Whiskey general

just stick to 4 roses

This, I always only see the 101 which is indeed the better drink anyway.
>People keep saying it "opens up" the flavor.
I've read legit science (read: not broscience) on this, something about the way the water interacts with the congeners or something like that helps it taste better. I don't really remember it too well because it was a long time ago but something about adding water does help.

I was always under the impression that the point is to take the edge off the alcohol taste so that its easier to taste the whiskey itself

I doubt it's possible for me. I live in Lithuania (Europe) and there are no popular rye brands, heck, probably there are no rye at all at local al/ck/ shops

I don't find.
Far more important is getting the temperature just right and letting the glass air out slightly.

Well, I usually drop a few cubes of ice in my whiskey. Just enough, to not to feel acohol, because of temperature and dillution. Still, It doesn't really help me. How many bottles do I have to drink till I start noticing all dem subtle hints of flavours?

Took me about two bottles, but I didn't start fiddling with temperature and airing out the glass and so on until the last few ounces of the second.

>drinking American corn piss water
>on the rocks
And you wonder why everything tastes the same.
Never drink anything with "Whiskey" on it, unless it's from Ireland.
Start with Scotch and get accomodated with the distinct tastes and characteristics of each of the islands. That alone will take you years. An example; Ardbeg, Laphroaig and Bowmore are from the island Islay - which is known for its very peaty and smokey whisky and yet they still differ heavily from each other.

Im just a beginner m8. I dont want to spend a fortune on quality scotches, because it will be just wasted away since I have no knowledge in this stuff. Shouldn't it be better to try all the different types (scotch, irish, burbon, canadian) until I can clearly differentiate one from anothers? (Since they differ much more than one type of scotch vs another)

Forget this pretentious shit.

My advice to you is mix the whiskey with coke so you can put it down without the alcohol burning your senses. Not too much coke at all, at most one park coke to two parts whiskey.

Try different drinks with the same soft drink added and you'll pick up some major differences. Add less and less soft drink to pick up more subtleties. Eventually, you'll be used to it and able to enjoy it.

You utter pleb.

OP don't listen to this moron at all.

You have to drink more. Yea when I started drinking, shots of plastic handle vodka were just as good to me as anything. Now I can't even smell the stuff without gagging.

Fuck you, if he's a beginner you cant suggest buying premium brands. The complexities will be lost due to the alcohol burning and hiding the tastes.

Found the poor white trash, let me guess if you've never had fish before you should eat shit-fed tilapia fillets? if you've never had apple juice before you should drink apple flavored reconstituted hi-C?

Stop pretending that tasting alcoholic beverages is some occult art, or that you're special because you bought something nice after years of abusing your liver on homeless people drinks. Anyone with taste buds can tell the difference.

Not a big fan of regular whisky, recent big fan of smokey whisky.

i got a $100 giftcard i need to spend. Thinking about lagavulin. Is it worth the buy?

It's pretty good quality, a benchmark in smoky whisky. You pretty much can't go wrong.

You are a complete retard and have no idea what you are talking about. Go drink yourself into a stupor with alcopops

>starting with scotch

Great plan if you want to quit before you even get started. Scotch to someone new to whisky is like a hammer to the face.

Start with Irish or Bourbon.

Don't be ridiculous, scotch comes in a broader range of styles than irish or bourbon

I wish the neckbeards of Veeky Forums would stop pretending scotch is just a generic term for LAFROOG

With enough ice added alcohol does not burn anything, its about finding flavours. In southern comfort (yes, I know, its a liquer, but its whiskey based) it is easy to fell all those flavours, in regular whiskey they are just too hard to find. What are budget whiskeys with strong hints of any flavour?

I'm in Edinburgh right now, how do I start drinking whiskey and what should I buy? Mostly experienced with drinking Mexican Mezcal.

>Scotch to someone new to whisky is like a hammer to the face.
That is factually wrong though. There are many, many mild whiskies that are suited for novices.
Dalwhinnie, Bunnahabhain, Aberlour, Dalmore just to name a few.
It all depends whether OP is an 18 year old, jobless welfare fag whose target is to get shitfaced. If that's the case he should stick to vodka+juice.
A bottle lasts me easily for a month or two.

that doesn't make sense to me. the first whiskey i actually enjoyed was some random Islay.

Get a 10 yo bottle of glenmorangie original. Don't bother with the older stuff or the one's aged in sherry or port casks, the original is the best in it's smoothness and simplicity.

And don't buy Islay scotch unless you like the taste of saltwater in your drink.

