The food pyramid is just a suggestion.

For a recent cigar and bourbon pairing, I reached for a couple of familiar old friends: Isaac Bowman Port Barrel Finished Bourbon and the Oliva Serie V Melanio.

The Isaac Bowman is produced by A. Smith Bowman Distillery, located right here in Fredericksburg, VA. Despite the distillery’s proximity, their core expressions can be surprisingly hard to come by — even here in Virginia. The Isaac Bowman Port Finish, fortunately, is generally found on store shelves, but that doesn’t make it any less desirable.

I’ve long been a fan of port-finished bourbons as companions to full-flavored cigars, and the Isaac Bowman is no exception. The bottle bears no age statement but is believed to be aged in oak for 4 to 5.5 years, followed by a 3 to 6 month finish in port barrels sourced from both Virginia and Portugal (using a mix of American and French Limousin oak). It’s bottled at 92 proof (46% ABV).

The port influence is immediately evident on the nose, offering notes of dark cherry, sweet apple, and vanilla. The palate carries those same port-aged qualities forward — delectable hints of sweet fruit, brown sugar, creamy vanilla, and a touch of mild spice. The finish is long, warm, and very satisfying.

The Oliva Serie V Melanio has made more than a few appearances in these Musings and on my Instagram feed. I can’t recall a time when I didn’t have either the Serie V or Serie V Melanio — usually in several vitolas — resting in my humidor. It’s a versatile, well-rounded cigar that pairs just as well with whiskey as it does with beer or coffee.

This cigar features an Ecuadorian-grown Sumatra wrapper over Nicaraguan binder and filler tobaccos, including Jalapa-grown ligero. Medium to full in body, it delivers a beautifully balanced profile of peppery spice, caramel, coffee, sweet nuts, and chocolate. The lingering mouthfeel is creamy and smooth.

This particular stick was from a box of Robustos I purchased in April 2024. It was brimming with the expected rich flavors and maintained an excellent, cool burn from start to finish.

The combination of the cigar and the port-finished bourbon was an absolute delight — perhaps one of the best pairings I’ve enjoyed in recent memory.

Cheers!

Trip: 51
Nights: 175-177

After losing my job at the end of May I canceled both June camping trips out of some Calvinistic ethic that I should not be in the woods having fun while unemployed. I fixed that for July by starting my own company, so now I am never employed or unemployed. I'm Schrodinger's Sales Consultant. So we went camping for the July 4th weekend.

We went to Douthat State Park. We were there in peak COVID in summer 2020. We met friends who got an AirBnB nearby. It poured rain the entire weekend. Our BBQ dinner with friends ended up happening in an unused picnic shelter at the State Park, after we spent the day hanging out in the camper due to the weather. The weather was much, much better this time. It was 90+ and humid in RVA and by the time we got to Douthat 2.5 hours later, it was low 80s with comfortable humidity.

We had an added complication of having to bring our 13-15 year old dog camping. He was camping with us once 5 years ago, and he was fine. But he is essentially allergic to planet earth, and we had free weekend pet sitting, so we just didn't ever bring him along. Our pet sitter has a new job that has him out of town most weekends, and Teddy's medications are complicated and the consequences of screwing them up are extreme, so we don't trust anybody else to deal with him. So Teddy gets to go camping.

Our fears about Teddy and camping turned out to be unfounded. He was great. He's old and not very mobile these days, so we can't take him hiking or even for much of a walk. Maybe we need a baby stroller to push him around. At one point a Park Ranger stopped by the site due to complaints of an unleashed dog chasing kids. He looked at Teddy and said, "I don't think he's the dog we are looking for." The Ranger also warned us to be careful on the bridge into the campground, as someone ran off it the previous night. (see photo below.) The bridge is sketchy and I get nervous pulling my little 14 ft. camper across it. I don't know how the guys driving a Dually with a 40 foot Airstream do it. Also, Teddy doesn't seem to understand that if he's already outside, he doesn't need to wait for us to take him out to pee. Not once all weekend did he walk to the grass and lift his leg. He waited for us to take him to the grass every single time.

We got into camp Thursday evening and after dinner got a fire going and we hung out at the campfire until it burned out, then headed into the camper for cards and board games. On Friday we went birding in the AM in the campground, which was also an experiment in leaving Teddy in the camper. I assume he was just sleeping in the camper, but whatever he was doing, he was quiet, which is what we were hoping for. So we can leave him for short periods of time without him causing a disturbance. After lunch I went out for a 5 mile RT hike to a waterfall that was more of a water trickle. Friday night was a repeat of the previous night, campfire/cards/bed. Douthat is fairly remote, there is no cell service in the park. However, I did not expect it to be so remote that we didn't hear a single firework on July 4th. I'm sure the many dogs in the campground appreciated that. Teddy's hearing is mostly gone so he would not have noticed them anyway.

