Remember the rickhouse.

As I write this, I'm sipping Willett's two-year rye -- the first juice they've distilled, aged and bottled start to finish on premises. It has the character of a rye whiskey five or six years its senior. This rye is one of three different bottles I brought back from Kentucky. 

My bachelor party was nothing short of amazing. My best man recapped our Four Roses barrel selection here. That was an experience I'll never forget. I'll also never forget the sense of clarity that the trip gave me.

It was as if I could see a clean divide through my life of what is and is not important. When you spend four days with three of your best friends, and you return home with sore abs from laughing, you know you're doing it right. That gift -- that experience -- is one for which I will forever be grateful.

Oddly enough, I was dreading opening this bottle of Willett. There are certainly rarer, pricier bottles out there. But this is one of the first bottles I've been lucky enough to get that can't be picked up at a local liquor store. There was also the sentimentality attached to it. If I drink it, and it's gone, will that feeling of clarity be gone too?

And then I remembered the rickhouses. Some twenty barrels deep. Some five stories high. There's plenty of good whiskey to come. This good bottle of Willett is for right here, right now.

Intentions | Mirth.

I've been friends with the best man of my bridal party since second grade. From my absolute lowest to the highest, he's been a friend I could count on. And this week, he's throwing me a bachelor party where my groomsmen and I are going to get to, in his own words, "see and do some things not a whole lot of people get to see or do." When he says something like this, he means it.

We'll be meeting with Jim Rutledge, master distiller at the Four Roses distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. And we'll making the next barrel selection for TalkBeer. (As an aside, if you're into craft beer or whiskey, check out TalkBeer. You will be educated and amused.)

The image at the top of this post was our prep work, if you could call it that. We sampled 23 different barrel proof bourbons, comparing strains and mash bills. Calibration is tough work, I know. Needless to say, it was awesome. And it's only a preview of what we'll be doing.

With friends like mine, and an opportunity like this on the horizon, there can only be one intention this week, and that's mirth.