For years, I've wanted to cultivate some sort of affected interest in a liquor of some sort, but the truth of the matter is this: most liquor, even the good stuff, tastes like ass, butane, or butane-laced ass. And being into clear liquors doesn't count. Maybe gin, I suppose, but then you just seem like a teenage girl or an old drunk. But really, the poseur's liquor of choice needs to be brown.

Scotch tastes like vodka filtered through cow dung. Irish whiskey (sorry, Dad) is straight-up lighter fluid with caramel coloring. Canadian whiskey reminds me of my grandfather, but it tastes like the bastard child of Irish whiskey and Diet Coke. So much for my whiskey fetish, right?

Wrong! Last night, my friend Pattycake Butler was passing through town, taking the long route from Oxford Business School to Connecticut, and we had a few drinks. Deciding to give my whiskey dream one last shot at greatness, I asked what kind of bourbon they had, and I settled on a bottle of 1996 Evan Williams Single Barrel. Don't let the review fool you--it was nothing like scotch, or at the very least, the corn balanced out the typical Scotchy sheep-vomit taste. Whatever the reasons, it tasted completely unlike the Jack-Daniels-in-a-Diet-Pepsi-can that kicked off my drinking life, and it gave me hope that I can find some other, better, single-barrel snooty bourbons out there worth drinking, even when I'm not planning on getting hammered. Because that will save me from being the "metro wine guy."

At some point, I suppose I'll have to learn to move into a plantation house, start raising horses, spend a lot of time on a porch drinking lemonade, and learn to play my banjo (or hire someone else to), but that's all somewhere down the line. For now, I'm going to kick it with my Kentucky Spirit Guide™ and do some serious drankin' research. Yee-haw for the Commonwealth!