Some ramblings on a Monday afternoon

It's a quiet blog day for me.  I'm working on employment stuff as well as tomorrow's Taste Off report.

In the meantime, I recommend...

The Coopered Tot posted the results of his gigantic 6-part blind Canadian Rye tasting, along with some thorough analysis.  It's so good that it inspired me to amend part of yesterday's Taste Off.  More on my much smaller non-rye Taste Off tomorrow.

The Scotch & Ice Cream blog posted an intensive write up on three Canadian Ryes last week.  Jefferson's 10 year Rye is looking better every day.

If you're a sherry fan, Chemistry of the Cocktail did a write-up on three deeee-licious looking sherry & rye cocktail recipes.

Looks like everything is turning up rye!

On the Scotch front, if you have 15 minutes and a drink at hand, Malt Maniac Ralfy just posted a video about Kilchoman (one of my favorite distilleries) and young crafted whiskies in general.

And look at that black-shirted drinker on the left of the photo below:

Thanks to Shawn Bishop Photography and their the wide-angle lens, I look considerably more buff than I deserve to.  Anyway, that's a pic from the LA Scotch Club's Peetin' Meetin'.  And I'm reaching for the indie Ardmore, my fave of the evening.

That's all, see you tomorrow for some bourbon.

NOT Single Malt Report: Wild Turkey Rye 101

For the 101st whisk(e)y?

Wild Turkey Rye 101, of course.

Distillery: Wild Turkey (their website has no info on rye)
Ownership: Campari Group (via Austin, Nichols, & Co.)
Type: Straight Rye
Region: Lawrenceburg, Kentucky

Age: minimum 2 years
Mashbill: 65% rye, 23% corn, 12% barley

Maturation: "charred white oak barrels"

Alcohol by Volume: 50.5%

In 1869, the Ripy family started a distillery on Wild Turkey Hill in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky.  The distillery blossomed despite grain shortages, the Prohibition shutdown, and the federal enforcement of bourbon standards.  The brand, Wild Turkey itself, had been the product of large batch bourbon purchases from other distilleries.  But in 1972, the Ripy family's distillery was acquired to become The Wild Turkey Distillery.  In 1980 the company was sold to Pernod Ricard.  Then in 2009 Campari purchased the brand.

Now, let me clarify something.  Wild Turkey 101 Rye has NOT entirely vanished.  Reports of its death have been somewhat exaggerated.  It's still out there to be found (at least three local stores have started carrying it again), but it is considerably less prevalent.  As folks have mentioned (here, here, here, and here) there's a rye shortage in the US right now.  If the Lawrenceburg distillery is getting less grain, then they'll stretch it out (water it down) and bottle more of the 81 proof version.  And sell it at the same exact price.  So it goes.

Soonafter getting a few recommendations on for WT101, I read all of the rye shortage news and got caught up in the panic.  Suddenly, no one was selling this rye around here.  When I found a bottle in Palm Springs a few months ago, I thought I'd discovered a great secret whiskey source.  Well, it was a good catch and the price was right, but it was no miracle.

So it's tough to find, but it's still around, especially if you live in or near a major American urban area.

With that out of the way, I have to say, I've never met a rye I didn't like.  Something about straight rye's nose and palate, with its spice cabinet and floral cherry cough syrup highlights, always appeals to me.

There are few $20 bottles of Scotch whisky that can compete with the complexity and spice of a $20 bottle of American rye.  Do we have import tariffs to thank for this?  Or the raw power of the rye distillate?  Probably both.

---

NEAT:
The color is of a red-orange molasses.  Always looks nice in a glass.  The nose starts with candied oranges, buttery oak, and barrel char.  Then there's a dry vegetal note that joins up with a whiff of hay.  A dusty cocoa and mild ground black pepper linger in the background.  Cherries in syrup and cherry cough syrup lead the way in the palate.  Pungent fruit sugars and anise liqueur follow.  It's always sweet and spicy, getting sweeter the longer it sits in the glass.  It finishes with the cherry cough syrup, anise liqueur, and juicy sweetness.  Though it's surprisingly brief for its ABV.

