Jim Beam in Manhattan
The spirit:
Jim Beam bourbon
The place: Manhattan
The space-time twist: With Fred Noe, great-grandson of Jim Beam
Start writing on the
Internet about “the perfect drink in the perfect
place,” and you get the sort of “ya think?” advice
usually reserved for freshly minted parolees: "maybe
you should focus on work that pays"; "don’t tell my
friends anything about what you did"; and, a personal
favorite, "do you even remember how you got into this
mess in the first place?"
But you also get some advice like this from the Imbiber: "What could be better than drinking Jim Beam with the great-grandson of the guy himself?"
"For God’s sake man," said the Voice of Temptation, "they’re putting the man on the Jim Beam label. ON THE LABEL." In spirited terms, that’s like they adding a President to Mount Rushmore. Done right, meeting Fred Noe meant I’d see a friend’s face at every decent bar in civilization. Besides, as name-dropping goes, he might finish second to Paris Hilton in your Upper East Side wine bars, but he’s a sure-fire story-starter in Louisville. Thus my mind drifted back to my home state of Kentucky, envisioning some Martha Stewart-perfect front porch, sipping brown liquor bourbon, perhaps from Mason jars, with somebody who would not run out of good hooch just when the stories got good.
That didn’t happen. It turned out to be an elegant "media event" in elegant Manhattan. And, in one of the few motivations for tea-totaling left in this world, was being hosted in part by my Day Job colleagues at Qorvis Communications, which would have sometimes meant sipping hydrogen and oxygen – discretion, after all, being the better part of valor.
But there was Fred Noe himself across the room (looking just a bit, I thought, like he felt New York was just fine but a good front porch would not have been unwelcome). Plus I’m from Kentucky – it would be like somebody from Boston turning down a chance to shoot free throws with Larry Bird. Plus, I was right about there being plenty of whiskey.
And I should probably mention that it was a news event: Beam Brands is launching its Courvoisier Exclusif Cognac in the United States (it’s designed for cocktails – I’m thinking the perfect place/spirits match is this bistro I know just south of Paris, but more on that later). Plus they have a great new website 4COCKTAILS that offers holiday season entertaining tips, complete with a telephone hotline (877-4COCKTAILS).
So there was my perfect Spirited Place moment: a decked-out, well-stocked Manhattan bar, Mr. Fred Noe telling a couple of stories about his dad’s final months and allowing that the elder Noe’s life had been just about all a man could ask for, and all the time being more friendly than a county judge executive commenting on a coon dog during election season (it’s a Kentucky thing).
Sometimes I could almost hear the faintest creak of a rocking chair, but it was probably just somebody’s stilettos scratching against the floor.
The place: Manhattan
The space-time twist: With Fred Noe, great-grandson of Jim Beam
But you also get some advice like this from the Imbiber: "What could be better than drinking Jim Beam with the great-grandson of the guy himself?"
"For God’s sake man," said the Voice of Temptation, "they’re putting the man on the Jim Beam label. ON THE LABEL." In spirited terms, that’s like they adding a President to Mount Rushmore. Done right, meeting Fred Noe meant I’d see a friend’s face at every decent bar in civilization. Besides, as name-dropping goes, he might finish second to Paris Hilton in your Upper East Side wine bars, but he’s a sure-fire story-starter in Louisville. Thus my mind drifted back to my home state of Kentucky, envisioning some Martha Stewart-perfect front porch, sipping brown liquor bourbon, perhaps from Mason jars, with somebody who would not run out of good hooch just when the stories got good.
That didn’t happen. It turned out to be an elegant "media event" in elegant Manhattan. And, in one of the few motivations for tea-totaling left in this world, was being hosted in part by my Day Job colleagues at Qorvis Communications, which would have sometimes meant sipping hydrogen and oxygen – discretion, after all, being the better part of valor.
But there was Fred Noe himself across the room (looking just a bit, I thought, like he felt New York was just fine but a good front porch would not have been unwelcome). Plus I’m from Kentucky – it would be like somebody from Boston turning down a chance to shoot free throws with Larry Bird. Plus, I was right about there being plenty of whiskey.
And I should probably mention that it was a news event: Beam Brands is launching its Courvoisier Exclusif Cognac in the United States (it’s designed for cocktails – I’m thinking the perfect place/spirits match is this bistro I know just south of Paris, but more on that later). Plus they have a great new website 4COCKTAILS that offers holiday season entertaining tips, complete with a telephone hotline (877-4COCKTAILS).
So there was my perfect Spirited Place moment: a decked-out, well-stocked Manhattan bar, Mr. Fred Noe telling a couple of stories about his dad’s final months and allowing that the elder Noe’s life had been just about all a man could ask for, and all the time being more friendly than a county judge executive commenting on a coon dog during election season (it’s a Kentucky thing).
Sometimes I could almost hear the faintest creak of a rocking chair, but it was probably just somebody’s stilettos scratching against the floor.
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