When Nick Drummond and Patrick Bakker moved to Ames, New York, they were enchanted by an old house which local legend said was once owned by an aristocratic German bootlegger during the days of Prohibition. The couple didn’t believe that their century-old home was a bootlegger’s house until they decided to undergo renovations last month.
source: Instagram
They were shocked to discover over 60 bottles of smuggled Scottish whiskey in the walls of their house. The mostly unopened bottles date from the era of Prohibition when the first owner of the house clearly ran a cracking trade. Lucky for us that the couple has been documenting their renovations and discoveries on Instagram.
Two months ago, the couple decided to begin renovations on their home. The home was built in 1915 by a German man known as Count Adolph Humpfner.
Drummond told CNN he was removing outside skirting along the bottom of the mudroom when a package fell out. “I’m like what is that? I’m very confused, I’m looking and there’s hay everywhere, there are paper and glass … I see another package and it’s this whiskey bottle. I’m like holy crap. This is like a whiskey stash. And this is like, all of a sudden, the whole story of the bootlegger.”
After finding the first package of whiskey, he kept on discovering several other smuggled packages under a hatch inside the floor. Drummond said that each bottle was wrapped in tissue papers and straw and came in packages of six.
“Initially we found seven bundles of six in the wall and then at that point we found four more bundles and actually funny enough as of less than a week ago we just found more,”
It is a Scottish whiskey called Old Smuggler Gaelic, which is still in distribution today.
Drummond did a lot of research on the man who built this home and found out that Humpfner was under numerous investigations and died a suspicious death.
The couple plans to keep one of the full bottles of whiskey to taste for themselves and sell the other full bottles, which are estimated to sell for $1,000 each.
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