I agree rum is hard. I said as much in my post.

Tequila is fine as long as you grab a bottle that says 100% Puro De Agave. Compliance requires it be all blue agave with no sugars or additives. It might have lost a lot of character to an autoclave, but it won’t be gross.

It is hard to go wrong grabbing a bottle of straight bourbon. By law to be bourbon there are assurances about the contents - no sugar/flavor/color added, aged in new charred barrels, minimum 51% corn, etc. Straight rye (or better yet BiB) has similar guarantees.

Canadian Rye does not have these requirements. It could be 5% rye and 95% wheat in fourth-fill barrels. It could have sugar added. It could have weird flavors added. You should know what you’re doing if you’re shopping Canadian Rye. I can’t give you a one liner on how to avoid the traps.

But most importantly, this is a thread about cocktails, and you have to get pretty deep into craft cocktails before you find any that call for Canadian rye. I am trying to give rules of thumbs for newbies to avoid common pitfalls, one of which is seeing a drink that calls for “rye” and grabbing a bottle of Canadian rye.

On that note, if you have some great recipes calling for Canadian rye, I’d love to hear them. I’ve got a bottle each of Forty Creek Copper Pot and Crown Northern harvest that are languishing on my shelf.