Whiskys (non-Irish or Scot) & Bourbons

[Greg]

Are you saying there is corruption in the Tr*** administration?

Shocker!

[Drunk Monk]

An extremely rare Japanese whisky once sold for $795,000 is now being offered again for $60,000
Ryan General
22 mins ago


[/url]


[b]Renowned Japanese whisky maker Suntory is gifting the world with its oldest release yet but at a much higher price than when it was initially released in Japan. [/b]
[b]A taste of history:[/b] The Yamazaki 55, the oldest single malt Japanese whisky release in House of Suntory’s history, has a “deep amber color; robust aroma redolent of sandalwood and well-ripened fruit; sweet, slightly bitter and woody palate; and slightly bitter yet sweet and rich finish,” according to a [url=https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-house-of-suntory-whisky-proudly-introduces-yamazaki-55-years-old-301372864.html]press release.

• In 2020, the company initially released just 100 bottles of the 55-year-old whisky, which were sold via a form of lottery for $27,000 (or 3 million yen), Forbes reported. 
  
  
• Later that year, a Yamazaki 55 bottle was purchased for around $795,000 at an auction.
  
  
• According to the company, the release honors the legacy of “three generations of Master Blenders” as well as “the founding family of Japanese whisky.”
  
  
• Components of the blend were “distilled in 1960 under the supervision of Suntory’s founder Shinjiro Torii and then aged in Mizunara casks; and in 1964 under Suntory’s Second Master Blender Keizo Saji and then aged in White Oak casks. Suntory’s Fifth-Generation Chief Blender Shinji Fukuyo worked closely with Third-Generation Master Blender Shingo Torii.” 
  
  
• Fukuyo said that during the blending process of Yamazaki 55, he was inspired by “the passage of time and ‘Wabi-sabi’ – the Japanese belief that imperfections can help to ultimately contribute to perfection.”
  
  
• He added that he considers the resulting expression to be more like a “Buddhist statue: calm and mysterious, requiring time to truly enjoy the inner beauty.”
  

[b]Highly anticipated release:[/b] This month, limited quantities of Yamazaki 55 will be available in the U.S., the U.K., Mainland China and Taiwan with the same allocation and packaging, but at a more expensive price of $60,000. 

• Beam Suntory, the American subsidiary of the Japanese company, has pledged to donate $5,000 for every bottle in the 100-bottle international release to the White Oak Initiative. This organization works to ensure white oak forests’ long-term sustainability in the U.S. 
  
  
• The official tasting notes said the expression treats the palate to a “mixture of sweet and slightly bitter, followed by a woody note from the Mizunara cask.”
  
  
• Yamazaki 55 reportedly has a “slightly bitter, a fragrance like scented wood and a hint of smokiness,” which amounts to a “sweet, rich, lingering finish.”
  
  
• According to Robb Report, the initial sip from the whisky provides a “shock, soft and rich, almost rum-like in its sweetness, which transitions beautifully into Yamazaki’s characteristic tropical fruit notes. Then, a mildly bitter nuttiness with strong hints of smoked wood leading into a long, lingering finish, sweet and lightly smoky.”
  

Featured Image via The Whisky Wash

Well, that's more like it?

[Drunk Monk]

This Bay Area whiskey company was just named on Esquire’s 2021 Spirit Awards

[/url]
[url=https://www.sfgate.com/author/susana-guerrero/]Susana Guerrero
Updated: Dec. 5, 2021 10:46 p.m.

Esquire's 2021 Spirit Awards listed one Bay Area company among the best this year. 
Guido Von Oepen / EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEm
A Bay Area whiskey company was recognized among the best in Esquire’s Spirt Awards for 2021.  
The list, which included whiskeys, tequilas, gin, and other spirits, featured Grizzly Beast straight bourbon whiskey by Redwood Empire Whiskey that has a distillery in Graton, Calif., an unincorporated town in Sonoma County.
“I love it when a whiskey surpasses my expectations,” Esquire wrote. “It's a lovely new sipping bourbon.”
Esquire added that Redwood Empire distills its whiskey in a single distilling season, and that its Grizzly Beast straight bourbon whiskey ages for about four years before its bottled. The bourbon whiskey is described of having orange zest, salted caramel, and buttermilk tasting notes with a spicy aroma.  Redwood Empire Whiskey named its Grizzly Beast bourbon whiskey after two trees found within two national state parks, according to its business website. “Grizzly” is a nod to the grizzly giant sequoia tree in Yosemite National Park, while the word “beast” comes from the mattole beast tree located in HumboldtRedwoods State Park.
The award comes just a few weeks after Esquire named five Bay Area businesses in its Best New Restaurants in America list. The list included Oakland businesses Horn Barbecue and Shawarmaji, along with Berkeley’s Fish & Bird Sousaku Izakaya, and San Francisco restaurants Anchovy Bar and 

I’ve had this. It’s okay. Not stellar. Someone else bought the bottle so maybe is a good buy for the price but it wasn’t outstanding enough for me to seek out. 

