Homage

My old friend Steve Ury decided to hang up his keyboard after ten years of blogging at SKU's Recent Eats. This is an except from an old post originally from 2012, a day I had spent working in the LA store while my colleague David OG took vacation:

I was emptying a shopping cart of booze into the liquor section when a tall, red-headed man came and started asking me about Pappy. I explained the sad state of affairs and what we now have to do with our raffle system and he was perplexed.

"Really? Because I heard Costco and BevMO have it in stock right now."

 

Ahh.........sigh.  I was beginning to sweat.  This guy was nice enough, but he really wasn't getting what I was trying to tell him. I began my little schtick about how there's a shortage of great Bourbon right now, so he countered with, "I just need something that's like 98-100 points. Isn't there anything here in the store?"

 

I had to take my jacket off at that point. Heat from both my exasperation and the flu were beginning to set in. Finally, he gives me a ten dollar bill and says, "Call me when the Pappy comes in."  I take his business card, but I hand him back the ten and tell him that I can't do that. 

 

"How about twenty?  Com'on! Twenty bucks, help me out!"

 

I refused but I told him I would do everything I could to help him out when the time came. I finally looked down at the business card he handed me to make sure his email was on it, and.....BAM.....there it was: Steve Ury - my longtime email and blogger penpal, there in the flesh. We had never seen each other before so we didn't know what the other looked like. He had figured out that I was me, but I didn't expect to get punked in my own store! The man behind Sku's Recent Eats is as funny in person as he is on his blog. A very well-executed practical joke.  

A big thanks to SKU and the word he helped spread about not just spirits, but particularly the work we were doing at K&L. He was a big part of helping us build the spirits department back in the olden days when whisky blogs were just us guys writing for each other.

-David Driscoll