Well it wasn't quite 20 years..

One can now again enjoy a nice whiskey or vodka or other spirit containing more than 20% alcohol here in the Czech republic, legally, provided it was not brewed/bottled in 2012. Oh did I happen to mention you couldn't.. well not unless it had been bought before or brought back to the country from wherever you happen to be..

Ok, it started when a couple of weeks ago there was some tainted alcohol being sold here. Apparently fake booze, laced with industrial cleaners or something horrific like that, in regular bottles, so you can probably guess it was pretty fucking poisonous, and some people died, and many got very sick. As you can imagine, this was quite a big deal. This was just before I left for Israel, and it was a big story while we were gone.

Just before we got back, prohibition was introduced. We returned to a city full of jazz and bobbed hair and rolling down stockings and ok, I exaggerate, but hard alcohol was not allowed to be sold.

Beer and wine's status stayed the same as it was, so life for us here changed remarkably little. Some spirits and liqueurs were still available, and bars got inventive and had cocktails with.. like other stuff. There were witty jokes on bar signs, offering non-alcoholic cocktails.. and prohibition parties with flappers on their signs, back in those temperately warm mid to late September of 2012 days...

Then today it finished. Any spirits made before the cutoff.. I guess any from 2011 can be sold and served again. That's still a lot of booze that will be gotten rid of, and it seems as if my first guess when I heard about this was right, it was a mostly  to put a freeze on selling alcohol so that all the poison shit could be gotten out of the system, and would not continue for very long. It's still not completely over I guess, and a lot of places have lost a lot of money over this.. but, one must be as safe as possible, one supposes. I mean without entirely giving up alcohol that is.