Whiskey

POLICE LOG* North Laurel: 9100 block of All Saints Road: Police responding to an alarm at Whiskey Bottom Liquors early Tuesday morning found its front door broken and several rub-off lottery tickets taken.

If the julep ceremonial previously described is too fussy for you, I offer a traditional drinking game from the Commonwealth.  Two people go into a room. Each has a bottle of bourbon.* They sit at leisure, drinking and talking.  When the whiskey has been consumed, one of them stands up and walks out of the room. The other tries to guess who left.    *Please, no Tennessee whiskey. 

In the days when Route 1 was the East Coast's main highway, northbound motorists knew they were just outside Baltimore when the whiff of a barroom floated into their DeSotos and Packards.The pungent smell of fermenting grains and yeast settled over Relay and St. Denis in the Patapsco River Valley along the old Washington Boulevard. The odor of Calvert whiskey marked roads, railroads and villages from the 1930s through the 1980s. When you smelled John Barleycorn, you knew Baltimore was not far away.

An American original and a traditional favorite of Marylanders, rye whiskey can be as pricey as its better-known cousin, small-batch bourbon. Bottles of aged, 20-year-old rye fetch upward of $100 a bottle. Fortunately, there are a handful of flavorful rye whiskeys at lower prices. These are ryes, if you will, for recessionary times. Rittenhouse Straight Rye Whisky Heaven Hill Distilleries, Bardstown, Ky.$15.99 for 750 milliliters. 100 proof. Reliable Churchill, distributor Produced in what is known as the Pennsylvania style, which apparently is close to how the colonists made whiskey, this rye was named the top North American whiskey of 2006 in a blind tasting in San Francisco.

County police arrested a Laurel man Friday evening and charged him with solicitation for prostitution during a sting operation near Whiskey Bottom Road.A female undercover vice squad detective was standing at the corner of Route 198 and Whiskey Bottom Road when a man drove up about 7 p.m. and offered the detective money for a sex act, police said.James Owen Snider Sr., 44, of the 300 block of Compton Ave. was arrested and charged, police said.

A motorcyclist was killed yesterday evening in Laurel when he struck a sport utility vehicle that turned in front of him, Howard County police said. Police said the driver of a Toyota RAV4 traveling north on Whiskey Bottom Road about 6 p.m. attempted to make a left turn into a store parking lot. The motorcyclist, who was not identified, was traveling south on Whiskey Bottom and struck the SUV. He was thrown from his motorcycle. The motorcyclist was pronounced dead at Laurel Regional Hospital.

THE SELF-STYLED Freemen of Montana, holding off federal law enforcement, are in an American tradition as old as the republic. But so is the authority that must in the end prevail. Most of the Freemen were debtors who came to dispute the legitimacy of the political authority enforcing creditors' rights. So were some Chesapeake tobacco planters in the 1770s who became Patriots in the American Revolution.More relevant forerunners were the farmers of Western Massachusetts who rallied behind Capt.

POLICE LOGNorth Laurel: 9800 block of Whiskey Run: A 1992 Toyota Corolla with Maryland tags BB5432 was stolen Thursday or Friday, police said.9800 block of Lyon Ave.: A would-be thief pushed an air conditioner from a building Thursday, set off an alarm and ran, police said.