It works well in a Sazerac (use real absinthe please!).  It's not bad in a Manhattan.  The dusty cocoa and barrel char elements should work well with some barbecue -- I'll try that this summer.

It stacks up pretty close to the Bulleit and Baby Saz straight ryes.  I won't declare a winner here since I've tried them in completely different circumstances.  I'll just have to drink some more rye, for empirical purposes, of course.

Availability - You'll need to do some Turkey hunting

Pricing - Excellent at $18-$21 (there are folks selling it for $30, shame on them)

Rating - 84

About getting "Jewed"

While sitting at a mostly empty pub yesterday, I overheard two forty-going-on-twenty-year-old guys discussing selling their used cars.  The louder of the two kept saying over and over again that he didn't want to go under seven grand.  He listed the price as seventy-five hundred, but "seven grand, man, that's the lowest I would go."

He then proceeded to tell his listener how the eventual buyer had "Jewed him down to sixty-five hundred".

I hadn't heard the word 'Jew' used as a verb in over 20 years.  I didn't realize it was still being utilized in that manner.  But let's set aside the bigot implications for a moment and analyze the usage here.

A man (or maybe just a male of the species) is trying to sell his car via Craigslist or the newspaper.  Though he likely paid 15-25 thousand dollars for it originally, he wants a new car or needs to pay the rent or requires cash for his meth habit and is thus willing to sell the vehicle unofficially for a return he hopes is better than trade-in value.  He advertises his price of $7500 with the hope he'll find a buyer too frightened to bargain; but, just in case, he sets the bidding floor at seven grand.

Perhaps buyers are scarce in this economy or too much time passes and his ex-wife has hired a lawyer because she needs money for child support.  At that moment a buyer comes along; a buyer who's done his homework and knows the car isn't worth 7K let alone 7.5K.  So they negotiate, which is a common worldwide practice when buying and selling private goods.  The buyer starts at six grand, the seller at 7.5.

Eventually the buyer makes it clear he will leave before he pays seven thousand dollars, since he can get the same model for less from alternate sellers.  This seller, hungry to sell, shows his desperation too quickly and winds up taking sixty-five hundred in cash.

He's hurt.  His dominance over the circumstance has been challenged and overcome.  Upon relating this tale to another male of the species, he doesn't want to reveal his forfeited masculinity, situational embarrassment, and negotiation failure.  Thus he uses, quite freely, what he thinks is an insult.  But instead, to anyone within earshot, he advances his inadequacy.  Not only has he lost financially and testosteronally, but he's revealed a void in his humanity.

To the seller:  In your desperate attempt to demean a man who got the better of you in many ways, you deployed what you assumed was an epithet towards my people.  You lowered yourself and thus elevated the object of your resentment.  Congratulations, you failed again.

Things from space

REAL:

Full screen, hi-definition, 360-degree panoramas of the Mars surface are now online.

They are beautiful.


NOT REAL:

Okay, the trailer -- with its Malick-style visuals, inspirational voice-over, and the best music from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack -- is real.  But sadly, the son of Jor-El is not.

Single Malt Report #100: Glencadam 20 year old 1989 Cask Strength (Signatory)

Occasionally I reference the pivotal moments in my whisky fandom.  One of my favorites occurred in May 2011.

Kristen and I were on holiday in London, loving life.  Because we're museum geeks, I made sure that we went to the British Museum on our next to last day.  But before we were to enter that grand display of human creation and achievement, I wanted to go to a whisky store.  Just around the corner from the museum, in Bloomsbury, there's a shop that I remembered very vividly window-gawking during my previous London visit three years earlier.  It's called Royal Mile Whiskies.  And I didn't even need a map to find the shop that morning last May.  I remembered that window that well.

Once inside, I was all OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!  Quietly though, it's Britain and all.  Somewhere in the universe there's a picture that my wife (sitting in the corner, as I have when she's gone clothes shopping) took of me, my hands clasped behind my back as I studied the shelves.  Any level of calm I displayed was a success.

I spent most of my time eyeing the Signatory whiskies, as they were the only indie bottlers I knew of at that moment.  The gent who worked at the shop was very helpful and very patient as I made dumbass comments about how f***ing ugly the Connoisseur's Choice labels were.

