Who knew scotch was so complicated?

Now that I have a few more moments, if you want to know yer Scotch, here are a few other bits to increase your cred with your friends:

In Scotland, it's "whisky". In most of the rest of the world, it's "whiskey". This is a variant spelling of the Gaelic word "uisge" ("water") and a foreshortening of "uisge beatha" ("water of life" - like "akvavit", "vodka", etc.)

The varieties are regions of Scotland. The major regions are:
- Highland (actually north, not necessarily mountainous)
- Lowland
- Campbelltown
- Speyside (along the Spey river)
- Islay (and Skye)

Like wines, each region has its own character and people tend to settle on a favorite, but only the snobbiest of snobs will refuse to drink anything but their favorite.

Scotch whisky can be one of the following:
- Single Malt - the product of one distillery and process, but can be a blend of several batches or even several years
- Single single - the product of one production run, not blended with other years
- Single cask - the product of a single barrel from a single run
- Blend (see above)
- Pure malt or vatted malt (see above)

Until the early 1800s, practically nobody outside Scotland drank Scotch whisky. It was strong, harsh, sometimes bitter, nasty stuff. Then a chap named Andrew Usher started experimenting with mixing whisky from different makers to smooth out the experience. His son, also named Andrew Usher, perfected the process and suddenly "blended" Scotch whisky became very popular around the world.

Even today, the Scots feel that each single malt has a combination of strengths and flaws and the art of blending is to mix different malts to find the perfect balance of nose, taste, and afterburn while masking the flaws in each major malt. On the other hand, major blends are designed to be cheap, consistent, and unremarkable (like McDonalds hamburgers) or expensive, consistent, and inoffensive (like Ruth's Chris Steakhouse).

To be sold as Scotch the whisky must be aged in a cask for at least three years. Most of the good stuff is at least ten years old. In a blend, the age statement on the bottle must be the age of the youngest malt in the blend. A cask loses ten percent of its volume each year (what the Scots call "the angels' share"), so not only does aging a whisky 25 years take a long time and take up space, but when you finally tap that cask, there's a very small fraction of what you originally put in there.

As soon as you put it in a bottle, the aging process stops, so don't keep your bottle of Macallans 18 on the shelf for seven years and think you just made 25 year old whisky.

For decades, most Scotch was aged in Oloroso sherry casks from Spain, but in the last ten to 20 years, many producers have experimented with various woods and casks that were used to age other products, notably, charred oak from American Bourbon.

Scotch is just distilled beer.

The spent barley is dried and sold to dairy farmers for feed, so Scotland claims to have the happiest cows in the world.

On British Airways, if you ask for "Scotch" you get whatever blend they happened to find on sale. If you ask for "malt" you get Glenmorangie.

Finally, my favorite bit of Scotch trivia: By law, a distillery must make a minimum batch of 500 gallons -- else the taxman figures you can just disappear into the mist of the hills. The smallest distillery in Scotland is Edradour in the painfully quaint town of Pitlochry. Edradour's setup makes a batch of exactly 500 gallons, so they can defend their claim of the smallest. Edradour makes a single malt, and they are the major component of a blend called House of Lords which is available in only two places: the bar in The House of Lords and in the tasting room at the Edradour distillery (guess where I got mine).

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
Who knew scotch was so complicated?

I did.

Sorry.

It's kinda like saying "my friends are coming over for dinner and they are big classical music fans... what CD should I buy to play for background music?"

.

.

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Well, of course, the answer to that is obvious... Elaine Camparone playing Scarlatti.

Hey, pj, thanks for the scotch education!

I knew some percentage of that stuff, but certainly not all.

Do you like Edradour? I see it here in various places but have not tried.

I sure wish more single malts were made available in those tiny one- or two-serving bottles so you could taste them before blowing a wad of money on a full bottle of something you haven't tried! Ordering at a bar is one way to taste-test, but that gets pricey too, and I mostly don't enjoy bars.

I recall that I liked Edradour, but it was about 1995 that I last had it. It was a perfectly fine Highland SM.