What's the Best Island Whisky

HOW AN IRISHMAN TAUGHT ME TO LOVE SCOTCH

In my early twenties, I moved from Hannover to Karlsruhe. Hannover is notorioulsy Germany's grayest city, so I moved to Germany's sunniest city. Supposedly, Karlsruhe was inspired by the sun's rays shining through branches as the prince napped beneath them. He woke up and planned "Sonnenstadt" setting up the streets to emanate from the palace like sunbeams. He called it Karl's rest, but many called it sun city and still do. Some even say it has ties to sun worship and the occult.

Karlsruhe 1721

There's a grave in the middle of the city that looks like a pyramid. Inside is the prince. It's one of those cities city planners, transit designers, and architects know about. I taught English around town and spent most evenings at a pub called Flynn's Inn.

Dave Flynn was a guy who traveled around the world opening Irish pubs for other people until he got sick of that and opened his own pub in Karlsruhe. Flynn's Inn was where every English-speaker in town congregated. It was home base. Dave was a whisky nut and had a secret stash from Kildare and other parts of Ireland he'd share with regulars and friends.

I think it's safe to say I knew almost nothing about whisky before knowing Dave Flynn.

One of the bartenders, Simon, a kind Irish poet, rented a room from me for a while. And even though I never had any money, Dave took good care of me and even let me take advantage of some whisky tastings. At one of those tastings I had a glass of my all-time favorite Scotch: Scapa 12-year.

It tasted like a little bit of peat mixed with the sea and grass of Scottland. I couldn't get enough. It transported me to windswept cliffs. I got really romantic about this Scotch. The host of the tasting told me they let Scapa Flow flood the distillery every year and do nothing about it. I can't find any evidence of this online, but I like the legend, so I'm going to keep repeating it until the distillers write me and tell me to stop.

My last night in Germany was spent in Flynn's Inn surrounded by friends I'd mostly never see again.

Stateside, I almost never found Scapa, but when I did I flipped out (I found it at the Franklin in Vegas and nearly drank them out of it). And when I was in Europe I usually sniffed some out. Their 12-year tasted like an 18 and brought me back to unknown shores. Little did I know Scapa produced no new juice from 1994 to 2004.

Now there's the Orcadian, widely available at least in the western states.

The Orcadian is a smooth and super-quaffable 16-year. It's all honey and salt and citrus, and so delicious it's hard to compare it to anything the same age. That seems to be the magic of this distillery: everything tastes much older than its age statement claims. That means it's a bargain because something of similar quality with an older statement is usually MUCH more expensive. Also, they claim that their angel's share is far less in comparison to other distilleries because of their location. Scapa is on the bank of Scapa Flow, and they're the second-most northern distillery in Scotland (Highland Park has them beat by half a mile).

The new packaging screaming for Americans to love them makes me think I'll be able to get this for a while into the future. And it's pretty and blue and has a little boat on it, and I love it. 

I miss their 12-year. That might be just my nostalgia. I love the Orcadian and want to drink more of it and tell my stories of my expatriate days when the only place I could speak English was with the other foreigners at Flynn's.

I don't know what happened to his spot in Karlsuhe, but Dave Flynn has a Flynn's Inn in Bonn now, and I hope to visit him some day. 

What's the Best Whiskey Chaser?

WHO INVENTED THE JAMESON PICKLEBACK SHOT?
Guest blog by Kanna Smith

My mom and I may not have gotten along when I was younger, but boy do things change. After an exhausting December day filled with obligations, we decided to grab a drink.

I’d never done shots with my mom before, and she was long past her shot days, and I wasn’t taking no for an answer.

After all, “Jameson and good decisions” was my life motto.

I might be less than classy after six or seven shots, but I’m the best version of myself with a little Irish in me. So we were off to the Hermosa Saloon.

Little did I know that it would end with me giving this tiny woman a piggyback ride on our trek home.

Like everyone’s favorite party-harty man-whore, Jameson is everywhere —loved by many and despised by those he fucked over (the weak). And those people are easily coaxed back to Jame-o with a simple pickleback.

