by Lew Bryson
One way to attack that problem is something you’re already seeing: price. Craft whiskeys are almost always more expensive than comparable whiskeys from traditional distillers. A price tag of $50 for a 3-year-old craft whiskey is common, when a 4-year-old bottle of Jim Beam can be had for under $20, and a 12-year-old single malt can be bought for around $40. What’s going on?
It’s simple scale. Buying in tiny quantities costs more per unit. Anyone who buys ground beef at the market knows that. Simple grocery shopping also teaches you that buying better-quality food costs more, buying organic costs a lot more, and buying out-of-the-ordinary food — ostrich, papayas, farmhouse cheeses — costs even more. And that’s also the case for some craft whiskeys. Their distillers are paying for a new distillery (even a small one isn’t cheap), equipment, labor-intensive processes, all the legal and regulatory costs, and energy, and none of it is at a volume discount.
But higher prices also keep demand in check and give distillers some breathing room so they can get their warehouse full. If they can balance demand and supply and price, they can start aging whiskey in larger barrels for longer times.
But do they want to? Craft whiskey is finding ways to make better young whiskey, using different distilling methods, different warehousing, and different grains. More importantly, tastes may be changing. After our long love affair with ever-older whiskeys over the past 15 years, the supply is running out. Craft distillers are going to be there with different stuff to tempt us. That stuff will challenge you. It will expand our definition of whiskey. Not everyone will like it; there will be different ways to enjoy it, new cocktails, and new rituals. But in the end it comes down to whether or not you like the way it tastes. That’s what it’s always about. And that could be part of the future of whiskey.
Dilution: Water, Ice, and Cocktails
Let’s put that old canard about drinking whiskey neat to rest. You’ll be urged by whiskey aficionados to only drink your whiskey neat: no water, and certainly no ice. You’ll read it in books — there’s no end of bad whiskey advice in detective novels — and you’ll see it in movies and television shows, where there’s always some self-righteous old man or know-it-all young dandy telling you that the only way to drink a good whiskey is neat, straight, up!
“When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey,” says Barry Fitzgerald in The Quiet Man, “and when I drink water, I drink water.” He then proceeds to toss the whiskey bottle’s cork away.
But as we discussed in chapter 5, adding water to whiskey is exactly what tasting pros do! So can’t you add a few drops of water to open up the nose, a splash to quell the heat, or even a glass on the side to sip: “Whiskey, water back,” as the traditional bar call goes? Of course you can. If you’re tasting for education or enlightenment, you’ll want to go easy and incrementally, but if you’re simply drinking for enjoyment, add it as you see fit. Just remember: You can only put water into whiskey. Taking it out makes putting the toothpaste back in the tube look easy.
Don’t let yourself be bound by the personal conventions of whiskey snobs . . . unless it’s their whiskey. In that case, you might want to go easy on the water and keep it down to a few drops, just to be polite. There are still some specialty whiskey bars where a heavy hand with the water in the wrong whiskey could get you ejected, or at least refused service.
But there are some cultural conventions that welcome water. Japan is in love with the highball, a joyfully refreshing dilution of blended Scotch whisky with cold soda water, knocked down to 20 percent ABV or less. I’ve picked up the soothing habit of Kentucky tea, a blend of two parts water to one part bourbon in a tall glass that gives the water flavor (while killing anything lurking in it) and gives the bourbon quaffing power; it’s a great drink with a meal, or when you just feel like drinking bourbon as if it were beer. In the hot countries of South America, whiskey patrons — notably in Venezuela and Brazil — cheerfully quench their thirst with a tall glass of Scotch and soda, clanking with ice.
Adding ice is perhaps even more controversial; you’re not just adding water, you’re chilling the whiskey as well, which fills some people with unspeakable horror. “You’ll chill your inner organs,” as a friend of mine swears he heard a Scotsman once say with horror at the very thought. Well, it’s not usually that hot in Scotland (Scotland’s on the same latitude as Juneau, Alaska; no wonder they don’t want ice!), but here in America, it can be sweltering.
