The recipe calls for bourbon, a third of a cup. Or you could use rum. For my father, it’s bourbon.
I try to make a batch of bourbon balls, my dad’s favorite Christmas cookies, every year. They’re easy, with crushed vanilla wafers, pecans and cocoa powder.
Finding time is the only trick – that and finding bourbon.
It took me about a decade to finish the Jim Beam stashed in the back of a cupboard. When that was gone, I cheated on the recipe. I’ve now used up an old bottle of Scotch whiskey, too.
With a cupboard bare of spirits, and living in one of 18 states (there’s also Montgomery County, Md.) that control liquor sales, this was my year to visit a liquor store.
Where, though? The last time I “needed” whiskey, in the 1990s, the Washington State Liquor Control Board had a store at Broadway and Everett Avenue in Everett, next to a QFC supermarket. Years ago, there also was a liquor store on Grand Avenue near The Herald.
Today, central Everett has no liquor store. I bought bourbon Tuesday at the closest state store, in Everett’s Claremont shopping center at 4933 Evergreen Way.
Is the lack of a liquor seller in Everett’s downtown core by design? Is the state trying to keep strong drink from city dwellers?
Not at all, said Susan Reams, a spokeswoman for the liquor control board. Reams said the state lost its lease next to the Broadway QFC. “When QFC remodeled, there was no new location for us,” she said. Leasing another building in the area was “cost prohibitive,” Reams added.
A new Everett store is coming, but not in time for your holiday eggnog. The liquor board’s store No. 193 is being built on Broadway near 20th Street, between Erickson Furniture Co. and Jerry’s Surplus.
It’s set to open in early spring, said Jamie Storm, a district manager with the liquor board. In the meantime, “the Evergreen store has been very, very busy,” he said.
Snohomish County has 20 retail liquor outlets, either state or state-contract stores, including one near Silver Lake and another on Everett Mall Way. There’s a warehouse on Cedar Street in Everett that sells to bars and restaurants, but not to retail customers.
For transplants from California and other states where shoppers buy vodka along with orange juice at grocery stores, Washington must seem a throwback to Prohibition times.
In fact, Reams said, the liquor control board dates to the end of Prohibition. The U.S. law banned the production, transportation and sale – but not the consumption – of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933.
The board’s mission, stated on its Web site, www.liq.wa.gov, is to “prevent the misuse of alcohol and tobacco and promote public safety through controlled retail and wholesale distribution, licensing, regulation, enforcement and education.”
States that control alcohol distribution have lower consumption rates than those that don’t, Reams said. With a state monopoly, Washington has some of the nation’s highest liquor costs. Boosting prices are a federal tax, state liter and sales taxes, and a markup that helps fund cities and counties, the state’s general fund and the liquor board.
Besides a drink and the right to complain about how much it costs, what do we get for our money?
The state taxes help pay for alcohol education and prevention, and health services, including the Basic Health Program. Liquor sales provide more than $298 million each year for programs and services in Washington. In the 2006 fiscal year, Snohomish County communities received $3,097,457 in liquor funds.
Reams said she rarely visits a liquor store. As a child in Bellevue, she remembers riding her bike past the liquor store and being afraid to pedal into the parking lot.
“I’d ride by real fast,” she said. “We were afraid we were going to get in trouble.”
With liquor sales peaking in the last few months of the year, Reams will join many of the rest of us as we pick up a few holiday provisions. On her list is a Starbucks liqueur to put in coffee.
Mmm, sounds good – with a couple bourbon balls.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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