Do you want to know how to make a bad situation much worse?

Well, for starters, you could do what one of my children did. You could spend a half hour in the bathroom ridding oneself of something dreadful, and then knowing that the stench is going to waft along the air currents, being carried through the halls and pulled through vents as a dreadful poison let loose for havoc, you could seek out a quick and misty remedy for covering your tracks. But as you sneak from the solitude of the commode, looking right and left through the doorway as to avoid indictment, you reach into a nearby basket of sprays and cleaners, and supposing that you’ve retrieved the air freshener, you return to the bathroom and become set in a valiant battle against each and every methane molecule, spraying this way and that way until all have been vanquished.

Except the aerosol wasn’t of the air-freshening kind. It was dust spray.

And so as another of your siblings is found in a hurry toward your previous locale, instead of rounding the corner and finding comforting solitude and a fresh roll of toilet paper, he goes gliding along the freshly waxed linoleum, slamming to the ground as a greased sack of potatoes and becoming lodged in the shallow space between the toilet and the drywall.

You could do something like that.

Or you could take what seems to have been a less than adequate whisky—one that I’m guessing died a natural death—and try to revive it.

The Lost Distillery Company’s reissuance of the Stratheden Blended Whisky, while it isn’t as tragic as a glazed bathroom floor and a stunned 10-year-old jammed into a tight spot, it just doesn’t rise to the level of quality that one might hope for in a classic restored.

Barely carried up on a drizzling gust, the nose of the whisky gives over a slight of salted honey and butter, but it dissipates no sooner than it meets with your senses.

Once in your mouth, there’s a moment when you think that you’ll be enjoying a clean and red-ripened berry concoction, but that instance fades in a dusting of dirty pepper and a lick of oily fat. The finish, a medium smack, is the same.

I suppose that this whisky isn’t all bad. It certainly worked well for both calming a parent’s nerves as well as stripping Pledge aerosol wax from the bathroom floor.