Tasting Whiskey

by Lew Bryson

  To my late grandfather, Newton Jay Shissler, who always kept a bottle of ’shine stashed in the kitchen cupboard.

  To Jimmy Russell, Parker Beam, and the late Elmer T. Lee and Ronnie Eddins, giants of bourbon from whom I learned an immense amount.

  And to the memory of Truman Cox, a good man who was taken from us way too young, before he could achieve the greatness as a master distiller that I solidly believe was his destiny.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Story of Whiskey

  Chapter 2: Making Spirit: Fermentation and Distillation

  Chapter 3: Aging

  Chapter 4: The Wall and the Work: The Challenge of Tasting Whiskey

  Chapter 5: Tasting: Tapping into Your Years of Experience

  Chapter 6: Mapping Whiskey Styles

  Chapter 7: Scotch: How the World Says “Whisky”

  Chapter 8: Irish: Single, Double, Triple

  Chapter 9: American: Bourbon, Tennessee, and Rye

  Chapter 10: Canadian: Blended, Always

  Chapter 11: Japanese: The Student Becomes the Master

  Chapter 12: Craft Whiskey

  Chapter 13: Dilution: Water, Ice, and Cocktails

  Chapter 14: What Goes Well with Whiskey?

  Chapter 15: Collecting Whiskey

  Resources

  Final Toast

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Interior Photography Credits

  Other Storey Titles You Will Enjoy

  Copyright

  Share Your Experience!

  Foreword

  There are very few people on this rocky sphere of pain and tribulation I’d rather have a drink with than Lew Bryson, and most of them are dead. I’ve known Lew as an occasional drinking buddy, a friend, and an editor for going on 15 years, and even despite that editor business I still look forward to our next tipple, much like the giant panda looks forward to nibbling the first succulent bamboo shoots of spring. Lew is just that pleasant to spend time with.

  In fact, he’s so agreeable that you tend to forget just how damn smart he is and how much he knows: about whiskey (he’s written and edited for America’s leading whiskey magazine for years), about beer (four books on the topic), and, well, about everything, or so it seems talking to him. At the same time, he’s not one to talk a bunch of junk just to make you think he’s a bigshot. But ask a question, and you’ll get a good answer (it helps that he used to be a librarian, I suppose). When it comes to the matter at hand — whiskey — he’s one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever met, without descending into trivia, one-upping, or blather. Which is good, because the literature on the topic is prone to be precisely that sort of bothersome stuff. Not this book.

  Tasting Whiskey is a book that I would have loved to have had close at hand when I first started getting into whiskey, back when Ronald Reagan was president (I needed the stuff then, but I feel the same under every administration). Like its author, the book is clear, patient, thorough, and even-handed, all without taking itself too seriously. It cuts through the old myths and marketing hooey that form such a large part of whiskey lore, without introducing new hooey of its own. I learned something on every page. I’d say more, but I’ve got a column to write and Lew is, as usual, waiting for it.

  Sláinte,

  David Wondrich

  Founding member of The Museum of the American Cocktail

  Author of two books on cocktail history, Punch and Imbibe

  Introduction

  There’s a feeling I get whenever I land at the airport in Louisville and walk into the terminal, under the big “Welcome to Louisville” sign, past the Woodford Reserve tavern, and down the escalators. It’s a weight off my shoulders, a weight I’d forgotten I’d been carrying: the weight of being a bourbon lover among people who often giggle at the mention of the word. I walk down that terminal . . . and I’m with my people. This is the place where I once slipped up and packed a bottle of Booker’s in my carry-on bag going home, and the TSA guy honestly said, “Look, we’ll just forget it this one time. That’s really good bourbon; take better care of it.” Yes, sir!

  There’s another feeling I get when I’m in the presence of an ancient and rare Scotch whisky. It’s awe, and something close to reverence. As long ago as 200 years, an acorn took root, grew into an oak, and was cut, seasoned, sawn into billets and staves, and shaped into a barrel. Bourbon or sherry was aged in the barrel, for however long, after which the barrel was shipped to Scotland, reassembled, and filled with new whisky. After at least 10 years, the barrel was emptied again, and more new whisky was put into it, somewhere around the year I was born. Then here I am, say 40-odd years old, and I’m handed a glass of it, drawn from the cask. My grandfather hadn’t yet been born when the whole process started. And it tastes marvelous.

  Then there’s the feeling I get when I have a glass of a new whiskey in my hand: anticipation. I have a good idea of what it’s going to taste like from my previous experiences, but I don’t know exactly what this is going to taste like. That’s exciting, and it whets my appetite and fires my curiosity.

  More and more people feel that way about whiskey these days, but it’s been a long time since whiskey was held in such general high regard. Whiskey has seen boom times, such as the huge surge in interest in Scotch whisky during the Victorian era, but the twentieth century was for the most part a lean time, from the rough restart of American distillers after Prohibition through the rise of vodka and light rum in the 1960s and ’70s. However, whether you’re talking about Scotch, bourbon, or Irish, whiskey has made an amazing comeback in the past 20 years, and it’s continuing to rise. Scotch whisky (the two different spellings of whisky and whiskey are quirkily applied; see Whiskey? or Whisky? for an explanation), for example, has seen the emergence of single malts as a high-priced, high-growth market niche. Sales continue to climb despite steep price increases, and rare bottles are seen as investment-grade purchases at auction houses in New York and Hong Kong.

