Raise a glass to the Year of the Snake with these cognac cocktails

Neither New York nor Grand Central does secrets. Not really. Four million tourists a year, cameras up, necks craned at a ceiling full of fake stars- while commuters cut through them like they’re furniture, dead set on making the 6:12 back to Westchester or Connecticut. Nobody’s looking up and to the left, past the smell of the Oyster Bar, toward an unmarked door on the west balcony that looks like it leads to a supply closet.  

It leads to 1923. To a room some Gilded Age banker built so he’d never have to slum it with the commuters. John W. Campbell ran the New York Central Railroad’s real estate empire, and instead of a normal office, the guy commissioned a fifteenth-century Florentine palazzo — inside a train station. Hand-painted ceiling beams dripping in gold leaf. Leaded glass windows built to filter light like a cathedral. A stone fireplace big enough to roast something in. The kind of flex only pre-income-tax money could pull off. 

The Tennessee Collective is a one-time-only whiskey blend built from eleven separate distilleries, each of which hands over a single barrel to be combined into one release that never gets made the same way again.

The Tennessee Whiskey Trail is bringing the format back for a second year, and this time, you won’t need to pre-order it months in advance.

Frankfort, Kentucky-based Redemption Whiskey is releasing its first bottled-in-bond bourbon this fall, and the brand decided to make its debut in the category something extra.

The new Single Barrel Bonded Bourbon comes from a single aging barrel rather than a blend, while still meeting the federal bottled-in-bond standard. That standard is pretty strict: it requires a whiskey to be distilled in one season by one distiller at one distillery, aged at least four years in a federally bonded warehouse, and bottled at exactly 100 proof.