Dick's Hideaway

Dick MacKenzie - www.dickshideaway.com

What a strange gift

The last time friends stopped by with a small treat in a penny candy brown bag, it turned out to be freshly picked poison mushrooms.
This visit, different friends, also featured a surprise in a little brown bag. “It’s from Marlie and Steve,” they told me. “They said it has something to do with cigars so it’ll be right up your alley.”
With some wariness I slowly removed a nicely handcrafted thin wooden rectangular board with a round circular cover over a small round hole drilled through the flat side. In the hole snuggled a stainless steel mesh basket. The cover was engraved “Whiskey Smoker”.
The little gift was like nothing I’d ever seen before. For several minutes we all held it, looked at it, and questioned what the devil this thing could possibly be, and what in the world it had to do with cigars.
Finally, after much surmising and a subtle hint from Google, we figured out the puzzling contraption was a smoke infuser for an afternoon cocktail.
In short order I assembled a scotch glass with a shot of water (for a test run), my cigar lighting torch, and tamped a pinch of local apple wood shavings (that I use for smoking chicken on my BBQ) into the silver basket.
With the board balanced on top of the glass and the basket positioned over the test cocktail I fired up the torch and scorched the apple wood. See pictures of the process. Note the smoke hovering above the liquid in the glass.
Smooth. Sweet. What a treat. Beautiful and fun gift. Beats a bag of poison mushrooms all to hell.