  But while Scotch is still what you hear the most about, the world of whiskey is broader, as is its rise. Bourbon has left its decades-long glide path into regional obscurity on the strong lift of the cocktail culture revolution and a new appreciation for authenticity; Jack Daniel’s is booming internationally; and rye whiskey is resurgent after a near-death experience in the 1990s. Japanese whisky has come solidly into its own, with global critical acclaim that is translating into export sales. Irish whiskey is simply amazing, having posted double-digit sales increases for the past 20 years, eclipsing the much-talked-about growth of craft beers and blossoming with new brands and new styles. There is even growth in the long-declining Canadian whisky segment, as distillers rediscover the strengths of blended whisky.

  People don’t just want to drink more good whiskey; they want to know more about it. They want to know about Scotch, bourbon, Irish, Canadian, Japanese, and all the new craft whiskeys. They want to know what’s good and what’s not, they want to know how it’s made, they want to see it being made, and they want to know more about the people who make it. They go to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, they go to the Fèis Ìle (the Islay Festival on Scotland’s “peatiest island”), and they make pilgrimages to their favorite distilleries on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, the Malt Whisky Trail, and the new Ireland Whiskey Trail.

  The purpose of Tasting Whiskey is to get you ready for those next steps. I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned in years of studying whiskey, sampling whiskey, visiting whiskey distilleries and talking to the people who make it, and writing about it for a living. It’s a shame how much misinformation about whiskey is out there. I know that when I started I had some laughably wrong ideas about how it is made, how it is
aged, and why it tastes the way it does. Those are common misconceptions, and I want to get you up to speed all at once, so you can move forward to enjoy your whiskey.

  I’m going to tell you about how whiskey’s made, the unique challenges of tasting it (and what it is you’re tasting), and what I’ve found to be the best ways to taste it. Then we’ll talk about the different regions of whiskey, how they differ, and why their whiskeys are made the way they are, where they are. Then I’ll tell you how to drink your whiskey, what goes well to eat with it, and how you can build a collection of whiskey.

  I hope you enjoy the process, and I hope you learn how to enjoy whiskey more by learning more about it. It’s a great clan, a broad family you’ll be joining, with branches all over the world. Happy to have you on board!

  The Story of Whiskey

  Whiskey is a unique spirit, with a unique taste. Other spirits do have some traits in common with whiskey. Vodka, for the most part, is also made from grain. Brandy is also barrel-aged. Rum has a similar range of unaged and aged expressions, as does tequila. Those last three often benefit from aging in used whiskey barrels. Gin may not seem to be related, but it’s a grain spirit, and its ancestral cousin, genever, is barrel-aged in the Netherlands to make a surprisingly whiskey-like spirit.

  But no other spirit inspires as much passion as whiskey! There are many more vodkas than there are whiskeys, but are there books that examine the differences among them? Do people collect them? Tequila inspires brand loyalty, but can you name the master distiller of your favorite brand? Do rare bottles sell for over $50,000 at auction? Cognac reaches those heights, but does cognac command the huge sales that whiskey does? Whiskey got the jump on brandy over 100 years ago and has never looked back.

  Like my boss at Whisky Advocate says, a lot of people drink vodka. But have you ever seen a vodka magazine?

  Let’s make the difference clear: whiskey is a spirit that is distilled from the product of fermented grains and aged in wooden barrels (which are almost always oak). It is not made from potatoes, fruit, or molasses; any spirit made from such things and calling itself “whiskey” is an imitation.

  Why do I say that so emphatically? Whiskey has centuries of tradition behind it that make it so, and government regulations behind it that insist upon it. Whiskey came from Ireland and Scotland; it emigrated from there to Canada and Japan; and although the early distillers in colonial America were mostly central European (the British settlers primarily made rum), they had a similar grain-based distilling tradition and picked up on barrel aging as early as the Scots and Irish.

  Those centuries of tradition stand on the shoulders of thousands more years of brewing tradition, which in turn stand on the foundation of civilization. Here’s how whiskey fits into the history of humankind.

  In the Name of the Spirit

  If we start from the very beginning, whiskey is about civilization. One theory of how civilization started is that it came about when humans settled down to grow grain, in order to have a steadier supply of grain than they got from gathering wild grains. They ate the grain, of course, but the theory rests not on eating, but on drinking. Some anthropologists believe that humans learned to grow grain in order to have a steady supply of beer, an important part of ceremony and celebration.

  Beer, wine, and mead were potent enough for humans for millennia; they’re still potent enough for us today on many occasions. But about 2,000 years ago, alchemists discovered (among other things) purification through distillation. At first they distilled only water, but soon they learned to distill essences, oils, and eventually crude, fiery beverages.

  Distillation is dependent on the different boiling points of liquids. To separate pure liquids from a mixed liquid, we gently raise the temperature and capture and condense the vapors as the different liquids boil. This works only if the liquids have sufficiently different boiling points. Happily, water and ethanol are such a pair.