Wtf does esquire know about whisky anyway?

And how many shots must you take to get to the level where whisky tastes like buttermilk?

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Feh. Bourbon is for baking.

[thatguy]

I thought I saw and posted this ages ago, but maybe it's actually new...

sad empty glass - so pretty

https://kottke.org/21/12/otherworldly-si...alt-scotch

Otherworldly Single Malt Scotch
posted by Jason Kottke   Dec 16, 2021




For his series Vanishing Spirits: The Dried Remains of Single Malt Scotch, photographer Ernie Buttons photographed the creatively lit bottoms of glasses emptied of their single malt Scotch whisky. The results look like alien worlds.
These remind me a lot of Christopher Jonassen’s frying pan worlds and Nadine Schlieper’s & Robert Pufleb’s photos of pancakes that look like moons. (via moss & fog)

--tg

[thatguy]

Come for The Dali museum…stay for the Whiskey club

https://www.ediblemontereybay.com/blog/t...-monterey/

The Whisky Club Prepares to Open in Downtown Monterey
by [color=var(--body-font-color)]Mark C. Anderson[/color]
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65)][/color]
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65)]Mitchel and LisAnne Sawhney, owners of the soon-to-open Whisky Club on Alvarado Street[/color]

December 15, 2021 – Mitchel Sawhney of Seaside is the type of whisky enthusiast and collector who spontaneously rattles off brands so fast most mortals can’t keep up. 
He’s so deep in the game he can claim one of the world’s largest collections of 40-year-old Laphroaig Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky. 

He enjoys the type of industry connections that recently earned him dibs on two bottles of only 20 in existence, with each worth upwards of $35,000. After his partner in life and business LisAnne Sawhney dropped that nugget as a way to show how into #whiskylife her husband is, he gently requested the brand not be mentioned because other collectors would be incensed at the producer that they didn’t get the memo.

(If you noted whisky without the “e,” good on you. That’s how the word is spelled in Scotland and Canada. Sawhney is all about his Scotch, so he leans “whisky,” and we’ll use that spelling here.)

But somehow he’s not a snob. He has no problem if you want to mix a world-class whisky with soda. Yes, he’ll take his neat, but you do you.

“Some people want to put Coke in Pappy Van Winkle 23 Year,” Mitchel says, referring to a spirit that can run around $100 a shot. “People get upset at that, but if it’s how he or she or they want to enjoy it, it’s his or her or their money. You have no right to get upset about what someone’s doing with their product. I am merely providing access and education unique to this area.”

It all bodes well for The Whisky Club, which occupies the former Guitar Center at 425 Alvarado Street in downtown Monterey. 
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65)][/color]
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65)]The interior is lined with gleaming wooden shelves (Photo: Mark C. Anderson)[/color]

The whole point is to democratize Sawhney’s passion for the spirit in a welcoming way, so his combination of abject enthusiasm, obsessive knowledge and laidback lack of judgement sets a promising tone.

“We want it to be a relaxed and educational place,” LisAnne says. “Mitch wants to share his passion for the spirits. We’re glad to share and be appreciated for what we’re bringing to the community.” 

After months of breathless anticipation and unsolicited visits from locals asking when they’ll open, TWC aims to start hosting soft openings by January. (Keep an eye on Edible Monterey Baynewsletters and TWC’s Facebook and Instagram feeds for updates.) 

Once two final approvals from the alcohol-control authorities In Sacramento go through they’ll start stocking the shelves of the two-headed business, likely around the start of 2022: Up front will be the bar, while the second chamber will be a bottle shop. Employee training is underway.

Even empty, the shelves are a vision to behold. When TWC opens they’ll present more than 200 expressions of whisky, whiskey and bourbon from the likes of Garrison Brothers, Laphroig, Macallan, High West, Woodford Reserve and beyond, expanding from there according to audience response.
 
The bottle shop will offer hundreds more. Sawhney enjoys relationships with many of their favorite brand’s owners and/or distillers, describing Angel’s Envy co-founder and Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame inductee Wes Henderson as an uncle figure.

“I’m a relationship sort of guy,” he says. “We are going to carry as many different expressions as we can of each brand we like so a customer can taste the difference. I want to share my passion with people to see if they like it.”

Obscure liquors from the world of whiskey—and beyond—also represent a focus. 
“Many of our [spirits] will be from craft distilleries and more uncommon names,” LisAnne says. “That’s one of our niches.” 
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65)][/color]
There will be a lot more going on besides whiskeys served solo or via flights. 
Eight upper end beers will flow from taps. A Scheid wine will be featured, also on tap. An ambitious cocktail line navigates classics, some on tap, and house recipes that are being finalized in concert with employee training. Those include three different takes on Manhattans and whisky sours, plus TWC specialties like Toast to Big Sur, Islay Sunrise and Get Off My Lawn, the latter being a nod to Clint Eastwood. Basic food will start with spirit-friendly chocolates and charcuterie boards.