If you're going to be an asshole who orders a chaser, try pickle juice. The judgmental stare of a bartender seems to soften when you request a pickleback.

Though she was hesitant, my mom is a drinking champion. It was pretty impressive to watch a 5’3” 105 pound woman toss back shots the way she did. I finally knew where I got it from. One shot turned to two, two shots turned to three, and three shots turned into forcing the bartender to join in our fun.

Like most nights that end in mornings hunched over toilets regretting every life-choice ever
made, we’d had no intention of getting so wrecked.

Between the shots, we mended a once-broken relationship. Picklebacks helped.

Who knew that brine would cut the burn of alcohol and the past? A goddamned genius.

Piggybacks after Picklebacks

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Legend has it an old lady with gold teeth walked into the Bushwick Country Club one night and asked for multiple shots and chasers of brine. The bartender liked it so much, he coined the term "pickleback" back in 2006.

Mostly people in NYC shot pickle brine behind Old Crow Bourbon. Salt changes the PH and seems to lessen the burn of ethanol. Alcohol burn whilst doing many shots can lead to sore throats and worse hangovers.

I like to think it's Las Vegas's obsession with Jameson Irish Whiskey is what propelled the pickleback to international notoriety.

Homophobia at Bulleit

WHY I DON'T BUY BULLEIT BOURBON ANYMORE

I was on the Bulleit train from almost the beginning. I love their rye and their bourbon and drank them often, as I'm addicted to Manhattans for half the year, and I don't mind a Boulevardier when I'm feeling saucy. But now I've officially disembarked.

For better or worse, America went with capitalism, and the only way for that to work is for consumers to vote for the world they want with their dollars.

That's why I'll never go to a Hobby Lobby and why I haven't drunk a drop of Bulleit Bourbon for almost six months now. 

The story goes that Tom Bulleit's daughter Hollis Bulleit made the brand the powerhouse it is through dogged ambassadorship but was pushed out when her sexual orientation became public. I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that a Kentucky-based family's patriarch is a homophobe; homophobia and racism are rampant down south unfortunately. But I don't care that I'm not surprised, and I'm not going to support a brand that I know is anti-gay.

There are other great bourbons at the same price point anyway.

There's a Slate article about how family businesses are more susceptible to such problems. It makes me think of Marxist notions to abolish the family unit. I don't understand how people spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with racist/homophobic family members. If the world is going to be a better place tomorrow, eye-rolling isn't enough; pillory your grandparents if you have to.

Diageo owns Bulleit and Johnnie Walker and countless other brands. As a consumer, it's hard to pillory Diageo. Remember when Dove was running ads about all women being beautiful while Axe was running ads about all women being sex toys? Unilever owns both brands and didn't care how anyone felt about that if you kept buying their products. That's just how branding works and why Diageo is so powerful (and also dangerous).

For now I'm drinking Buffalo Trace and Gentleman Jack, owned by Sazerac and Brown-Forman, respectively, both of whom have probably had similar issues in their histories. . . but what else am I supposed to do?

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When I was living in Virginia, my ex-in-laws were horribly racist, sexist, and homophobic. The father of the family would proudly declare himself one from time to time. When his daughter was dating a black dude Big Daddy announced his intention to "tie him to the back of his truck and drive down a dirt road." When his daughter pointed out that her father had expected her brother to marry a Chinese girl, he proclaimed "I'm a racist and a sexist."

When you talk like that you deserve to lose your brand—you're a nazi. Nazi's, contrary to Trump's view, are the enemy because they threaten peace and hinder progress toward equality.

My ex-wife often sided with her parents. That drove a rift in our relationship. It was the thing we fought about the most, and it eventually tore apart our marriage. I thought I had to tolerate it until we had the chance to move far away from her ancestral home. But when that became a real possibility, it became clear she would never be out from under their influence.

And I'll never take that train again.