I tend to say stupid sh*t when I'm happy.

I first chose the Bowmore 16yr Signatory UCF 1994 which turned out to be one of my favorite all time whiskies.  Then I went back and forth and back and forth over the Cask Strength bottlings.  Should I have chosen the Clynelish?  Probably.  Should I have forked over 10-15GBP more for the Highland Park?  Yes.  But I went with the Glencadam.

Why?  I have no idea.  I had never heard of Glencadam before.  Maybe I thought that was a good thing; you know, like something definitely unavailable in The States.  Maybe I was intrigued by the idea that it was matured in a refill sherry butt -- which, I had no idea, has been a prevalent practice throughout whisky history.

But I went with it.  It was my first cask strength bottle.  And the only single cask-er I've ever had ...... so far.  Royal Mile shipped the parcel very quickly and safely to our LA apartment.  I opened the Bowmore that June.  SOMEHOW, I waited until September 2nd to open the Glencadam.

Distillery: Glencadam
Owner: Angus Dundee Plc

Independent Bottler: Signatory

Age: 20 years (September 1989 - April 2010)

Maturation: refill sherry butt

Type: Single Malt
Region: Eastern Highlands

Alcohol by Volume: 55.7%
Cask: 6019
Bottle #: 283 of 508
Chill filtration? No
Artificial colorant? No

When finished it two weeks ago, it had been a joy for all of its eleven months open.  Sort of a special occasion booze.  I decided early on that I'd do three sets of notes on the whisky as time and oxygen had their way with it.  Beginning, middle, end.

After writing each set of notes, I never looked back on what I'd written, maintaining an uninfluenced study the best I could.  I started this one week before my first Single Malt Report, so its open life stretched the length of time that I reported on the 99 other whiskies.

One question remains in my mind.  Did the whisky change or did I?

---

Here are the three sets of notes with my comments at the time of the tasting.

#1 - Beginning
29 September 2011 (27 days old)
Color - Golden, goes cloudy with water, brings out the yellows
Nose - Floral, tiny bit of leather
Palate - Light peat, then some cream sherry, oak, hot apples or applesauce
Finish - Starts out quiet then fades up, tapioca, nilla wafers

Comments - Even with 4 teaspoons of water it's still sticky and thick on the glass

* * * * *

#2 - Middle
1 February 2012 (5 months old)
NEAT
Color - Light apple juice
Nose - Surprisingly bourbony, spicy zing, apple juice, sultanas?, vanilla, gingerbread cookies for a brief moment
Palate - Cigars, smooth texture, sweet, alcohol hot, toffee and caramel sauce
Finish - Excellent length, cigar smoke, tiny bit of sweetness, vanilla

WITH WATER (approx 37% ABV)
Color - Gets very cloudy!
Nose - expectedly everything has mellowed, very dry wine, a little vanilla, oak, sugars
Palate - Creamier, some sweet sherry, much sweeter now almost like candy, sweet cream, nutty at the start, then some spices
Finish - Medium length, chocolate followed by vanilla ice cream

Comments - must have been a much-used refill sherry cask, very little color from the oak

* * * * *

#3 - End
27 July 2012 (almost 11 months old)
NEAT
Color - Bold gold
Nose - fruity (prunes, dried apricots, apples, very ripe peaches), something vaguely gaseous but not off-putting though this grows with time
Palate - pecan pie (nuts, pastry, and brown sugar), almonds, almond extract, still packing some alcohol heat, sweet, tannin drying, barley sugar
Finish - Tannin drying, lovely heat, a little sherry, nutty and sweet

WITH WATER (approx 37% ABV)
Nose - perfumy, tropical fruit, very light, Juicy Fruit gum, a little oak
Palate - very mild, but fuller texture, mineraly, light sugar, some bitterness
Finish - mostly bitterness remaining, mingling with light sweetness

Comments - still VERY cloudy with water, sediment at the bottom of the glass

---

Firstly, peat???  Wut?  According to Charlie Maclean's Whiskypedia, Glencadam uses unpeated malt.  But my peat sensors were very sensitive last year, as I was still trying to warm up to phenolics.  I remember saying, "Great, I bought two peated whiskies."  Perhaps it had something to do with a newly opened cask strength bottle because that peat element was gone within a couple of months.  Something cigar-ish remained in its place for a while.  By the end, the smoke was gone entirely, possibly replaced by dry tannins.