There are just times in life when an American is going to need ice. Chilling the whiskey is what you want when it’s sweltering hot and you’re out on your back porch watching the kids in the pool, or tending the grill. Take a low tumbler, what’s rightly called an old-fashioned glass for reasons we’re going to get to shortly, put some chunks of ice in there, and douse them with whiskey.
Ah. It’s like Colonel Davy Crockett said: “It makes a man warm in the winter, and cool in the summer.” And a little bit of ice sure helps the cooling.
If you’re going to drink good whiskey when you’re in the summer heat — and I do; why drink something that’s substandard just because it’s hot? — you’ll want to use big, hard, cold chunks of ice, stuff that will chill more than it dilutes, not some crushed slurry that will quickly melt. You can either buy block ice and get handy with a pick or mallet — an impressive skill, but keeping block ice around can be wearying — or get some of the extra-large sphere or cube ice molds (the Tovolo ones work well at a very affordable price). I don’t hold with the whiskey stones or metal balls; you can chip your teeth on the things, and the set of stones I had picked up food odors in the freezer. Stick to ice, that’s my advice.
As for drinking your whiskey neat, well, I do, a lot of times. To keep warm in the winter, for instance, or when I’m first tasting a new whiskey, or simply because the whiskey is one that I’ve found I enjoy drinking neat. You should feel as free to drink your whiskey neat as you do to add water or ice. After all, what does “neat” mean? It’s defined as free from admixture or dilution. See, if you want to avoid dilution, by the time the whiskey is in the bottle you’re too late. Unless you’re drinking cask-strength, single-barrel whiskey, it’s already been mixed and diluted. So stop shilly-shallying, and have a drink. Any way you like it. It’s your whiskey, after all.
Three Ways to Drink Plain Whiskey
Whiskey in Cocktails
For over 200 years we’ve been putting whiskey in cocktails, and there’s good reason: they taste good. An Irishman loves his hot whiskey, Manhattans are the standard of many a bourbon drinker (though in my opinion they work better with rye), Canadian is a shamelessly good mixer, and a stiff Scotch and soda can make a big difference in your day.
Here again, you’ll want to let your own taste be your guide. As you’re learning, although all whiskey is made from grain and aged in oak, there are different grains, different oaks, and different makers. There are great differences among whiskeys, and they will go together with cocktail ingredients in very different ways.
I’ve lined up a baker’s dozen of cocktails, most of them classics and a couple that are new, or perhaps not something you’d thought of as a cocktail. We’ll go through them and talk about what’s in them, and why those ingredients work with the particular whiskey bartenders have chosen. I’ll be telling some stories as we go, and that’s all part of the cocktail experience. Take your seat at the bar, and have your tip money ready.
Not That Whiskey!
You may be told by your friends not to put “good” whiskey in cocktails; bartenders may say or strongly imply the same thing. Those annoying whiskey snobs, always ruining your fun. Well, this time, I agree, mostly. I’ve done it a few times to see what happens, and you should feel free to as well. It’s your whiskey, after all. But you should think a bit before ordering a Rob Roy made with Macallan 18-year-old, or a Van Winkle Manhattan, or — good God — Irish coffee with Jameson Gold Reserve.
Why? Think of it like cooking with wine. There’s the old “don’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drin
k” advice, but that’s more about flawed or corked wine, or the so-called cooking wine that’s been heavily salted to make it undrinkable. When you’re drinking whiskey, there’s a certain level of quality you don’t want to go below, and really, it’s a fairly low level; as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, most of the truly bad whiskeys are no longer with us. But using a really fine whiskey doesn’t affect the cocktail enough to make it worth the loss of savoring the whiskey by itself, or the stiff bump in price it will mean.
That goes back to my praise of “table whiskey,” or the “house bottle.” I keep in stock a bottle of each of the major types: a blended Scotch, a standard bourbon, a rye, an Irish, and a Canadian. Those are the bottles I reach for when it’s highball time, or poker night, or when I want a casual cocktail.