Four Roses Small Batch is good stuff, you'll definitely be able to tell difference between regular Four Roses and the small batch

Commit suicide you pretentious shit. Blind taste tests have proved all this shit wrong.

your ramblings make zero sense. gb2 /v/ or whatever trashcan board you crawled from.

Basically what said.
When you make whisky, the things that give it it's primary scents and flavours are esters, which are part of a chemical group called congeners.

When you add a few drops of water to the whisky, the water molecules and the whisky molecules are all mixed up, causing friction on a very small scale, but heating it up slightly.

This allows more of these esters to evaporate from the glass, reaching your nose, and helping you smell more of what's gone into the glass.

Which is also why you shouldn't really add ice to water, since cooling down the spirit means less of these esters are ale to evoporate. Kind of like when you put vodka in the freezer to make it taste less like vodka.

Hope that makes sense, it's a little oversimplified but that's the basic idea.

(I work in a Scottish distillery, if anyone has any questions)

Get some Glen Rivet 12 year single malt scotch at Costco. It's delicious plus it's only like $23 right now

best budget scotch for newfags? Ballantines is very cheap, but it's probably shit?
Also, blended vs single malt?

For low-tier but drinkable Canadian whisky I'd suggest Alberta Springs or Canadian Club rye. No point in breaking the bank just to get some whisky you know you won't appreciate.

>(I work in a Scottish distillery, if anyone has any questions)
what distillery do you work for and what is your favourite scotch?

Scotch blended is usually considered shit. The above red level Johnnie Walkers are considered an exception but you should really get single malt. For Irish, getting a blend is on the other hand a very good introduction to what Irish whiskey is about. Get one of the big three: Jameson, Bushmill's or Tullamore D.E.W. Please refrain from giving a fuck if the maker of the whiskey consider the pope an authority on their Bible interpretations or not.

It's not necessarily as black and white as blended vs single malt. Basically, in Scotland, there are two kinds of whisky you can make: malt whisky (made from malted barley) and grain whisky (made from basically any other starchy crop).
A single malt is a blend of malt whisky casks that come from one single distillery. A blended malt is a blend of casks that just happen to come from different distilleries - so there's no difference in quality there.

Likewise, you can get single grain and blended grain whisky. However, grain whisky has, if I remember correctly, around 9-10 times fewer esters in the final product than a malt, so is generally seen as a lower quality drink. This also has to do with the fact that grain whisky is more mass produced, so has to use lower quality products.

That's not to say all grain whisky is shit though - there are some fantastic grain whiskies out there, Compass Box's Hedonism for example (not a budget whisky though).

Blended Whisky, on the other hand, is a blend of malt whisky casks AND grain whisky casks - this is easily the most mass produced whisky out there. Think Famous Grouse, Bells, White & Mackay etc. Not brilliant stuff, since it's usually like 80-90% grain whisky.

Personally, I actually think Johnnie Walker Black Label is a brilliant drink for the price, around £28 in Scotland (well, for now at least).

Funny you should mention Ballantines actually - I grew up in the town where production was based, so I'm quite biased!

Hope that wasn't too confusing

Sorry to be a pussy, but I'm hesitant to mention the name of my actual workplace on Veeky Forums.
It's a really quite small and unheard of distillery, so it wouldn't really matter anyway!

In terms of what I would be most likely to buy in a shop, I'd probably go for Auchentoshan Three Wood. In terms of the best whisky I've ever tried, it would have to be either the Talisker 30yo, or a 26yo Aberfeldy we tasted straight from the cask at the distillery. I don't know whether it was the atmosphere we were in, or whatever, but it was phenomenal

how is evan williams lads? thinking about picking up some tomorrow

Oh no! What are they going to do, backtrace your Veeky Forums post and then ban you for using this site?

You're probably right, I know I'm being stupid. Apologies! Any other questions about whisky?

Alberta Premium is already high-tier as far as cheap Canadian goes.
Maybe try the Alberta Premium Dark Horse for a couple bucks more, Forty Creek is also pretty good.

There is literally nothing wrong with blending whisky

youtube.com/watch?v=3EzB5R9iweo

pretty shite but it'll do ya if you need it. I think there are cheaper whiskeys of similar quality though

It lets everyone around you instantly know that your are a liitle bitch

How would you recommend one to develop a taste for whisky as a beginner (begin with cheap scotches, begin with any cheap whisky, start high, drinks many varieties) ? Do you believe that bourbons lack the same merit of quality held by scotches? Generally what would you say are the characteristics of a good whisky? What would you say separates the taste of a bourbon from a scotch, rather than their technical differences?

