Oh, what a night! We spent yesterday evening at the Edgewater Hotel, soaking up some delicious spirits at Distill America, the annual exhibition of local (and a few not-so-local) distillers. I was very pleasantly surprised by how many distillers are right here in the Midwest. Off the top of my head, I can think of two here in Madison (the Old Sugar Distillery and Yahara Bay, in case you’re in the area) and we met about half a dozen others from the Milwaukee-Chicago area. There’s a lot of booze being made right in our backyard.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how many really delicious spirits there are. Until recently, almost all the liquor I drank tasted like gasoline to me, so I was never a liquor-drinking guy. I might have had a lightweight cocktail like a Tom Collins every so often, but for the most part I kept the high-powered stuff at arm’s length because it had no appeal for me. As it turns out, I didn’t like it because I’d been drinking cheap, low-grade liquor.

Probably the most delightful surprise of the evening was Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Talk about a spirit that I always thought of as rocket fuel – vodka was it. I thought only Russians and college students could drink vodka in any quantity, but Tito’s is dangerously delicious. I slurped up my tiny half-ounce shot and asked if I could try another (he had some infused with a citrus fruit called Buddha’s Hand that complimented the vodka very well).

After the show we hopped in the car and did a little drifting around the inner circle road of capitol square. Just kidding. We had a room at the Edgewater. We would’ve spent a little more than half the cost of a room on cab fare, so we figure we’d splurge and fix it so we wouldn’t have to go anywhere at all after the party was over, and it turned out to be one of our better ideas, one we’ll have to think about when the Great Taste of the Midwest rolls around next year.