As you might know, I've been participating in an online Canadian Whisky tasting. It's done a lot for my appreciation for good whisky from Canada.
Let's step back in time a couple months. It was a fairly normal day. Well as normal as any day can be when you get your first visit from the Whisky Fairy. You see it was on that day I received the samples for the, then, upcoming tasting. Four cute little bottles filled with what I could only assume was tasty goodness (Spoiler: they were). And while for the longest time I was fixated by the idea of what was in the bottles, eventually I got to looking at the bottles themselves. Small, plastic bottles with a tamper proof lid.
After pondering these bottles for a few days, a thought popped into my head. I had a bunch of full-sized bottles that are running low, but that I didn't want to drink because of some vague notion that I might want to write one of these silly blog posts about them. I was doing the exact thing you shouldn't do: hoarding small amounts of good whiskey in large bottles. Not only could this whiskey oxidize and change, but more tragically, it was whiskey I wasn't drinking taking up space on the shelf from stuff I wanted to drink.
I know, I was shocked too. Drinking whiskey is at the top of my list of things to do with whiskey.
So after that tragic thought popped into my head I decided that I needed to buy some sample bottles. The theory being that I fill the small bottles from the big. Seal those and set them aside for when I have the itch to write a blog post. Then I can finish any bottle on the shelf at any time without that slight pang of guilt for not blogging about it.
So where to find these fancy little bottles? Google here I come. After a fairly brief search, here is what I found:
specialtybottle.com At Specialty Bottle I ordered 80 of the 2 ounce boston rounds shown above. They came with caps and I purchased a packet of 250 shrink bands that you place around the cap and then hit it with a hair dryer to shrink and seal the bottle. These bottles work pretty good, but they are about 60 cents each before shipping. So while these work great for storing my samples, I wouldn't want to give them away.
sks-bottle.com Enter SKS Bottle & Packaging, Inc. Here I found: 50 mL PET Nip bottles that also have the tamper proof cap that I saw in those Canadian samples. These work out to about 35 cents each and seem perfect for those samples I send home with friends who visit my home. (I do that some times, now who wants to come visit?)
So far the bottle theory is working. I've poured two samples of each bottle I had open. I emptied two while pouring the samples and about five since. (Yay! shelf space!) As I open new bottles, the very first thing I do is fill two more samples. Now I can enjoy whatever whiskey I want without worrying about blog guilt.
I'm always looking for better or cheaper suggestions. Do you keep/share samples? Where do you get the bottles you use? If you'd like, share that in the comments below.