Next, the bourbon notes?  Per Whiskypedia, Glencadam itself ages their whiskies in ex-bourbon barrels.  Could it have been re-casked from ex-bourbon to ex-sherry when sent to Signatory?

At the start, the nose and flavor were a bit muted.  Or I was still new to the process.  But about midway through the bottle it had gotten sugary sweet, especially with water.  By the end, the fruits jumped out and the sweetness had tamed.

To answer the question: Did the whisky change or did I?

The answer is, yes.  :)

I actually liked it best at the end.  It was only 20% full for the last four months so some sort of oxidation had happened, but it didn't kill the whisky.  It didn't take to water very well any more, but was very pleasant when neat.

And my nosing/tasting notes seem to have gained detail, clarity, and focus throughout time.  By the end I was able to pinpoint the fruits and the nuts, which something I'm getting better at with my notes in general.

What will replace this in the Whisky Closet?  I don't know, but it had better be good for a long time.

Availability - Unknown, all of the major UK shops appear to be sold out

Pricing - Was in the 45-50GBP range (w/o VAT, before shipping)

Rating - 88

One Hundred Whiskies --or-- Why have I been doing this?

When I had restarted Diving for Pearls last August 29th, my intent was to create daily content centered around the freelance writing career, baseball, film reviews, music, and books.  As a bit of even lighter escapism, I had hoped to be able to write a few Single Malt Reports each month, maybe one a week at best.

Instead, over these 11 months, I have reported on 99 whiskies and delivered almost 140 drinking-related posts.

What happened?  What changed?  Have I become a raging alcoholic?

To answer the last question first: No.  Having lower alcohol consumption than the average American (according to some studies), I may be drinking less than before this started.  There's no intent to get blitzed.  It's rare that I even get a good buzz on.

To be more specific, I've become a more selective drinker.  My choice in beverages is an increasingly-bourgeois luxury that I cannot afford in large quantity.  Moreover, I'm paranoid about my health, and I need to get out of bed early every AM to get to the gym.

But when I like something, I fixate on it.  I study it, read about it, always hungering for more data.  I can read about whisky for hours without taking a single sip.  And whisky is the perfect alchemy, where science and mystery meet to create unique sensory experiences.  How could I not obsess?

I chose not to delve into my writing career here because of the oceans of negativity that surrounded it.  Writers love to complain and they love to complain of nothing more than their writing careers.  This was not to be a daily bitch session.  Diving for Pearls deserved better.  Plus, I didn't want certain parties to happen upon my complaints until I had addressed them appropriately offline.

Film reviews take an immense amount of time for me because I don't want to post something subpar.  The George Herman Hitchcock Project isn't dead, but (between the film viewing, reading, and the write-ups) one of those posts could easily take six hours.

My emotional investment in baseball wanes with each season, though my interest in football and basketball grows.  And maybe I'll be able to talk a bunch of soccer smack when the 2014 World Cup comes along.

I still intend to write about more than whisky on this site, but I really enjoy studying these amber elixirs.  There's reading, history, geography, the aforementioned science, and sometimes math involved in my whisky experience.  And the beverage tastes pretty good too.

---

Last week, when I wrote about my whisky tasting process, I mentioned that I don't report on everything I taste.  There's another 30-40 whiskies I've tried this year that I haven't reported on because I was enjoying them without probing much deeper.

For instance:

This is Green Spot and this is good.

My bottle- and sample-purchasing (already carefully controlled) will be curbed after August, possibly for the rest of the year.  Happily, I have enough goodies on hand to do reports for the rest of 2012.  Some REALLY good goodies.  Plus I have the benefit of several local spirits groups that help me reach the whisky beyond my grasp.

2013 will likely be more of an American Whiskey year, as long as crop shortages and growing international demand don't push this national commodity's prices to Scotch levels.  Perhaps rum and other distilled spirits may make an appearance.