In general, there’s certainly something to be said for not casually tossing a rare, ancient, and wonderful bottling into anything more involved than your favorite whiskey glass. But when it comes to everyday drinking of regularly available whiskeys, no matter how “fine” or “hand-crafted,” I maintain the philosophy that Wild Turkey master distiller Jimmy Russell explained to me shortly after I met him. “We don’t really care how you drink our whiskey,” he told me, smiling broadly, “just so long as you drink it.” Cheers to that!
Hot Whiskey
Simplicity Itself
A hot whiskey is as simple and easy as it sounds. If it weren’t for the boiling water, a six-year-old could make one. Put the kettle on, and while you’re waiting for it to sing, take a slice of lemon and poke a few whole cloves through the skin; you don’t have to use the cloves, but it makes a better drink. Get out a glass — it should be a tempered one or a mug; a handle helps, because it’s going to get warm. Have your Irish whiskey and sugar ready. White sugar will do, honey is better, and demerara is more authentic, if you have it.
When the water is boiling, rinse the glass with it, to take the chill off the glass. Then add a teaspoon of sugar and an ounce of boiling water, and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add 2 ounces of whiskey — Powers, Jameson, Black Bush, Kilbeggan — and your cloved-up lemon, then pour in another ounce of boiling water. Stir once. Enjoy. Easy-peasy.
Sugar. Hot water. Whiskey. A bit of lemon. It doesn’t get much simpler than that, boyo, but truth be told, it’s quite a different drink from just a tot of whiskey. You’re re-creating how people used to drink whiskey back before it was good enough to drink on its own, to be blunt. This was the original idea of “punch,” a word that is said to come from the Hindi word “panch,” meaning “five,” for the number of ingredients (water, whiskey, sugar, lemon, and spice). It seems more likely to me that it derives from “puncheon,” a type of cask.
The sugar and lemon accentuate the sweet malt and fruity notes of the whiskey, while the cloves’ bright but intriguingly musky notes perk up the senses and blend so well with citrus. The hot water brings it all together, facilitating the melding of the flavors and aromas, and then pushes them into your senses, opening up your sinuses and the nasopharynx, the part of your throat that connects the back of the nose and the back of the mouth. If you think of how a cup of hot tea opens you up and lets you breathe for a bit when you have a cold, you’ll understand how a hot whiskey gets the flavors into your senses.
It’s not just for the winter, either. A hot whiskey works well as the day winds down in the summer, too. Why? It’s just that good. And did I mention that it’s easy?
If you want to try the hot whiskey with Scotch, it’s done pretty much the same way, but it’s called a Whisky Skin. Just use a piece of peel off the lemon — no cloves — and suit yourself on the whisky: try a good blend, a solid Speysider like Glenfiddich or Glenfarclas, or loft the smell of peat into the air with a tot of Talisker.
Old-Fashioned
From the Dawn of Cocktail Hour
The old-fashioned is well named. Look at the ingredients: whiskey, sugar, bitters, and a bit of water. This is a “cocktail” from the dawn of drinks history, what people were drinking in New Orleans at the turn of the nineteenth century. That’s the original idea of a cocktail: liquor, some sugar to take the edge off and make it pleasant to the taste, some bitters for rounding out the bumps, and a splash of water to bring it down to comfortable drinking strength.
The old-fashioned is a familiar cocktail, and a real go-to for me. Just as Negronis are popular with some cocktail enthusiasts because of their dead-simple 1:1:1 ratio of gin/Campari/sweet vermouth, the old-fashioned is something even the most inexperienced of bartenders can be easily coached through. It’s a simple recipe, but let’s consider some questions first, before determining just which simple recipe we’ll use.
Was the drink really invented at the Pendennis Club in Louisville? They certainly serve a lot of old-fashioneds — or so I’m told; it’s a private club — and they claim to be the site of its invention, but there are references to the cocktail that predate the club’s founding. Given that early cocktails were exactly this sort of mixture, and bourbon and rye whiskey were around for about 100 years prior to the club’s founding in 1881, it seems unlikely no one would have mixed up an old-fashioned before that.