They also want to specialize in capped-capacity tasting seminars with as many titans of the whisky world as they can rope in. Plans for whisky subscriptions, distillery field trips and a formidable club-within-the-club are in the pipeline for coming years.

Sawhney calls the physical renovation “a labor of love—and a lot more patience.” 

“The floor was uneven,” he says. “The walls were waves.”

He stained most of the ample wood surfaces himself. He brought in 130 sheets of plywood for various updates. He plodded through the elaborate machinations involved with changing a historic building.

The key words for the whole operation: “In time.” It comes up when discussing procuring screws. It surfaces when talking staff challenges. (BTW, they are looking for whisky enthusiasts to hire.) It pops up when discussing permit processes. 

That feels on brand in a pair of ways. 

One, Mitchel Sawhney used to work 16-hour days building data memory for massive partners in the high-tech analytic space, assembling systems that could process eight transactions a second. He estimates he made 150 decisions a day while, he adds, one bad call “can get you fired.” (LisAnne is pausing her career in business consulting to help get TWC off the ground, and aspires to make this the first of a growing family of shops.)

So even as bringing TWC to life has been a Herculean heave, it also feels like an appropriate next act that’s more focused on relax and enjoy than react and transact. 

Two, without time there is no aged whisky. There’s a reason he prefers spirits that have decades of maturation to their name. And a little extra time to fine tune things can’t hurt after this long of a wait, as LisAnna knows well.

She messaged as much after learning that the opening will be delayed until the new year: “At least we all get to learn more and enjoy the holidays.”

Cheers to that. 

More at thewhiskyclub.com.

—tg

[Drunk Monk]

Sabbatical bourbon is made in the lowlands of...

...Stockton.

An accomplice gifted me a bottle. He was on the road, stumbled on the distillery, went in for a tasting, and ended up buying two cases. At least, that’s how many he had in his truck. He got several of each and gifted me a bottle of the barrel reserve small batch.

Tastes like medicine. It’s 100 proof. Maybe it’ll be good for hot toddys or something. I’m always grateful for a gifted bottle. Maybe if I drink enough of it, the flavor will emerge. Bourbon is like that sometimes, right?

Is there even any peat source in Stockton?

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Weller's if you must, or Old Potrero. Anything else is just alcohol and marketing.

[thatguy]

Speaking of just marketing:

https://boingboing.net/2022/05/23/metall...metal.html

Metallica releases new whiskey aged on the sounds of heavy metal

Thom Dunn
4:48 am Mon  May 23, 2022 
"Rye The Lightning" is a new straight rye whiskey from Metallica's whiskey brand, BLACKENED. Named for and inspired by the band's sophomore album, which sold some six million copies, the whiskey was aged through BLACKENED's proprietary "Black Noise" process. Basically, they blast the barrels with the sonic strength of a live recording of Metallica performing "Ride The Lightning" in its entirety. 
Here's the fancy marketing way they explain it: 

We set out to craft a whiskey that brings the uniqueness of the collaborators together in a bottle. A whiskey born of innovation, and unlike any other in the world. From the time Dave was a cadet at West Point, he was fascinated with the effects of sound – the way an organ can play a note that shakes an entire building. As he honed his craft over the years, the thought of what sound could do to whiskey at a molecular level stayed with him. As it so happened, Metallica and Meyer Sound innovated a subwoofer employing that same range, harnessing the vibrations that make a Metallica concert the resonant, visceral experience their fans know and love. The convergence of these ambitions have resulted in a sonic-enhancement method that utilizes a variation of the band's song-determined frequencies to disrupt the whiskey inside the barrel, causing increased wood interaction that kicks up the wood-flavor characteristics in the whiskey. We call this proprietary sonic-enhancement process BLACK NOISE™.

Sure, okay.
It's not entirely clear how long the whiskey is subject to this sonic assault. According to Rolling Stone, the rye base is aged 5-8 years in traditional Kentucky whiskey barrels, then finished in Madeira wine and Caribbean rum casks for 2-14 weeks each. I'm guessing the Black Noise process only happens at the end there, where it's good for marketing.
According to the distiller, Rye the Lightning has, "notes of dried fig, hay, pinewood, pear, and rum cake on the nose, and on the palate, clover honey, mint, corn husk, sugar cane, walnut, and cinnamon."
It's $80, if you want to buy a bottle.
Metallica Unveil 'Rye the Lightning,' a Straight Rye Named After Iconic Sophomore Release[Tim Chan / Rolling Stone]

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc3N7GsDb6z

--tg

[Greg]

They been promoting the Metallica Whiskey heavily during Giants' games.