I get that these are very noobish questions, but I am genuinely interested in learning.

>drink bourbon - tastes horrible and like drinking wood
>drink irish whiskey - tastes less horrible than bourbon but still feels like drinking wood
>drink scotch whisky blend - feels like a watery version of irish whiskey, but still wood water
I don't even like sake and beer. I feel like the only thing I'll be able to drink at this point are shochu and wine. Maybe premium vodka, but that's probably because premium vodka is like water.

>hal never referenced wild turkey as the "kickin' chicken"

suspension of disbelief ruined desu

I have no sense of smell, will this still work?

>drinking vodka
I remember being a teenager too.

Certainly not as a matter of general principle. But as implies, blends are largely a product of brands trying to achieve maximum profit from minimum investment - using to overwhelming proportion cheap grain whisky as opposed to good malt - to cater to people who really aren't concerned with the quality of their drink.

Lots of good blends out there. JW Green was probably the best product JW made.

>How would you recommend one to develop a taste for whisky as a beginner
In terms of developing a taste for whisky, at least in terms of scotches, I'd suggest sitting down one night to taste and compare a few different whiskies, which will really help you notice the difference and not just think that "they all just smell like whisky".

Check the difference between a smoky and non-smoky dram, for example. Check the difference between whisky that's been matured in a bourbon cask and one matured in a sherry cask, or port, or even rum. Maturation is what gives the spirit all of it's colour and most of it's flavour, so what type of cask it's in completely changes the flavour, colour and smell. Keeping tasting notes can really help with this as well.

I know that sounds like it could be expensive, and for the USA it probably is, I have no idea (i've never been). But there's a very good chance your local town or campus has a whisky drinking society - that's often the cheapest way to taste new things.

>Do you believe that bourbons lack the same merit of quality held by scotches?

I'll start by saying that I absolutely do like bourbon. I think there are some great bourbons out there, someone earlier mentioned Four Roses which I think is awesome personally.

However, by law, bourbon whiskey has to be matured in virgin american oak casks ie, American oak that's never been used to mature a spirit before. In my opinion, this tends to make all bourbons have a very similar, overwhelming vanilla/coconut flavour (american oak has a shit-tonne of Vannilin inside it), which I think limits it in a way, compared to Scotch.

Also, the southern states where bourbon is made have a much hotter climate than Scotland, so the whisky evaporates in the cask much quicker, meaning you have to bottle it at a younger age.

The noobish questions are routinely the best, don't worry about that! Hope that helped

Do you have, in your opinion, not a very good sense of smell, or legitimately a medical issue with your olfactory system?

If it's just that you haven't done it very often, then it's absolutely something you can be trained up in with enough time. Going through the steps in my last post might be a good way to start with that.

If you do actually have a problem with smelling, then that might be an issue - most of whisky tasting is in the nose unfortunately. However, there are many other parts of it that you'll be able to notice, perhaps even moreso than someone who can smell, who knows!

For example, the mouthfeel of the whisky can be different. Lighter, more delicate whiskies (typically the lowland style or irish whiskey) tends to have a much lighter mouthfeel than some of the heavier, more full-bodied whiskies in the highlands and islands.

I absolutely agree that there's nothing wrong with blending whisky! I would suggest taking most things Richard Paterson says with a pinch of salt however. That pretentious arsepiece could learn a few lessons in humility - awfully high and mighty for the man responsible for White and fucking Mackay.

Thanks mang, really appreciate the advice and insight. I'll defiantly look into whisky drinking societies since I imagine it would be a good place to develop taste and socialize. Also I just thought it would be a good opportunity to get into scotches since the import market is going to be going well in the U.S. Hopefully that means I'll be able to find some decent deals.

>Mixing it with coke

Well, I do mix it with disaronno (amaretto liquer), it goes very well for any whiskey.

>all bourbons have a very similar, overwhelming vanilla/coconut flavour
Literally how? All I taste in bourbon is wood.

Is Hibiki 21 worth 300 bucks?

It's apparently one of the best blended whiskeys in the world. If it's worth it to you to try world class buy it.

Thanks. It would be nice if the bottle is still there after I save the money for it, but that's probably unlikely.
Do you guys have like a whisky savings account for times like this?
I keep reading everyone here buying 18 and up whiskey.

It's for pussies. The only water should come from your rocks unless you have sensitive teeth or like warm whiskey.

Fullashit you are

If you have to save money for it, you probably shouldn't buy it, lol

>I keep reading everyone here buying 18 and up whiskey.
You are the OP I assume? Don't go overkill, mang.

