I was just in the local liquor store, buying some beer, and a label caught my eye - Anejo. Now, for those of you who know Spanish, you know already this just means "old". But when you apply this label to booze - it means smooth. I remember being in Mexico and seeing a bottle of Anejo tequila, and I bought it - just to check it out. For those who like hard liquor, this was grand stuff. You couldn't even buy it in the US - there was no market for it then. The same was true for aged rum - I could get anejo rum down there, but not in the US. It was damn good stuff.
But, you know, what this brought to mind were some really fine memories of some good times drinking. Not tequila, but what they call, in Mexico, risya (rye-see-a), the local moonshine version of tequila. Let me tell ya, this stuff was anything BUT smooth. If it was smooth, it was so strong it would peel paint. We had some GOOD times, let me tell ya! Fire pits on the beach in the middle of the night - going to the cock fights - midnight camping in an orange grove - we had some good times. But risya is moonshine - and sometimes it was nasty stuff. I remember one night, we took a ferry out to this isolated fishing town - there were no passable roads to this town. We stayed there a couple of days in thatched huts - talk about getting away from it all! But the risya, it was bad stuff. Everybody was drinking it - but it was nasty. I swear getting drunk on that stuff took 5 years off my life every time I got drunk. Fortunately, we only stayed one night! I like a little adventure, but generally not to the point of being suicidal.
And, of course, thinking about moonshine, brought to mind memories of Arkansas, and a family cousin who was in law enforcement, whichever bureau was in charge of moonshine. I have to chuckle - we got some of the finest confiscated moonshine. This stuff was about as potent as Everclear, but it had a definite BODY going down. Yup, that's the word - a body. It would only have been pretty good at peeling paint - and it had some of the texture of bourbon whiskey. The same kind of character to kinda tingles the old taste buds as it goes down. It was clearer than water in the bottle, but definitely had texture in the throat. Whoeh.
Anejo.