I keeping thinking 20 year old Metallica would be kicking whiskey making Metallica's ass.

[thatguy]

It's a nice day for a white whiskey

https://lifehacker.com/whats-so-special-...1849044936

What's So Special About White Whiskey?

It’s a cynical marketing triumph, but also a fun alternative to other spirits.

One of the side effects of modern capitalism is the incessant drive for growth. Every business has to get bigger every year or it’s a disaster. You see this echoed in the consumer markets—there always has to be a new product, a new category, a new way to encourage folks to spend their money. So it’s not a total surprise that even the spirits industry has put effort into reinventing the wheel. Do we need new varieties of whiskey? No, probably not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to invent some. Hence, white whiskey.

Technically, white whiskey isn’t so much a new kind of whiskey as it is a new kind of cynical marketing technique. Basically, the whiskey producers of the world—especially the smaller distilleries—had two problems. One, traditional whiskey like bourbon or rye takes a long time to mature, during which time it represents nothing but an expense on a distillery’s accounts. And two, vodka is the main competitor to whiskey in terms of sales. So the fact that you’ve been seeing a lot of white whiskey on the shelves isn’t too surprising. But what is it?

What is white whiskey?

Fundamentally, white whiskey is unaged (or barely aged) whiskey straight out of the distillation process. Traditional whiskey emerges from the distilling process clear and potent, then is aged in oak barrels of some sort, during which time it slowly acquires its brown color, along with flavors pulled from the wood. Technically, to be considered whiskey a liquor has to spend time in barrels aging, though the rule is pretty imprecise, and literally any time spent in a barrel—even ten seconds—counts.

Many distillers call raw whiskey “white dog.” You’ll often see that phrase used in branding and marketing of white whiskeys—but it’s misleading. White dog is technically whiskey that’s been distilled with the intention of aging it properly. When distillers decide to make an unaged white whiskey from the get-go, they usually alter the mash bill (the ingredients used in the fermentation and distillation process, like corn or rye or wheat) to create a different flavor profile from the raw whiskey intended for barrels, where the choice of wood and the amount of time spent maturing have a lot to say about what the final product tastes like.

You can see the economic drive behind white whiskey. If you’re a small distillery just starting out, the first thing you do is invest a ton of cash and time into distilling enormous amounts of white dog, then wait a few years before you can start selling a young whiskey to the world. If you need to make cash right away, you can leverage your one asset: All those gallons of white, barely-aged whiskey. In that sense, white whiskey is a smart, if slightly cynical, marketing trick. It’s sort of like slicing up raw potatoes and marketing them as Raw French Fries.

Harkening back to the days of moonshine

America has a long tradition of loving white whiskey. Moonshine—that illicit liquor brewed in bathtubs and sold in speakeasies during Prohibition—is a form of white whiskey: raw, unaged and with a high alcohol content that will kick you in the ass and perhaps make you temporarily blind. Modern white whiskey may be a marketing ploy, but it’s part of a historical lineage, and still deserves a place in your liquor cabinet.

The white whiskey you’ll find on shelves isn’t classic moonshine anyway. Moonshine isn’t a well-defined category because the stuff made a century ago was produced illegally, with no rules (or health inspections) covering its production. It was distilled from anything its tax-evading, law-breaking makers could get their hands on. In the modern day, what we officially call moonshine generally has a lot of corn in the mash bill, plus added sugar in order to approximate the classic stuff. It’s still incredibly potent—upwards of 190 proof. (That’s an evening you’ll never remember to forget.)

As noted above, modern white whiskey varieties are produced more thoughtfully, although you can call it moonshine if it makes you feel like an outlaw. Distillers usually adjust and massage their mash bills when they know the result is intended to be a white whiskey, aiming for a particular flavor profile. Unlike vodka, white whiskey will definitely have a flavor to it, so it’s worth checking out different varieties. There’s also a burgeoning white whiskey cocktail scene, though I’d argue this defeats the whole purpose of a white whiskey, which is to enjoy a raw, pristine liquor. In fact, white whiskey is popular enough that it’s no longer a guaranteed economic lifeline for smaller distilleries, because the big boys are muscling in on the action.

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

ain't that just poteen?

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Bottle shite and sell it as silk. Assholes.

[Greg]

Poteen is made from potatoes.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

What in particular acquires my goat is that most of the bullshit marketing stuff is an excuse to try to do less, make a cheap, fast, inferior product, and then try to sell it as a premium “equal to the labor-intensive, slow” dram. That’s an insult to the craft and skill of the original [shakes fist slowly at the sky].

Thus endeth my Old Man Shouting At Clouds rant.

Also: This is not a *Gathering*.