Older isn't always necessarily better. For example I prefer the Bowmore 15 to 18. Lagavulin 16 and Orban 14 are very good. One of my favourites is Ardbeg 10.
You should rather start small and work your way up than spend a lot of saved up money on a single bottle of some meme whisky that in the end you might or might not even like. For that money you can buy 5-7 bottles of different distillerires. THEN you will get the idea which dram from what producer you actually like more and can later buy the higher priced onces if you feel like it.

Try some at a bar before you blow 300 on it, seriously. That said, I've tried the 17 and it was excellent.

yeah if youre drinking some shit scotch

I started with an 18yr glenlivet and THAT got me into whiskey.

Correct way to drink whiskey:
1. Put tongue on side of glass and pour whiskey onto the back of your tongue. (The tip of your tongue is most sensitive to the ethanol)
2. Let the whiskey rest in your mouth for 3 seconds.
3. Exhale through your nose. (The ethanol partially evaporates in your mouth. When you exhale, you're exhaling the ethanol fumes)
4. Swallow and enjoy.

I recommend that you put 3 large ice cubes in a tumbler and fill the glass about 1/3 of the way.

t. Been drinking $80+ whiskies for 6 years. Bourbon is best.

>shit scotch
no such thing

>ice cubes
>t. Been drinking $80+ whiskies for 6 years. >Bourbon is best.
entire post disregarded instantly.

This guy is right about older not necessarily being better. There are tons of "no age statement" scotches coming out that are excellent.
Notably - Ardbeg Uigeadail, Laphroaig Lore, Glenlivet Alpha, Aberlour A’Bunadh

Black label is decent, white label is above average for its price. Don't even look at the green label

>>shit scotch
>no such thing
toot toot

Diet Coke and Evan Williams, how am I doing?

first time trying this, overall pretty impressive for a 25 eur bottle. Flavor isn't that well developed compared to nicer single malts but very smooth and great value.

thats a great scotch for cocktails

I'll drink almost anything but jesus christ, worst $20 I ever spent.

Ok, I take it back and apologize.

JW Black tastes like water and there are tons of single malts at the same pricepoint that beat the pants off of it, you shouldn't ever buy a blend for any reason.

>JW Black tastes like water
false
>there are tons of single malts at the same pricepoint that beat the pants off of it
true
>you shouldn't ever buy a blend for any reason
false

see I generally don't put single malts into cocktails.

Also blends are perfect at being what they are. If you have no use for them, fine. But there's plenty of people who do. And they're very often the ones spending lots of money on scotch.

>false
ok it tastes like water with e150

>he thinks he can taste the caramel
You can always tell when someone just started getting into scotch. The pretense and posturing is staggering.

it's a good blend. Not outstanding or exceptional in any way, but it's good.
It's got a soft honeyed nose, spicy and syrupy on the palate, and a basic smoky finish that lasts a good while.
It's not sophisticated in the least, but it's above average and priced accordingly.
Been drinking scotch for 18 years. No posturing here.

e150a has a really distinctive taste, you probably burn the fuck out of your tongue regularly or have some kind of medical condition if you can't taste it

What are the Evan Williamses of Canadian and Scotch whiskey? Kind of the cheapest version that is still passable.

Clan MacGregor and Black Velvet would be my choices for cheap scotch and canadian whiskey respectively.

Thanks. I'll try them this weekend.

I need to upgrade from my usual $7 fifth of Canada House.

This is bait question, but what you guise think about Jack Daniels?

Yes.

youtube.com/watch?v=lCXkAy5XvcU
This is the best way to start. The dude knows what he is talking about and this is a good way to start.

Yes, it's worth the price.
Other smoky ones I would consider to be more bang for your buck at that price point - Laphroaig Lore, Ardbeg Uigeadail, Laphroaig Cairdeas (2014 or 2015), Octomore 6.2 (maybe a little pricier, but worth it)

All that being said, you can't go wrong getting Lagavulin 16. Even though recent bottlings aren't as good as they used to be even just a few years ago, it's still a classic Islay and still has its distinctive flavor.

Laphroaig Quarter Cask
Ardbeg 10
Ardbeg Uigeadail
Oban 14
Bowmore 15
Lagavulin 16

I like all those very much. Try buying two bottles out of those with your $100 instead of spending it all on one single bottle, but that's just my humble opinion.

>jack daniels
unless you're merely trying to get drunk it's absolute shit

Pretty bad. If you want cheap, shitty whiskey, Canadian Mist and Jim Beam are superior choices.