what stale lead-laced paint chips taste like, but as I said, I have been to Russia many times and have seen dilapidated communist-era structures with the paint peeling and falling into dusty piles at the base of the wall. I have to imagine that if I took some of those peelings, ground them up, put them into a teabag, and soaked the bag in water…it would taste like this whiskey. The finish, well, let’s just say that it lengthily left me with the desire to allow this bottle to sit for another gathering of decades before breaching its protective fences because the science behind all of these notes already suggests that it will be at least 100 years before it’s safe to hold in your hands let alone consume.

But alas, we’ve done so already. Please, a moment of silence for my fallen comrades…