The official invitation and tasting

It did not take long for Mrs B to respond with a very long story, accompanied by an official invitation to come to her house next winter.

On 9 January 2012 we finally met, accompanied by the Charleston Mercury’s publisher and his spouse. After having welcomed us cordially and introducing us to her son, who will be referred to as Mr B Junior, she put a full bottle of the bourbon into my hands and pointed to six glasses. ‘Will you do us the honour, open the bottle and pour us a dram?’

I hesitated and asked: ‘Are you sure about this, really?’ Mother and son nodded insistently, after which I pulled the metal cap to open the ‘pint’ (bottle size, approximately 0.5 litre). Carefully I poured the dark amber liquid into the six glasses and presented them to the people present. Solemnly we raised our glasses, all recognizing the special moment in time and toasted to ‘may there never be a Prohibition again!’

The nose immediately released aromas of cloves and nutmeg, the taste was spicy with a whiff of white pepper and the body was extremely smooth for a whiskey of that age. Silently we swallowed the liquid, contemplating the event. The finish reminded me of bay leaves and liquorice. Then Mrs B commenced to tell the story how the bottle ended up in her family. We sat down and listened. I noted down the following:

In 2006 Mrs B’s husband passed away at a ripe old age. Mr B must have been quite an interesting character and descended from a long line of Bs who had been living in Charleston for 12 generations, while the pedigree of his mother’s side of the family reached back to the Mayflower pilgrims.

Mr B grew up in Tennessee and moved to boarding school in Massachusetts, after which he studied marine biology at the University of Virginia (incidentally my wife Becky also studied marine biology, albeit at the College of Charleston, many decades later).

Mr B’s hobby and passion was car racing and he had a thorough knowledge of German sports cars. The Second World War interrupted his career and he was drafted from Cape Cod. Being an expert in radio communications and a polyglot as well, he was added to the Intelligence Force. He was sent to Europe in 1940, well before the USA officially became involved in the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was part of the forces who liberated Maastricht, in the south of the Netherlands, at the end of 1945. The American Army kept him in Europe for a while, since they needed his particular skills in Potsdam after the war had ended.

In 1946 Mr B returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts and became one of the founders of a local broadcasting station. In 1950 he was invited by the prestigious Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to dedicate the rest of his working life to the development of satellite communication. During this time he not only met Mrs B, who originates from Boston, but also a couple from Cape Cod: the husband had worked in the whiskey industry and acquired shares in a distillery. When Prohibition was repealed in December 1933, this man was paid in kind, because there was no money in the company, and ended up with numerous cases of whiskey (a case contains 24 pints, roughly 12 litres per case). For many years the four friends enjoyed one bottle after the other, especially when Mr and Mrs B stayed at their own summer home on Cape Cod. When the gentleman passed away, the Bs remained friends with his widow, who would live until she was 100 years old (!)

She passed away in 1997, not long after she had given the last cases of this exquisite bourbon to the Bs, who continued to enjoy it on special occasions. When Mr B died himself in 2006 and the Cape Cod house was cleaned up, his son, Mr B Junior, stumbled upon an overlooked, unopened case with 24 pints and a handful of loose unopened bottles. He took them to Charleston and stored them in his mother’s house, where again they were forgotten. In September 2011 Mrs B inadvertently found one full bottle at the back of a cupboard. When she decided to clear out the shed in the back of the garden, she discovered, under a layer of dust, the unopened case, still closed with two sturdy metal wires around the cardboard box.

‘Since I always read your articles in The Mercury, the thought crossed my mind that you might know more about the history of this brand and that’s why I sent you that email some time ago’, Mrs B ended her story.

My mouth fell open with surprise: ‘Do you still have that unopened case in your possession?’

‘Certainly, would you like to see it?’ she responded.

And yes, there it stood, in the back room. Since it had become too dark to make a good picture, we decided I’d come back the next day. The images shown in this article were made by me on the 10th of January, 2012.

Mrs B hardly drinks whiskey nowadays and she asked me to represent her with the aim of selling the case, an honour I could not refuse.

Since then various interested parties from different corners of the world - ranging from Australia to Alaska and in-between—made offers that I relayed to Mrs B and Mr B Junior, submitting them with advice whether to sell or not. Being an established family with an age-old pedigree, they were not only in it for the money per se, but also wanted a buyer they would like and who would do something special with the case.

They found that party in Best of Whiskies, whose representative Nils van Rijn finally purchased the case and became good friends with Mr B Junior during the course of the negotiations.

Best of Whiskies asked me to warrant that the purchased product was genuine, which I did in signing a bespoke certificate that declares this is ‘The Real Thing’. The 24 bottles are now for sale separately and the lucky new owners will receive a signed and stamped certificate with their bottle.

The Dutch may have sold New Amsterdam to the Americans who turned it into New York, but these same Dutch, centuries later, managed to acquire some real and rare American liquid history, and will know what to do with it!

Hans Offringa,
Zwolle – May 2020

Pictures: The whisky couple