Honesty is such a lonely word

So this weekend, as part of a continual exercise in stuffing my face with delicious Italian foods (including a tiramisu that I really wanted to declare aloud "tiramisuper," but saved that for the anonimity of this blog), my uncle and I came upon an after-dinner drink menu offering "150 year old Grand Marnier" for $25 a glass. My uncle declared shock, even asking the waitress if this was a typo. She said it was 150 years old. I declared shennanigans (which is Gaelic for "bullshit" or "tomfoolery," whichever works best).

1856 was a fine year indeed:

• The Sigma Alpha Epsilon (Same Assholes Everywhere) fraternity was founded, as was Auburn University (Bo Jackson = awesome).
• The Crimean War ended. That's the one we all know about because of Iron Maiden's The Trooper.
• One Congressman beat a Senator with a cane over a speech he gave about slavery, putting the Sentaor out of the game for 3 full years. We just don't get this kind of raw excitement anymore. Just a lot of speeches givent o empty rooms.
  
• 500 Mormons left Iowa City for Salt Lake City, making it even more ironic when the New Orleans Jazz moved there in 1979 and didn't change their name.
  
• Sigmund Feud, Nikola Tesla and Woodrow Wilson were born (as well as Andrey Markov...that's one for the nerds).
  
• Western Union, the fastest way to send money, was thus named by Ezra Cornell after a few mergers and acquisitions by the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. Can you say Back to the Future 3 plothole (BttF3 takes place in 1855)?
  
• James Buchanan beat Millard Filmore in a presidential election that saw the founding of the Republican Party AND said Republican Party winning the electoral votes from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (strange times indeed)

but I just didn't feel that the events above happened during the same year that someone bottled up some Grand Marnier that would be sold 150 years later to unknowing patrons in a Jersey Italian restaurant that was probably a mob front anyways for the low, low price of $25 a glass. An empty Coca-Cola bottle from 1856 would probably be worth thousands of dollars--if Coke existed back then, that is...it would actually take another thirty years for that to happen.

And as it turns out, Grand Marnier wasn't founded in 1856 either. However, its distillery was opened in 1827. In 1977, the powers that be released a sesquicentennial edition called Grand Marnier 150, which used some elements that had been aged 50 years. This drink is apparently still in production, which means that the "150 year old" cognac is actually somewhere between (at most) 50 and 80 years old, with 50 being much more likely.

I have been discussing this extensively with my friend, Friar Tuck, and together we've decided that not only is calling this stuff 150 years-old akin to calling a drummer boy quarter 230 years old, but that if one happens to come across Grand Marnier 150, the ultimate mixer would be aged Tang from the Apollo 11 mission.