scotch

WISER’S SPECIAL BLEND—Making Johnnie Walker its bitch

My Fellow Inebriates,

As exhilaratingly nasty as our last whisky tasting was, LBHQ isn’t big enough for a substance as raunchy as JOHNNIE WALKER RED LABEL. Our tastebuds aren’t sure whether to bother growing back until the bottle’s finished, but kudos to my dad for bringing home such a coarse, discordant palate-abuser.

The hell, you say. There’s no reason to laud such a purchase, is there?

Well, first of all, buying JOHNNIE WALKER RED isn’t the worst choice my dad’s ever made. Just last weekend, for example, he locked his car keys in the trunk of the car. Ka-ching, $60, and roadside assistance popped the mechanism (I had a vision of FOUR mickeys of crappy whisky floating away, all for naught).

Second, products like JOHNNIE WALKER RED serve admirably as tastebud resetters. By burning all your tastebuds off, they destroy the memory of what a good whisky tastes like, zeroing out your expectations (and in fact, my second glass of JOHNNIE WALKER RED was considerably more tolerable than the first). Effectively you get re-accustomed to cheap crap, which is good for your budget.

Third—and I could be totally wrong about this, so perhaps some neo-Darwinians out there will correct me—only the toughest tastebuds survive the bad-whisky assault, and after repeated assaults these hardy little meat-pixels dominate your tongue’s surface, where they not only welcome solvent-like booze but ask for more. Not only is this good for your budget; it also tricks you into thinking you’re enjoying your cheap crap.

Win-win-win.

The only downside about JOHNNIE WALKER RED is that it’s not as cheap as it could be. About $16 buys you 375 mL, but for $11.87 you could have WISER’S SPECIAL BLEND.

But wait, you say, I only just survived JOHNNIE WALKER RED. Surely WISER’S SPECIAL BLEND, at three-quarters its price, will be paint thinner itself.

Surprisingly not. Deep amber-gold, WISER’S SPECIAL BLEND opens up gently with a light grain aroma that develops quickly—wood, vanilla, and a hint of caramel. It spreads over the tongue with a warming, smooth oaky-caramel release, lingering with polite heat and a slight medicinal hint.

For a cheap whisky, WISER’S SPECIAL BLEND has a lot going on. Whereas many of its fellow Canadian whiskies fall short on character, WISER’S offers plenty of depth and layering, and enough balance to hit a wide range of whisky-drinking tastes. With its unexpected subtlety, and for the most reasonable dough possible, it makes JOHNNIE WALKER RED LABEL its bitch.

For sure, there are more complex whiskies out there, but you won’t find them in big-ass 1.75-L bottles with a mere $56 price tag. Which is about the cost of unlocking your trunk to retrieve your car keys. 😦

HARVIESTOUN OLA DUBH 12

My Fellow Inebriates,

It’s a million degrees. If ever there was a good time for a lingering soul to depart a furball like Fluffy, this is it. He’s panting with the heat. If it gets much hotter, he might end up dead, and then where will Granny be?

The weekend didn’t feel quite as hot, and I think I know why. The icy refreshment of our Gin Shoot-Out lowered everyone’s temperature, and once we were half-drunk, we stopped worrying about things like Fluffy surviving his first summer in Langley. But after we’d declared GORDON’S the winner of the gin showdown, we decided to take a break from gin and try something from Christine’s canvas bag.

If you recall Christine’s last visit, she brought HARVIESTOUN OLA DUBH 18, a cask-aged ale that had us reeling with bliss. For comparison, this time she brought OLA DUBH 12.

Now you may be wondering, at this point, how we can mooch off Christine so dreadfully. And the answer is, I really have no idea. My parents are socially retarded. But we were all grateful, and poured the OLA DUBH 12 three ways into Reidel stemless glasses, because they happened to be clean.

Like OLA DUBH 18, OLA DUBH 12 is visually striking for its black opacity and creamy beige head. Maturation in Highland Park 12 casks should, we expected, impart almost as much nuance as maturation in Highland Park 18 casks. So it was a bit of a shock to be bowled over by one predominant aroma: molasses. No word of a lie, it was like taking a whiff of a carton of straight molasses. And sure, molasses is nice—the food-eaters at LBHQ tell me it’s great in gingerbread—but it was so dominant in OLA DUBH 12 that it was hard to pick out any other background olfactory chords.

