Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits (Aaron Goldfarb)

In Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits, journalist Aaron Goldfarb goes on an adventure in vintage spirits. This is an intoxicating story of obsessives on the hunt for old bottles of whiskey, tequila, rum, chartreuse—you name it—from estate sales, grandpa’s liquor cabinet, and out-of-the-way and inner-city liquor stores that may just have a case or a few bottles lying around in the basement.

What Goldfarb and these “dusty hunters” discover are more than just bottles from bygone brands or old formulations no longer available—they find portals into history. Spirits, once bottled, don’t age like wine. A bourbon from the 1935 lets you savor the end of Prohibition. A 1940s rum cocktail with actual 1940s rum tastes the way it would to a GI returning from WWII. An old Italian amaro captures la dolce vita in a glass, and vintage gin is a drinkable time capsule from Mad Men-era lunchtime martinis.

Dusty Booze mixes the history of our drinking culture and the Indiana Jones-meets-Simpsons Comic Book Guy adventures of the collectors, including the hunt for rumored stash from a reclusive Hollywood legend. This is a buoyant, thirst-triggering voyage into a unique subculture that has exploded in popularity in recent years.