  Although we tend to think about distillation in these simple terms — a matter of the boiling points of water and ethanol — there is a large number of liquids being distilled, including other alcohols, oils, and aromatic compounds. The process is not perfect; not all the alcohol is captured, nor all the water and heavier liquids left behind. But as we have more perfectly understood how distillation works, we have been able to get better at it, and get out what we want, while leaving behind that which is foul-tasting, impure, and watery.

  We have only a foggy idea of when these distilled spirits were first made. To begin, there are records of aqua vitae (“water of life/vitality,” the alchemical Latin name for alcohol) being consumed in Ireland in the very early 1400s, and malt sent to a friar to make aqua vitae in 1494. Aqua vitae would be translated as uisce beatha in Gaelic, which — probably with the application of years of drinking — would eventually become linguistically massaged to “whiskey.”

  It’s more important to realize that by modern definitions, we aren’t talking about whiskey here at all. We definitely have a spirit distilled from the product of fermented grain — in this case, almost certainly malted barley — but then we run into the issue of aging. While the monks, and soon farmers and millers, were making the rough spirit, and smoothing it with spices, honey, herbs, and God knows what else, one thing they weren’t doing was aging it in barrels. They had barrels, and they had spirits, but the two didn’t come together for quite a while.

  Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de Arte Distillandi de Compositis (Strasbourg, 1512) describes the manufacture of aqua vitae, one of the world’s first distilled spirits.

  Whiskey? Or Whisky?

  Let’s get this out of the way right now. Many words have been written about why some countries — and by extension, their distillers — spell the word “whisky,” and others spell it “whiskey.” (The Welsh, just to be different, spell it “wisgi.”) Generally speaking, in Great Britain, Canada, and Japan, it’s “whisky.” In the United States and Ireland, it’s “whiskey,” though there are a few American brands that prefer the other spelling — Maker’s Mark and George Dickel, for instance. Just to add to that little bit of confusion, where the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations defines what the spirit is under American law, it consistently spells it “whisky.”

  That should make it plain, but I’ll spell it out for you: it doesn’t make any difference which way you spell it, except for national pride. “Whisky” and “whiskey” are two virtually identical words for the same thing. I don’t even know why we have discussions about it. No one has ever proposed that a Canadian’s “neighbour” is any different from an American’s “neighbor.” An ingot of “aluminium” is the same stuff as “aluminum,” right down to the subatomic level.

  That’s not to say there is no difference between the spirits from the different countries, because there are differences, very significant ones, and we’ll get to that later. But the differences have nothing to do with spelling!

  To appease the purists (though some sticklers will certainly still find fault), I will use “whisky” when talking about Scotch, Canadian, and Japanese whiskies. When I’m talking about American and Irish whiskeys, or about whiskey in general, I’ll use “whiskey,” because I’m an American, writing in America; it’s how we do it here. But it’s only spelling.

  Whisky or whiskey: it’s only a letter.

  Into the Wood

  Before whiskey got aged, it largely got smuggled. Taxation has been the lot of booze for centuries, because kings and politicians know a good thing when they see it, and usually put a tax on it. That’s when the long, intricate dance of the distiller and the exciseman, the moonshiner and the revenuer, began. Clandestine Scottish and Irish distillers had natural advantages in their home turf: plenty of streams and lakes for mashing and for cooling the vapors, and hills and deep valleys for hiding from the tax collectors.

  This may be why barrel aging first started. Small wooden barrels were lighter and less prone to break than ceramic jugs, and a smuggler could move quickly with small kegs. G
iven today’s craft distillers’ experience with small barrels and quick aging, it’s completely believable that a month in a 5-gallon barrel could have a significant and desirable effect on raw spirit, especially if it were sloshed about.

  Oddly enough, over in the American colonies, distillers were generally considered pillars of the community; sometimes they were sponsored by the community so the town could have a distillery. As I said, the British settlers, especially those in New England, mostly made rum, but my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors made whiskey, usually from rye, the grain they were most familiar with.

  Come the Revolutionary War, this rye whiskey would become the patriot’s drink: rum came from molasses imported from the British West Indies, subject to taxes before the Revolution, hard to get after it began. Rye whiskey was indigenous, and the lore is that Pennsylvania rye helped keep the Colonial soldiers warm and well tempered during their time in winter quarters at Valley Forge. General Washington must have liked it; he built a distillery at his estate at Mount Vernon, and after retiring from the presidency, he would become for a short time the nation’s largest distiller of rye whiskey. Now that’s a pillar of the community.

  A re-creation of George Washington’s eighteenth-century gristmill and distillery at Mount Vernon, one of the largest of its time

  New Whiskeys, Aged

  The world was changing, and whiskey would change with it. Americans had tasted liberty and wanted more: when the war was won and the United States tried to grapple with the debt it had run up fighting it with an excise tax on distilling, farmer-distillers in western Pennsylvania refused to pay it, a defiance that became the Whiskey Rebellion.

  In Scotland, about 30 years later, distilling would be revolutionized by government rule when legal distillation was made easier (and enforcement against illegal distillation was made stronger).