On Saturday I did another hike to a waterfall that had little water. Blue Suck Falls kind of sucked. It's a big exposed piece of rock, so I bet it is quite spectacular during Spring runoff season. On July 5th 2025, there was maybe a few gallons a minute flowing, so not so spectacular. It was a very pretty hike though. I birded along the hike and picked up a few warblers and watched a crow harassing a Broad Wing Hawk, so it was a good hike overall. After that I just lounged at the campsite. It was a very mellow camping weekend. Saturday night was a repeat of the previous two nights.

The drive home on Sunday was uneventful.

Douthat is a wonderful state park. The trails were very well maintained. I only had to deal with a single blow down in two days of hiking. It's one of the original Virginia state parks, so the campsites are nice sized, if not particularly level. The beach area looked very nice, although we did not do any beach time due to having Teddy with us. The camp store and grill had the essentials and you can rent canoes, kayaks, and paddle boats a a very reasonable hourly rate. We didn't leave the park the entire weekend.

Next camping trip is to the Snowshoe ski resort in WV for a blues and brews event. We are mainly going because the Saturday night headlining act is Robert Jon and the Wreck, one of my favorite bands. I will leave you with a couple of sample tunes.

Oh Miss Carolina

Old Friend

I typically drink my coffee hot and black, even on warm days. But on this particular afternoon, the heat had me craving something cooler — so I brewed up iced coffees for my wife and myself. Then I reached into the humidor for a quick smoke.

The Dunbarton Polpetta Petit Puros is a cigar I hadn’t tried before. It recently showed up in two different cigar-of-the-month subscriptions, so it had definitely caught my attention.

I’ve enjoyed the Black Label Trading Co. La Madonna Negra numerous times over the past couple of years, and recently revisited one that had been resting in my humidor for nearly two years — left from my original pre-release order.

Cloaked in a rich U.S. Connecticut Broadleaf Maduro wrapper, the cigar features an Ecuadorian Habano binder and fillers from Nicaragua and Pennsylvania. It boasts a soft box press and is dressed with striking black, white, and gold-accented bands that contrast beautifully against the reddish-chocolate hue of the wrapper.

This well-aged stick burned evenly and delivered a medium- to full-bodied experience. Dark chocolate, espresso, and dark cherry took center stage, while subtle notes of black pepper and cedar added depth and complexity in the background.

That said, this particular cigar did present a tight draw initially. After a few minutes of struggling, I reached for the PerfecDraw tool and extracted a sizable stem that had clearly been restricting airflow. Once cleared, the draw opened up nicely, producing copious smoke and allowing the cigar’s full flavor profile to shine through.

As I enjoyed the La Madonna Negra, I reached for a nearly depleted bottle of Uncle Nearest 1856 Premium Whiskey — a bottle I realized I’ve somehow never written about in these Musings.

Uncle Nearest is a Tennessee distillery named in honor of Nathan “Nearest” Green, the formerly enslaved man who taught Jack Daniel the craft of distillation. The “1856” marks the earliest documented involvement of Nearest Green as the master distiller for the operation that would eventually become the Jack Daniel's Distillery

While technically not a bourbon due to Tennessee whiskey's legal classification requirements, Uncle Nearest 1856 is extremely close in profile. It undergoes the Lincoln County Process, which involves filtering the spirit through sugar maple charcoal before aging — an essential characteristic of Tennessee whiskey. In every other respect, it meets the legal standards of a bourbon. Whether Tennessee whiskey is bourbon remains a long-running (and mostly semantic) debate — one I’ll leave to others.

On the nose, the 1856 offers notes of vanilla, caramel, and toasted oak. The palate brings brown sugar, maple syrup, charred oak, and a touch of spice, all carried with a gentle heat from its 100-proof strength.

Compared to the Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7, the “classic” example of Tennessee whiskey, Uncle Nearest is richer, bolder, and more layered — closer to a classic bourbon than its softer Tennessee sibling. One reason my bottle’s nearly empty: I've found it makes a fine Old Fashioned and has often been in my rotation for that cocktail.

As for the pairing, La Madonna Negra was an ideal companion to the whiskey. The cigar’s dark chocolate and espresso notes harmonized with the whiskey’s vanilla and caramel, while the 100-proof backbone of the Uncle Nearest stood up well to the cigar’s bold character.

Cheers!

