One of the joys of living in the tropics is the threat of complete annihilation to life and property that we face each year from June to November. As of this morning, it’s clear that many of us here in Palm Beach country have dodged the bullet on Hurricane Irma. People in other parts of the state weren’t quite as fortunate. There’s no solution, of course, short of moving to Minnesota, but we’re grateful that we came through it unharmed and with access to power. The results were a reduced posting schedule last week (and probably this week), but the outcome could have been far worse.

You don’t need to be a bourbon drinker to spot the familiar red wax seal on a bottle of Maker’s Mark. It wasn’t always so easy to identify: Maker’s was a low-production cult item for the first two decades after the distillery’s founding in 1958. Today the operation is owned by Beam Global, which means that it is available in virtually every corner of the globe. The distillery is still owned by the Samuels family, and the product is as smooth and enjoyable as it was sixty years ago.

Glass Half Full, our regular roundup of the most interesting food, wine and spirits stories on the web, yielded the usual assortment of bizarre items: the ten things you didn’t know about Screaming Eagle; the forgotten history of black bartenders; the surging popularity of wine flour (you can bake with it, or add water and drink it), and the reassuring fact that it’s still OK to put ketchup on hot dogs---despite what Anthony Bourdain and Barack Obama might have to say on the subject.

Here are last week’s posts:

Maker's Mark Bourbon

Glass Half Full: 9/8/2017