Review – Ten High, Kentucky Bourbon, (No Age Stated), 40%

There’s a game that we play on occasion at the dinner table. It involves one person starting a sentence by choosing a word, and then each subsequent person around the table adds another word until a sentence is formed. Each sentence is only brought to an end when someone offering a word announces a concluding form of punctuation. We carry on with this, going around the table several times until a story emerges.

To illustrate, here’s what the Thoma family came up with tonight—one word at a time:

It was a dark and stormy pond. The mom went bananas. Five dogs came and ate her whistle. The dad didn’t scoop her slime with eggs or bacon. Joshua smells flowers that were pink, ravenous, and floating with ghosts and zombies’ feet. Zombies like Hallmark weirdos that sparkle in the ocean. Possessed dolls exist in nurseries and bowls of Jell-O that jiggle. Mom colored a gruesomely terrific death. She went to Paris as the queen of meatballs.

Does this story remind you of anything?

Ten High Whiskey, you say?

Indeed. And yet, how so?

Well, besides the fact that it is, just like the story, a jumbled mess, there are other particulars that warn of a gruesomely terrific death if you venture to consume it.

First, you should know that the nose and palate are as one. This whiskey appears to have been squeegeed from rotting animal carcasses that had previously been marinating in a “dark and stormy pond.” A swirl in the Glencairn reveals the putrid smell of the gelatinous slime that forms at the edges of the bygone animals’ wounds, and a swig confirms the sour extract. It is something that dad would never try to scoop up—and I’d encourage you to emulate such reservation.

Second, you must beware of too generous a sip. The finish is the salty leather from a sunbaked zombie’s feet. And this zombie had a bad case of athlete’s foot before he died.

The image of demon possessed dolls sitting in bowls of Jell-O amidst the hapless kiddos in the nursery has nothing on this nightmarish whiskey adulteration. In fact, my money is on the kids facing off with Lucifer. They have a better chance at survival than the cheapskate who decided to throw down six and a half dollars for a fifth of this detritus.

This whiskey is about to make sure he’s the next one soaking in the pond.