A few weeks ago a sales engineer who had been working on a project on our new bottling line in Bardstown finished his assignment and headed out of town to get to his next project. Before he left, our distillery maintenance manager gave him a bottle of Evan Williams Single Barrel Vintage-dated Bourbon as a little reward for the long weekends and nights the engineer had put in at our place.

That night, while he was at a restaurant having dinner, a man at a nearby table began coughing and gagging and having some serious trouble breathing. The engineer went over and asked the man's companion, an older woman, if he could help in some way. It turned out she was the poor guy's mother and knew exactly what was going on. She said her son was having a severe asthma attack and his inhaler wasn't solving the problem. She was really worried.

Now the amazing part. The sales engineer knew about this kind of thing because his own mother had suffered similar attacks over the years. Her doctor once told her she could get relief by pouring Bourbon Whiskey on a rag and inhaling the fumes. The trouble was that the restaurant where all this was going on served only beer. Our engineer was a quick thinker and realized he had the cure in his car. So he helped the man outside and went right to his prized bottle of Evan Williams Single Barrel Bourbon. He was also a Bourbon lover and wasn't about to waste a drop of vintage Evan Williams by soaking a rag with it. Instead, both men had a few sips right from the bottle, the coughing and gagging stopped and they went back to finish their dinners.

I've always known Evan Williams Single Barrel was a great Bourbon, but I never thought of it as a lifesaver! (Guess the lawyers wouldn't let us say that on the bottle.)

-Parker