Ok, I lied. I feel bad about it, but considering that lying has become quite the fashionable political activity in the U.S. as of late,  I suppose it’s my patriotic duty to lie my ass off (and yes, I said duty). Back in May, after returning from a trip to Scotland, I eagerly proclaimed, “I’m back, baby!”…only to disappear once again two months later. Sure, I might have fired off a few posts for a couple of weeks there in June, but come mid-July, posts on The Casks were as scarce as facts in a political convention featuring an empty chair.

So, why the hiatus, you ask? I wish I had some far-out tale of misadventure and over-indulgence, an epic journey beginning in San Francisco with wallet full of hard cash and loose morals, and ending with me blinking into the hot Mid-Western sun as I wake up two months later lying pants-less in a Minneapolis gutter. That would really be something, wouldn’t it? Yes…yes, it would.

Yeah, well, keep dreaming. The truth is that, loose morals aside, the wife (let’s call her Sherry Butts) and I spent most of July and August packing up our relatively large, worn-out, rent-controlled apartment and trying not to lose our small son in an ever-growing ziggurat of boxes. At the end of August, we bid SF a tearful, if not timely, farewell, and headed east to the great state of Minnesota. Lots of family and good friends, lots of lower costs of living, and lots of better schools, etc. for the wee one made the beautiful Twin Cities area a no-brainer. Sure the Summers can be searingly hot and the Winters, brutally cold, but the wife and I both originally hail from this part of the world so we know what we’re getting into, don’t worry.

So that’s where the hell I’ve been. I used to live in San Francisco, I left, and now I live in Minneapolis. The good news is The Casks came with me, and I literally mean came with me, too. I drove across the country and multiple state lines with nearly six cases of booze jammed into our Honda hatchback (by the way, if you happen to work in law enforcement, rest assured that by “six cases of booze” what I really mean is “six cases of bibles”). We’ve found ourselves a new place to live, we’ve visited Blue Max Liquors a few times, and now that the movers have delivered my Glencairn glasses, I can get back to business. With any luck, in the coming months, the blog will feature not just reviews and news, but the long-overdue write-up this past May’s fantastic trip to Pulteney, Balblair, Speyburn, and Knockdhu distilleries. Sorry to have been away for so long, I’m definitely looking forward to re-connecting with the whisky world again!