Once we started sipping we could pick up espresso, cocoa, and perhaps some peat. But the strongest note on the tongue was molasses. It was so overwhelming as to be out of whack, if you ask me. As for the mouthfeel, it fell a little short, especially given Harviestoun’s own descriptor, “viscous and gloopy.” Instead it was light- to medium-bodied—certainly too light to stand up to the molasses—and not as creamy as expected.

According to Christine’s sources, the sweet spot for OlA DUBH is 16 years, so that’s next on our list. The 18-year vastly outshone the 12-year, so we’ll see what a Highland Park 16 cask does for this viscous and gloopy beer. We’ll see…

In the meantime I’ll check to make sure Fluffy’s not dead.

HARVIESTOUN OLA DUBH—ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

My Fellow Inebriates,

I was shattered when Christine left our house this morning. By which I mean, when I woke up hours after she’d gone and realized the fact, I felt betrayed. Not by Christine, who can do no wrong. (Christine arrived at our house yesterday afternoon with her special canvas bag containing two fine whiskies, two unique craft beers, and an outstanding Shiraz she’d been cellaring since 2003.) Christine is beyond reproach.

But I felt sort of let down by my parents, who didn’t bother to shake me awake to say good-bye. I actually meant to stow away with Christine this morning in the canvas bag. Although it was still occupied by two bottles of Scotch, it had a compartment I could have slipped into if I weren’t comatose at the time of her departure. Evidently my parents couldn’t entertain Christine until I finished sleeping off last night’s alcohol; I didn’t even get a chance to pant after her booze or press my nose against the window.

Why are my parents so boring? I can’t imagine why anyone visits them at all. What a testament to their dullness that any visitors they do get must bring alcohol to make the visit tolerable. (Come to think of it…well, it’s kind of a wash. If my parents were more interesting they would get more visitors, but the visitors wouldn’t need to get hammered to endure their company.) But still, last night was pretty cool.

First out of the canvas bag was HARVIESTOUN OLA DUBH SPECIAL RESERVE (18). Translated as “black oil,” OLA DUBH is so named for its “gloopy and viscous” mouthfeel. It is “the first ale to be aged in malt whisky casks from a named distillery and, with traceable casks and numbered bottles, the first with genuine provenance.” Christine found this 8% brew at a specialty liquor store in Olympic Village where it commanded $8 for its Highland Park–cask aging. Short glasses seemed fitting, so the humans poured it three ways (I gadded about between the three glasses, ending up with the lion’s share).

“Black oil” is not a misnomer. In the glass OLA DUBH is thick, oily, and darker than Coca Cola. Harviestoun compares its appearance to that of “used motor oil,” but I don’t know of any automotive waste that exudes such symphonic waves of dark chocolate, espresso, sherry, and peat. This breathtaking aroma is but a prelude to an exquisite cascade of malty, smoky, leathery toffee-tinged gloriousness—enveloping the palate and winding up with a soulfully bitter cocoa finish. Prickling the tongue with gentle carbonation, OLA DUBH is a rhapsodic hybrid of whisky and beer, warming and mellow yet curiously tingly on the palate. Sweeter than a stout and infinitely more complex, OLA DUBH wrenches a forbidden word from even the most hardened and obdurate taster—the taster who has sworn never to utter the word—yes, against his will and without resistance, my dad said it: OLA DUBH is sessionable.

Because if you could—if you possibly could—you would want to draw your experience with OLA DUBH out over several hours. With its glass-clinging, massive body and absolutely subjugating intensity, this beer takes over your mind; it controls you; it OWNS you.

After everyone drank their two fingers of OLA DUBH, there was no way we could immediately sample another beer. It wouldn’t have been fair. So everyone sipped Carmenere while my mother concocted one of her meals seemingly designed to bother and disconcert everyone’s palate, and together those incongruous new tastes helped arrest everyone’s pining for the OLA DUBH.

In all honesty—although this may be the sort of creeping determinism my furry head cooked up to cope with the emptiness of the OLA DUBH bottle—I doubt you could drink such a viscous beer all evening. At least humans probably wouldn’t want to. But we bears have some crazy stomach enzymes. 😉