It all starts off with a punt, an outside bet, a whim. But it stays with persistence. So much whisky has been drunk! Tasted, experimented with, drooled about! I climb the learning curve with gusto. But do we see words, writing, … ? No.

Thus I cast aside good intentions of publishing carefully wrought prose and witty commentary on whisky tasting experiences, photos of labels, meandering through terminology and just pick up where I am: at the tail end of a mild hangover (Not atttibutable to whisky), soothed with Japanese food, researching a pair of video artists, and realising I really should get some words on this page.

Voila.

in brief: an Introduction to Whisky tasting, where we covered the main whisky producing regions in Scotland, features, pitfalls (additives, cold filtering), and the like. Pretty worthwhile.

An Australian whisky tasting. Super interesting. I realised that I have a secret love of the things that no one quite likes or understands. There was one whisky that I am quite sure would be the Australian equivalent of blue corn whiskey (American).  It was the sort of whisky you drink while sitting on a rock outcrop looking across an expanse of bushland with a hint of bushfire smoke in the air. It tasted like dried twigs – in my uneducated opinion, most Aust whiskies I have tried seem to have that chewing-on-a-dry-eucalyptus-twig sensation at the somewhere just as you swallow the stuff.  Twigs, with maybe some jet fuel, overtones of Sang-Thip whisky, and some other things I can’t remember. anyway I developed a soft spot for it. The kind of whisky that only its mother could love, haha.

After this: a smoky whisky tasting. Managed not to lose my notes for this. I will share more at some stage.  But really right now this is just a device to talk about the Lagavulin I tasted last night, recommended by the exceedingly polite, humble yet friendly and informative bartender at Grain Bar.  I was a little disarmed by his pleasant Germanic (Nordic?) accent and evident appreciation for whisky, so I couldn’t help but say yes when he showed us his personal favourite, the Lagavulin 16, which has spent the last (how long?) part of its sleep in a Pedro Ximenez barrel. “f*ck yeah,” I declared to a new acquaintance upon tasting the stuff. We decided that this was a legitimate tasting description. I didn’t note whether it was the Distiller’s Edition or not. Frankly, I could never afford a bottle of the stuff right now anyway, and I made a deliberate choice to not worry too much about the technicalities and just take it all in, sooner or later it would start to take shape. As most things in life do.