the offered taste as literal handing-down

The disease handed down not as metaphor but as an actual flask pressed on a ten-year-old twice inside one morning — the father coupling the offer to the "hard news" he's about to impart, so that the drink and the initiation into bodily manhood arrive as the same gesture. The inheritance the novel tracks through three generations is here caught at the transmitting instant, a taste offered as though it were the lesson itself.