Maverick Drinks is ready for you to hit the books, and the sauce, once again. If you remember from your earlier  alcoholic academic studies, Masters of Malt’s Reference Series offered three bottles — each with the same but increasingly older whisky, marked with detailed notes, so that the drinking experience may be a learning one too. The series of malted whiskey blends therefore offered a bottle-paced immersion into the life of a whiskey, with each blend being bottled at different points in the aging process. As you sampled each bottle in order, and read the corresponding tasting notes, you could experience and understand first-hand exactly how whisky matures on the palette. The taster’s experience is thus a deliberate sensorial study in whiskey preparation, aging and imbibing.

As originally promised, extensions to each of these valuable reference tools are now available. Extension .1 finishes the original blend in a Pedro Ximénez Sherry casket, while Extension .2 stirs it up with some Islay Single Malt, and Extension .3 is colored with E150a (or what those gifted with the gabbier side of the gimlet like to call “Spirit Caramel”). Now you not only understand exactly how whisky ages taste-wise, but how different blends affect its final presentation. Prices begin at just over $65 and move up from there. Note that the initial series was very well received, so it may indeed be worth your time to renew your checkouts from the liquor library.