It was a productive week on the starting my own company front. I signed my first two clients, and I'm expecting another contract this week. It's not paying all, or even most of the bills yet, but it is paying some of them. More importantly, the incoming cash lengthens my runway for when I run out of money to sometime next year. My nervousness at going solo is starting to turn to excitement as my plans come to fruition and I start to consider what my life will look like next year when this is working fully. I have an MBA and I actually built a pro-forma income statement and tested various scenarios to gauge my odds of making a living on my own. It was fun to work those financial analysis muscles, and seeing the plan actually work is cool too. I've proved the idea is valid and the strategy is solid. Now is the hard part, executing.

The reality in the US is that working for a company is not job security. Almost all white collar professional work in the US is "at-will." For those of you not in the US, that means you can fired at any time for any reason, or no reason at all, excepting specific protected cases like race, sex, national origin, etc. Not that the current administration would actually enforce those laws. In late stage capitalism doing a good job does not provide job security in corporate America. If you are going to live the uncertainty, you might as well do it on your own where you keep all the profits instead of making some rich asshole richer.

We saw the Indigo Girls in concert this week. It was brutally hot, but 100% worth it. I also published my top 5 books list for the first half of the year. This afternoon, I'm attending a lecture on the historical impact of the Declaration of Independence at my favorite local brewery. Yes, I'm paying to listen to a history lecture at a brewery. I'll probably have a post about that in July.

Harper is an open source grammar checker that works 100% locally. I use Language Tool because it seemed less icky than Grammarly, but I need to install this and give it a test run.

The moment you stop eating what everyone else eats, stop buying what everyone else buys, stop believing what everyone else believes — not because you're rebelling but because you're paying attention — you discover something unsettling: most people are sleepwalking. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
-What if Everything You Were Told About Happiness is Wrong?

This queer online zine can only be read via Telnet.

This mashup of 80s metal songs with "hell" in the title is an absolute work of art. Make sure you stick with it to the end, or at least through the extended guitar solo cuts.

Substack sucks, but you already knew that.

I found this new to me band this week, Massive Wagons. It's blues based bar room rock and roll done incredibly well. Check out this tune from their latest record, which takes on the British government.

Next week's edition may be delayed due to the Independence Day holiday in the US. We are no longer a functioning representative democracy, but we'll still take the day off. I expect it to renamed in honor of the orange shit gibbon in the near future.

And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.

It was a productive week on the starting my own company front. I signed my first two clients, and I'm expecting another contract this week. It's not paying all, or even most of the bills yet, but it is paying some of them. More importantly, the incoming cash lengthens my runway for when I run out of money to sometime next year. My nervousness at going solo is starting to turn to excitement as my plans come to fruition and I start to consider what my life will look like next year when this is working fully. I have an MBA and I actually built a pro-forma income statement and tested various scenarios to gauge my odds of making a living on my own. It was fun to work those financial analysis muscles, and seeing the plan actually work is cool too. I've proved the idea is valid and the strategy is solid. Now is the hard part, executing.

The reality in the US is that working for a company is not job security. Almost all white collar professional work in the US is "at-will." For those of you not in the US, that means you can fired at any time for any reason, or no reason at all, excepting specific protected cases like race, sex, national origin, etc. Not that the current administration would actually enforce those laws. In late stage capitalism doing a good job does not provide job security in corporate America. If you are going to live the uncertainty, you might as well do it on your own where you keep all the profits instead of making some rich asshole richer.

We saw the Indigo Girls in concert this week. It was brutally hot, but 100% worth it. I also published my top 5 books list for the first half of the year. This afternoon, I'm attending a lecture on the historical impact of the Declaration of Independence at my favorite local brewery. Yes, I'm paying to listen to a history lecture at a brewery. I'll probably have a post about that in July.

Harper is an open source grammar checker that works 100% locally. I use Language Tool because it seemed less icky than Grammarly, but I need to install this and give it a test run.

The moment you stop eating what everyone else eats, stop buying what everyone else buys, stop believing what everyone else believes — not because you're rebelling but because you're paying attention — you discover something unsettling: most people are sleepwalking. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
-What if Everything You Were Told About Happiness is Wrong?

This queer online zine can only be read via Telnet.

This mashup of 80s metal songs with "hell" in the title is an absolute work of art. Make sure you stick with it to the end, or at least through the extended guitar solo cuts.

Substack sucks, but you already knew that.

I found this new to me band this week, Massive Wagons. It's blues based bar room rock and roll done incredibly well. Check out this tune from their latest record, which takes on the British government.

Next week's edition may be delayed due to the Independence Day holiday in the US. We are no longer a functioning representative democracy, but we'll still take the day off. I expect it to renamed in honor of the orange shit gibbon in the near future.

And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.