Will I reach 200 reports?  I hope so.  This first block of 100 has been very educational.  I have left all of my early whisky posts intact, even though some of them are wrong or naive.  And I'd like to think I've become a better noser and taster, but that could be illusion and ego.

For report #100, I've picked a personal whisky, one that's been the subject of experiments as it's been in the Whisky Closet for some time.  For report #101, I've chosen one of the newest members of the collection.

But before those posts, I would like to thank everyone who has stopped by the site.  Especially those who have visited a second time!  I aim to do a great job with each report.  I look forward to discovering both my first 5-star and 0-star whiskies.  When the time comes, I hope I can find the right words to do them justice.

Single Malt Report Standings as of August 4, 2012

Please note: These so-called standings refer to my individual Single Malt Report pages, not whisky on the Internet or searches as a whole.  Just my silly stuff.  Cheers!

(My methodology uses pageview counts from three different sources in an attempt to suss out which posts are spammer heavy and which ones are getting the real clicky traffic.  Then I apply a very (not) sophisticated algorithm.  And from that I get a Top Ten.)

SINGLE MALT REPORT STANDINGS AS OF 8/4/2012 (out of 89 posts / 99 whiskies):

#10  Millstone 8-year-old French Oak, Dutch Single Malt -1

#9  Lauder's Blended Scotch Whisky +1
Millstone and Lauder's flipped spots.  I'm not noticing any trends in this case.  Though #11 and #12 are closing in.

#8  The Macallan 12-year-old Single Malt NC
Mac 12 holds the eighth spot easily, gradually separating itself from #8 and #9.

#7 Powers Gold Label (Blended Irish Whiskey) NC
Powers stays strong.  That's okay with me.

#6  J&B Rare Blended Scotch Whisky -2
The big surprise in the Top Ten.  J&B gets knocked from its #4 spot which it's held since I started this tracker, and falls TWO places.  It's still very close to Mac 18, so there may still be movement next time.

#5  The Macallan 18-year-old Single Malt +1
I was half right, half wrong in my predictions.  Mac 18 did knock J&B back by August, but it did not surpass Chivas by any margin.

#4 Chivas Regal 12-year-old Blended Scotch Whisky +1
Chivas is back to a big click streak, zooming along, putting #5 and #6 behind it.  But it's not so far ahead that it can't be caught this month.

#3  The Glenlivet 15-year-old French Oak Reserve Single Malt NC
This one's still pulling considerably more clicks than Grouse, but again, the distance is so far that it won't challenge the next spot until 2013.

#2  The Famous Grouse Blended Scotch Whisky NC
The Grouse page is secure.

#1  Glenfiddich 12-year-old Single Malt NC
Number one.  Carve it in stone.

---

BIG MOVERS

UP
Oban 14-year-old makes the biggest leap, up 13 spots to #49
After being the big rookie last week, Glen Garioch 12-year-old jumps 11 places to 38th
Even after taking spambots into consideration, Ardbeg Corryvreckan hops 10 spots to 47th place
Its partner in crime, Ardbeg Uigeadail moves up 6 to land in 40th place

DOWN
The Glenrothes 1991 & 1994 post drops 8 places to #48.  It has fallen 27 spots in two months because it has gotten 1 click in that entire time period.
Vegas 2012 edition (3 of 4) drops 5 spots to knock it out of the Top Fifty
Amrut Cask Strength 2010, Batch 2 falls 4 places to 41st
Johnnie Walker Black Label falls 4 places to 34th.  It has fallen from 17th to 34th over the last two months as it has garnered two whole clicks in that time.  I'm curious as to why that one hasn't even generated any image search results.  The mysteries of Google......

NOTES FOR THIS WEEK, BAD PREDICTIONS FOR NEXT WEEK

As time moves along and the clicks add up, there's a lot less movement in the Top Thirty.  All the large shifts happen in spots below that.

While there will be a challenge or two to the Top Ten, I don't foresee that happening this month.  But there will be some musical chairs amongst the existing Ten in the meantime.

August and September should bring a handful of popular rookies into the mix, we'll see how they shake things up.

Thanks again for all the views!  The standings should return in a couple of weeks.