Is it made with rye or bourbon? In Kentucky, it’s almost certainly bourbon; in hip cocktail bars in New York and San Francisco, probably rye. As Canadian starts to catch on again, maybe a high-rye Canadian. Rye will spice things up, while bourbon may be too sweet for some. The important question is, how do you like it? I look on questions like this as an opportunity for drinking different cocktails, an activity I’m pleased to call “research,” as in, “More research is needed.”
Is it made with fruit, or not? Ah, well, there’s the sticker. Of the questions that divide mixologists, this is one of the big ones. I was taught basic cocktail making back in the dark days of the early 1980s, the days of jugged sour mix. The way my boss made old-fashioneds was to put the sugar in the glass and then gun a quick squirt of club soda in there, followed by two dashes of bitters, a slice of orange, and a maraschino cherry, which he would then muddle with great abandon; the cherry would be neon-red mush, the orange would be the peel, usually in two or three pieces. Then ice, whiskey (Windsor Canadian), a quick stir, a cocktail straw, and another cherry, with stem.
I don’t make old-fashioneds that way anymore. I don’t think anyone does, actually; the orange (or pineapple, peach, or lemon; I’ve seen all called for), if it’s in there, gets lightly muddled in the sugar to bring out some juice, or sometimes it’s merely hung on the side as a garnish.
Here’s how I make an old-fashioned, and you’re welcome to fiddle with it. I put a teaspoon of sugar (plain table sugar; we keep things simple around here) in the glass, pour in a bit of water (just a splash), and add 2 dashes of Angostura bitters. I stir a bit to dissolve the sugar, then fill the glass with chunked ice, pour 2 ounces of bourbon over it, and stir once or twice. It’s satisfyingly simple, solid, and tasty, and it’s a cocktail even a guy like me can make.
Whiskey Sour
Not Like Aunt Tillie Made It
I tended bar during grad school, and what a waste of time that was. Grad school, I mean. I can’t remember the last time I ever used what I learned there, whereas tending bar led me into this career. I should’ve been paying more attention behind the stick!
That was back in the early 1980s, and the three most popular drinks at the bar where I worked were draft beer (Miller High Life; it was the only draft we served), highballs made with Windsor Canadian and grapefruit soda (a local anomaly), and whiskey sours. Any kind of sour, really; I also regularly made them with apricot “brandy” and rum, and one guy got Kahlua sours.
I was okay with that, because sours were easy. Grab a shaker glass and dump in a three-count of booze (I had to measure the Kahlua because it poured slow), 1 barspoon of superfine sugar, and 2 glugs of sour mix, and fill it with ice. Cap it, shake it, strain it, and drop a cherry in it: instant tip if you got it to them while the fizz was still popping off the top. The older women loved them.
Only thing was, I thought they tasted like crap. “Whiskey sour” became my codeword for cheap cocktails and the people who drank them. I’d rather have had an honest 7 & 7 than the slumming whiskey sour.
Then I dropped by to see a friend at a new restaurant he’d opened. It was the first real cocktail bar I’d ever been in: bartenders in white jackets and black bowties, slick and smooth wood bar, eye-popping selection of booze on the backbar, and some strange mechanical contraption bolted to the bar surface. I got a beer and talked to my buddy, but I was entranced by the whole scene, and kept an eye on that . . . thing.
Then someone ordered a whiskey sour, and the bartender grabbed a fresh lemon, sliced it in two, placed half on the bottom jaw of the device, and rotated the handle. It was a juice press! Lemon juice poured into the glass, and then he added the whiskey, sugar, and ice, shook it, strained it, and . . . damn, I had to have one. He used fresh juice!
It was a revelation. For all the terrible things mixologists have said about sour mix, I have to judge: they haven’t said enough. Thick, sweet, mystery-citrus sour mix emasculates this drink. With the fresh lemon juice slamming against the whiskey’s sweetness (and the sugar direct-dialing down the acidic bite just enough), it was a drink that made my mouth jump and brought that tingling tightness back at the joints of my jaw. As a Tennessean acquaintance of mine would say, “It made my glands squeeze!”