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Batch 129

"Breakfast of Champions"

“Breakfast of Champions”

Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey enlists crews of volunteers to bottle each batch of whiskey at their distillery in Denver. The call goes out about once every 3 weeks to the next 40 people on the Bottling Crew Lottery list. The wait is so long it took 2 years to get down to me. Enough lapsed time that I honestly forgot it was something I was waiting to do. When the email hit my inbox I almost let it go unanswered – mostly out of laziness and partly due to the fact that I’m more of a beer drinker these days. Then I really leaned into that 2-years-on-a-wait-list notion and thought heywaitaminute, it’s my turn! I may have forgotten for 23 of those 24 months that I was waiting but time marched on none the less so you bet your barrel I will run into that distillery bright and early with my closed toe shoes and valid ID, slap some batch numbers and dates on those yellow labels, coax 5,000 bottles through that conveyor belt/assembly line, eat a couple slices of the delicious pizza you set out for lunch, and run back out of there 4 hours later with my fist around a complimentary bottle of whiskey raised high in the freakin’ afternoon sky. I will also marvel at the strange cosmic coincidence that the batch I just bottled was distilled within 3 days in 2012 of when I signed up for the Lottery and that the very bottle placed in my hand as I walked out the door had “Breakfast of Champions” scrawled in its comments section when earlier that morning the stack of labels I was handed to fill out had “Reading Vonnegut” in its comments section. Just one of those well rounded out, neatly book ended days – 2 years in the making. Now to find the perfect occasion to drink this fated bottle of whiskey…

Reading Vonnegut!

Reading Vonnegut!

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Assembly line worker for a day!

Seems I also developed a chew habit...

Seems I also developed a chew habit…