What Kind of Scotch Should I Get My High Roller

The MACALLAN M at Whiskey Down
Guest Blog by Kanna Smith

Eager to be a part of something new and learn about a spirit that I didn’t even like before, I started working at the brand new Whiskey Down in the middle of the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas. I was frustratingly scheduled 1AM-9AM, the hours when sobriety is rare, manners and inhibitions rarer, and small-town women realize the enormous responsibility of high heels.

If there were guests, they were too drunk to drink, or too rude to serve. I had an odd amount of power as a cocktail server: if I didn’t like you, you didn’t drink. You could stumble into any other bar you wanted to in MGM, but I'd have already given my friends there a heads up. Sorry bud, you’re done drinking for the night.

Opening night at Whiskey Down

I tried to exercise caution. I would make the call only when I was certain that the douchebag I was kicking out was just that, a simple drunk douchebag. . . because money talks in Vegas, more so than anywhere else. It screams at you from every machine, every table, every hooker’s eyes as they follow their unsuspecting marks to the bar. And that's what screamed at us when one of the youngest millionaires in the world requested we carry Macallan M at Whiskey Down.

My ears rang when he came in. He was polite, liked whiskey, tipped well, and was a big gambler. There was nothing more I wanted in a guest. He was drunk this evening, more than I had ever seen him.

“Whisky makes me frisky.”
-Some drunk guy probably

“I’d like an M. neat please,” he slurred, eyelids dropping.

I smelled a delicious opportunity in the alcohol on his breath. As I delivered the M, I mentioned my love of whisky and my curiosity surrounding the single malt.

“You’ve never had it?” He asked thickly. I could hear the concern in his voice. I nearly had him.

I blinked coyly, “I can’t afford it." That sealed it. He instructed me to add another to his tab, so I could enjoy it after work.

What followed was the longest shift of my life. I couldn’t wait to try this $730-per-1.5-ounce Scotch! 9AM finally came, and after I tasted the whisky, I nearly did too. I carefully brought the glass to my lips and slowly let the liquid gold touch my tongue. The warm scent of dried apricot melted delicately into flavors of vanilla with a tart plum finish. The first swallow numbed my entire mouth; a sensation I’ve not experienced since.

And though I’ve had the Macallan M once more since that fateful night with my high roller, you know what they say… You never forget your first.

The MACALLAN story »

Which Bourbon Should I Buy My Pool Shark?

Reflections on 3am, The Hustler, and J.T.S. Brown
Guest Blog by Kevin Kunundrum

Sometimes there are surprises on the bottom shelf.

I’ve been thinking of the Paul Newman movie, The Hustler. Early 1960s—glorious black and white. The seedy stark monochromatic reality of life on the other side of the tracks. The anti-hero who gets so close but then self-destructs.

And then it’s that trip through the Underworld anyone who tries for something more must face: A landscape of fire and shadows and clouds of smoke.

And from one of those clouds, Paul Newman’s character Fast Eddie Felson says to the bartender “J.T.S. Brown.”

Time is out of joint. Civilized society is fast asleep or just waking up while Eddie lives a parallel life in a penumbral Purgatory. And sometimes he can see their world, he can almost touch it, but he can never break through. He’ll always be a part of life after dark and smoke-filled rooms and plaintive jazz by Negroes who still feel slavery and pool halls and prostitutes and 3am bars and men who swim about like sharks in the shadows looking for that next meal.

And there’s that hollowness they all share, that they feel but never stand still long enough to face.

They’re sharks after all. And they pull another Lucky from the pack shaped by their pocket and motion to the bartender with the tip of a lit cigarette, “J.T.S. Brown.” The poetry of this place, the economy of words as the drink appears, straight, no chaser.

And Fast Eddie gazes into the glass like temporary absolution. The hollowness is still there. The wound that never heals, what men feel for being alive, for being men. And Eddie looks at the bartender and once in a great while he’ll say,

“I’m feelin’ it pretty bad tonight, Joe.”

And the bartender offers a nod and pours another round. And now and then he’ll say, “On the house.”

