Bourbon-addled brows all a-furrow
Tips & tricks to get the most from the drinking paraphernalia you did not ask for
Editor’s note: Fingers will resume publishing new coverage Thursday. Thanks for your patience as I sort through a bunch of silly bullshit. In the meantime, I thought it’d be fun to reprint a crowd favorite about the worst gift of all time (whiskey stones), which originally appeared at olde boozeletter in January 2022. I edited it lightly for accuracy, but I think it mostly holds up! This edition is exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, so if that’s not you, buy a subscription here. —Dave.
According to polling I just made up to strengthen the premise of this newsletter, each year millions of boyfriends, husbands, fathers, and sons receive whiskey stones in their Christmas stockings. Maybe there are some women in there, too. Probably. Whatever, not the point.
The point is, while these giftees are intimately familiar with how whiskey works (you drink it, it makes you feel warm inside, then a few hours later you’re deep in conversation about whether Rip Torn or Norman Mailer would win in a contemporary rematch of Maidstone), they’re often flummoxed by the function of the fancy blocks they’ve just received. Why would I put rocks into a perfectly good glass of whiskey? they wonder, their bourbon-addled brows all a-furrow.
That’s where the Fingers Whiskey Stone Giftee Helpline (FWSGH) comes in. Every year in the first week of January, the switchboards at Fingers HQ are set ablaze by bourbon bros, whiskey women, and Scotch sippers around the country, who are both relieved they didn’t get something off this year’s Bad Holiday Gift Guide for Heavy-Drinking Frenemies™, and utterly baffled as to what the fuck they’re supposed to do with their ornate, seemingly useless curios.
Giftees are matched with a highly trained boozeletter expert who talks them through this difficult, confusing holiday experience, sharing tips on how to use their whiskey stones and tricks for concealing the emotional dismay that comes from realizing that their friends and loved ones view them as a one-dimensional, brown liquor-loving caricature that has no other discernible traits or interests.
Given the sensitive nature of these conversations, FWSGH call transcripts have traditionally been kept strictly confidential. But for the first time ever, we’ve secured permission from select giftees to share portions of their distress calls with the Fingers Fam to promote greater acceptance, emotional wellbeing, and sense of community amongst other whiskey stone recipients who feel alone, perplexed, and misunderstood at this difficult moment.
Editor’s note: The transcripts below are 100% real and NOT fabricated for my own sick amusement, how could you even suggest such a thing? If you gave someone whiskey stones this year, I’m sure they loved them. Everybody stay calm.