Couple find Prohibition-era whisky hidden in wall of home

A couple renovating their home in New York state discovered that what they thought was old insulation were in fact bundles of whisky bottles dating to the 1920s.

Nick Drummond and Patrick Bakker, who have been carrying out renovation work on the house in Ames, New York, made the find earlier this month.

Drummond posted pictures on social media of packages containing bottles of whisky that he found when removing some of the wooden exterior panels of his house. He later found more whisky secreted beneath the floorboards of his mudroom.

“We were told our home was built by a bootlegger but had no idea it could be true. This is crazy,” Drummond wrote on social media.

Drummond and Bakker have so far found 42 bottles of the bootleg liquor hidden in their home. Some of the bottles remain full, while others appear to have been broken while stored.

According to the Montgomery County Daily Gazette, the brown paper bundles were each packed with six bottles of whisky. Each bottle was wrapped in straw, and are labeled ‘Old Smuggler Gaelic Whiskey’ and bottled by the Stirling Bonding Company.

A sticker on the back of the bottles dates them to the 1920s.

The couple told the Daily Gazette that they intend to carry out further research into how the whisky ended up in their home. Drummond, who is posting about the finds on Instagram and Facebook under the pseudonym ‘Bootlegger Bungalow‘, believes a man called Adolph Humpfner, who died in 1932 with an estate worth US$140,000, built his home.

He said that he hopes to try one of the bottles of whisky, and will install a glass panel in the floor in order to view the packages beneath.