Manyu’s friend Shu is back in China to visit her elderly parents, so her husband Stefan is on his own for a couple of months. On Wednesday we had him over for dinner.
Manyu fried up fresh bluegill fillets and made a beef stew in her multipurpose rice cooker. After our meal I looked into my limited liquor supply to see if I could find an after-dinner drink. “I don’t have any liqueurs,” I said, “but there’s a bottle of maple-flavored bourbon. Do you want to try that?”
Stefan, who knows I like my bourbon straight, asked, “Why do you have a flavored bourbon?”
“I haven’t even opened it,” I said. “Someone must have given it to me, but it’s been here so long that I don’t remember who.” Then, without waiting for Stefan to answer my question about whether he wanted to try some, I broke the seal and put ice in two glasses.
I took a whiff from the mouth of the bottle. “Wow,” I said, “it really smells maply.” Then I poured a double into my glass. “It even pours like syrup.”
Finally I took a drink. “It even tastes like syrup. If I wanted to, I could put this on pancakes.”
I poured some of the thick liquid into Stefan’s glass, and he took a sip. “I don’t taste any bourbon,” he said. “Are you sure that this isn’t syrup?” Stefan picked up the bottle to read the label. “This isn’t bourbon,” he said. “It’s maple syrup stored in a bourbon barrel.”
I took the bottle from Stefan and read the label for myself. He was right. “Why would anyone do that? And what we are going to do with the syrup already in our glasses?”
“What would happen if we added the bourbon ourselves?” Stefan asked.
I went back to my liquor cabinet, pulled out the Wild Turkey, and poured double shots into both glasses. Stefan stirred his drink with a dessert fork that had been left on the table and took a sip. “Still too sweet,” he said, “but I think it’ll work.”
I tasted my concoction. “You’re right. I don’t want to add any more bourbon, but with half as much syrup, this wouldn’t be bad. I’m gonna let some of the ice melt before I drink any more, but it’s okay.”
After Stefan left for home, I googled maple syrup flavored bourbon. As it turns out, there are at least a dozen different brands of the stuff. There are also, like my bottle, a few syrups stored in bourbon barrels, and there is one bourbon stored in maple syrup barrels. I didn’t even know maple syrup came in barrels.
I’ve always thought of bourbon, with its corn base, Kentucky water, and oak barrels, as the most American of hard liquors. Maple flavored bourbon might have it beat.
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