Folks, save most of your rum corks!

I have been accumulating way too many spare corks. Then I ran into a problem whereby none of them fit one that fell apart on a recent purchase. The bottle was Kirk & Sweeney 18 Year Old, which has now been discontinued. I had to use a cork screw to get it out and it came apart in pieces. Out of about four dozen corks stashed away, not one of them fit. So I had to transfer the rum to one of the bottles that I kept for such things and for pre-mixed cocktails. That rum has really gone down in quality by the way. This was my inspiration to finally go through all of these corks to measure the diameters and separate them in groups. Since I have not owned a set of calipers since college, I used the old standby of a crescent wrench and measured the results of each group. They range from 9 mm to 14 mm in diameter. I kept the ones with the company name on the top for brands that I will always buy. Dictador even had several different sizes. The cork from Grander got thrown away. I also wisely kept the most attractive ones, even the oddball black cork from that horrible bottle of tequila from The Rock. After finally throwing most of them away and saving only the best ones, I now keep that crescent wrench next to my little collection. This will not allow any more duplicates to be entered into it.