Two Blasts From The Past: New York Distilleries & Highland Park

I got an AI art generator to create an oil portrait of an older gentleman with a top hat enjoying a glass of whiskey.

The other day I got a Google Alert about myself. We writer folk generally use Google Alerts or things of that nature to find out if, and where, our articles have been published, since our editors often don’t tell us themselves. I didn’t think I had anything scheduled for publication in the previous 24 hours, so I opened it up to find that, for whatever reason, Yahoo News in the UK had run a review I’d written for Robb Report in 2016, about a whisky from Highland Park that’s no longer being made — hell, I don’t even think the original Robb Report link is still active. Maybe it was just an error on Google’s part. The Internet is pretty mistake-prone, as we all know. But anyway, it was fun, and a little cringey, to read my 2016 self, and it reminded me what an excellent whisky Highland Park’s Ice Edition was. If you see it in the wild at a reasonable price — not a likely bet, but I’m saying IF — definitely give it a shot.

Yahoo’s blast from the past reminded me that I’d found another interesting relic in my files, which I’d been meaning to resurrect here for a while. Back in 2012 I tried to write up, for HuffPost, all the New York State-based distilleries with booze on the market in one handy-dandy article. This wasn’t as far-fetched an idea as it would be now, when such an undertaking would probably require a book. Post-Prohibition distilling in the Empire State had been a thing for less than a decade at that point — the Tuthilltown Distillery, which made (and still makes) Hudson Whiskey, was the first, around 2004 or so — and the craft spirits movement was only really starting to get going throughout the state at that point. It’s an interesting look at what was going on just before everything really took off.

Enjoy the stroll down alcoholic Memory Lane! Yahoo News/Robb Report piece on Highland Park is -> HERE <-, NY State distilleries for HuffPost is -> HERE <-.