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.

Whiskey and time travel.

If you open a bottle of whiskey, pour yourself a glass and take a sip, you've traveled through time. I'm traveling through time right now as I write this, sipping some Evan Williams single barrel bourbon. For the uninitiated, a single barrel whiskey is a whiskey that has been bottled from and aged in one barrel it's entire life. When you taste a single-barrel whiskey, you're tasting the confluence of chemistry, biology and time that occurred in one specific spot during one specific time period. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the distiller will even mark the label with the bottling date.

The whiskey I'm sipping was bottled on November 5, 2005: three days after my 19th birthday, my freshman year of college. I sip and return to that time of supreme awkwardness, self-doubt and fear. I didn't know it yet, but in a few weeks, my life was about to veer down some dark roads.

It would take another six years to piece it all together. While I wandered the dark roads, I made bad decisions. I hurt people I cared about. I lost friends. I lost family members, but was too emotionally stunted to properly mourn them. I latched on to vague ideas of who and what I should be. And all along, depression sunk its claws deeper and deeper in my back.

And all along, this bottle waited for me. It sat in a Kentucky rickhouse while I became a journalist. It stewed in the sweltering summer heat while I wrote my first pieces of fiction on the third floor of the college library. It absorbed the tannic acid of its charred oak barrel while I played in bands, wrote songs, went on road trips, reconnected with my grandfather, learned to drive a manual transmission, and fell in love. It spent its last Kentucky summer while I planned my proposal and eventual marriage to my beautiful fiance. 

And on April 20, 2015, I uncorked this bottle, took a sip and traveled through time. I remembered all of this and was reminded that all of the best things in life -- love, human beings, creativity, whiskey -- they all need time.