LINCOLN SQUARE — It's yard sale season and somewhere amidst other people's castoffs there just might be a bottle of liquid gold.
Vintage whiskeys — seal intact — are prized by collectors, including The Sixth's Benjamin Schiller, who hunt garage sales and auctions on the prowl for rarities.
What's the appeal?
"It's something gone forever," said Schiller, beverage director at Lincoln Square's new craft cocktail bar. "A lot of these distilleries no longer exist. A lot of the methods are no longer used."
Though he doesn't recall his first experience with vintage whiskey, Schiller does remember the moment that turned him into a collector.
About eight years ago, a friend brought over a bottle of Old Grand-Dad that dated back to the 1970s. Schiller and his pal tasted the vintage booze side by side with a pour from a new bottle of the same brand.
"There was a massive difference," Schiller said. "You'd be blown away."
Unlike fine wine, whiskey doesn't improve with age — in 2016 it will taste pretty much the same as it did when it was bottled in 1976.
And that's precisely what can make a vintage whiskey better than its modern counterpart, according to Schiller, who said he thinks "most of our best whiskey is behind us."
Consider all of the variables that go into making a bottle of whiskey: the water, the grain, the barrel wood and the climate the alcohol is aged in.
Of those, today's corn and wood bear little resemblance to what distilleries were using in past decades.
"You can't harvest 300-year-old wild trees, let the wood air-dry for two to three years and make a barrel," Schiller said. "There's a big difference, and you can taste it."
Changes to the country's corn crop have also been well-documented.
"A master distiller told me, 'These grains are not being engineered for flavor,'" Schiller said.
For those interested in drinking the past, The Sixth keeps a couple dozen vintage spirits on hand, a number Schiller is always on the hunt to increase.
"It's a constant process of us going to auctions or people at estate sales texting me," he said.
According to experts, here's what to look for should a vintage bottle turn up at a neighborhood yard sale:
• First and foremost, make sure the seal is intact.
• A full bottle is ideal, but it's more than possible some evaporation will have taken place even if the bottle is sealed, especially if it's quite old.
• The liquid should be clear at room temperature. If the whiskey is cloudy, the bottle is contaminated.
• If an old bottle of booze tastes odd, don't drink it. Lead can leach into whiskey stored in old crystal or porcelain decanters, and whiskeys made before 1920 could have been adulterated, experts say, so exercise caution before drinking them.
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