And Eddie nods back as if he’s been given a reprieve. The promise of sunrise, straining, bleeding through the smoke-stained glass. Maybe today…

All this was on the bottom shelf in the liquor store in that bottle tucked away. This time traveler from 1960. J.T.S. Brown. Kentucky bourbon that’s smooth and strong and better with each glass. This companion to the hollowness. This poetry of shadows that somehow holds us together.

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What Should I Buy for My Bourbon Drinker

If you watch the video above, you might get why I like this bourbon so much. Anyone who thinks Tito's is handmade should take a look. I don't have a personal romantic story to go along with this except I drink it a lot with friends. This bourbon comes with its own story. This is the real deal. This is old-school American craftsmanship at its best, but you get to put it in your mouth and consume it! You can't say that about fancy cars, Jerry Seinfeld!

First up, you see. You see the barrel-shaped bottle with its parchment like wrapping. On closer look, you can see where someone has handwritten where the juice in this thing comes from. And there's a little horse on top with letter by its back leg.

Next is the smell. You can smell that barrel. You can smell Kentucky! You can smell the bluegrass on the morning after a thunderstorm. There's a tiny bit of smoke from where lightning struck the night before.

Then the taste. You can taste the summer humidity. You can taste the sweating pipes in old barns. You can taste the dust settling at dusk as the fireflies start their nightly fandango. The freshly cut trees.

It's a magical drink, and it's not the same for everyone. You see, a single barrel means each batch is slightly different and will never happen exactly the same way again. Now, there's something to be said about the incredible talent some masters possess to create the same bottle over and over again, year in and year out, but there's also something worthwhile knowing that after you're done with some Blanton's bottles, that's it: a unique experience you'll never track back down.

If you're at a bar, if they have it, a dram of this will run you between $23 and $55. I knew a bar that sold it at $15, and I drank all they had. I know a cigar lounge that sells it at $23 here in Vegas, and when they see me coming, they pour it before I sit down. I go there a lot for the bourbon.

A colleague asked me before Christmas what he should get for his friend who is a bourbon-drinker, and this is what I suggested. He went with the easier-to-find Angel's Envy, which is a fine bourbon. But if you want to make someone feel special. . . or better yet, make yourself feel special, buy a bottle of Blanton's.

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A short word about the horses:

When I worked at MGM Grand, I helped work a bar called Whiskey Down. Some bartenders there collected the stoppers because they spell BLANTON'S when you collect them all. You can even buy barrel staves with pre-carved holes into which collectors might insert and display these stoppers.

I'm not a big collector of things, but I have a few of these stoppers, and now I feel like a schmuck not having collected them. I've got a couple N's that are different from one another, which means to me they change these horses fairly frequently, adding to that uniqueness. They're small and easy to forget about in a drawer. Maybe when I get a few more, I'll buy one of those staves. I just found one on Amazon I want:

The Boulevardier

I met a delightful person today who claimed to love bourbon. Favorite bourbon? Bulleit Rye. "How do you like it?" "In a shot glass next to my beer or in a Boulevardier."

I adored this answer partly because it sounded honest and true, and partly because I had not heard of anyone drinking a Boulevardier in ages. It's one of those Negroni bastards you unfortunately don't see around very often, but it's a delicious cocktail and one worth exploring. Also, documented references to this drink predate the Negroni, which I find mildly interesting.

Here's a history of the drink »
Here's a recipe »
Here's a very slightly different recipe »

I have had it in a cocktail glass, but I prefer brown spirits in a rocks/old-fashioned glass for purely aesthetic reasons.

So, this person and I are going to get dressed up in the middle of the night, go to a whiskey bar, and order Boulevardiers. I'll take pictures.

Also, there's some controversy regarding Campari. So here's a link to that if you care about controversy. My personal take is I'd rather eat as few bug butts as possible. I mean, there's an acceptable amount of insect parts in everything we eat, but yeah, I prefer not to jump in and eat them on purpose. I don't see it as a betrayal that a company might change its recipe ever so slightly every hundred or so years either. Times, tastes, and what's acceptable to stick in one's mouth change, people.

Obligatory literary rye reference.