Adventures in Dusties: Old Fitzgerald

I do a lot of hunting for dusty bottles and have become pretty good at dating old bottles from the past thirty or forty years based on clues like tax stamps and other label issues.  My pal Adam from the LA Whiskey Society, though, is in a totally different dusty hunting league.  He specializes in identifying and dating bottles from seventy to more than one hundred years ago and has a deep knowledge of early twentieth century bottle manufacturing, including the companies that made bottles, their trademarks and the processes used to make the bottles.

Adam has posted an engaging story on the LA Whiskey Society site in which he finds a bottle labeled Old Fitzgerald 1859.  He tells the story of how he evaluated the bottle and what he determined that it most likely contained.  It's a great post, sort of a bourbon mystery, that he titles Adventures in Whiskey:  The Case of the Strange Fitzgerald.  (It's listed as episode one, so I can only hope there will be future installments about other interesting bottles).