Better than Redemption (Bourbon)

This past Christmas, my church co-hosted a Christmas party in Long Island City. Our good friend Cici, owner of the Mighty March Liquor Store in Elmhurst, donated three cases of wine to the party. (My dad, a staunch Nazarene until the day he died, is probably giving me judgmental glances from heaven right about now. Nazarenes, who are both teetotalers and cessationists, don’t even get “drunk” in the spirit, much less on a good Chardonnay.) As a thank you, and to prepare for my in-laws’ upcoming visit to New York, we bought a few bottles of red wine. My husband had also – I can’t remember why – decided he wanted to drink bourbon.

So what else is a good Christian wife to do when she sees a bottle labeled “Redemption” but tell her husband to buy it? I’m pretty sure that’s what John Calvin would do, right? (Martin Luther, of course, was a beer guy.) Not that I had to flex many of my persuasive powers: As I said, he was on a bourbon kick for some mysterious reason. (For the purposes of this post, I’m not going to dwell on Redemption’s problematic claim that it’s a “true reflection of ‘America’s Native Spirit.'”)

Now, my experience with hard liquor is very limited. My husband is a scotch drinker, but scotch to me tastes exactly like a band-aid smells – rubbery, sharp, and with a whiff of bodily damage having taken place somewhere. Bourbon doesn’t rate much better with me, although the smell is more nail polish remover than plastic adhesive. So believe me when I say that the only reason I chose this particular bottle was its name. (There’s probably some sub-SAT level analogy there – choosing a book : its cover :: choosing a liquor : its name. Alas, I think analogies have been scrubbed from the SAT, which means millions of high schoolers are now illiterate in the mysterious symbology of analogies. Which I think was one of the rejected tracks from Schoolhouse Rock?)

Not that it matters, since I have no idea what a “good” bourbon should taste like. My husband seemed to like it okay, although he quickly moved on from straight shots to making Old Fashioneds with Angostura bitters. He hasn’t chosen to re-purchase Redemption, though. (That sounds like the boozy equivalent of re-committing yourself to Jesus, which, to my recollection, every good Nazarene does at least half a dozen times a year.)

Last week, I visited Wilmore, Kentucky, home of Asbury Theological Seminary, for a conference. Since Kentucky is the birthplace of bourbon, it only made sense to pick some up as a souvenir for my husband, whose Redemption had long run dry. (The puns are endless.) While my traveling companion Larry and I were hunting down a liquor store on the way to the Bluegrass Airport, three different people recommended Woodford Reserve as the best local version.

The people at Woodford Reserve, besides having apparently thoroughly mobilized the airport-adjacent population of Kentucky on their behalf, are conscientious folks. I couldn’t even click on their website without putting in my birthdate to prove I am above legal drinking age. I am more than a little confused by this precaution, given that the limit for legal consumption of html is somewhere around infinity. Their website also helpfully informed me that their bourbon has zero caffeine, zero carbs, zero protein, zero sodium, and zero sugar and is friendly to butterflies, watercress, and native white pond lilies. Except for the part where it can cause inebriation, lead to poor romantic choices, and smells like I should be scrubbing my toenails with it, this makes it no worse for your health and arguably better for the environment than Diet Coke.

My husband likes the way the Woodford tastes, too. He said it tastes like “burning velvet.” (My oldest daughter says this would be a great name for a band. She’s too young to have heard of the Flaming Lips.) Asked for a comparison to Redemption, he thought for a second and said, “The Redemption had the burning, not the velvet. And not even as much burning.”

So there you go, folks. Better than Redemption, and with more burning. Do with that what you will.

(P.S. I made gentle fun of the Nazarenes here, but I grew up with them and consider them my family. I jest with love.)