Scotch 101, sort of

It's not a Scottish/Irish festival if a wench isn't getting kissed by a leprechaun.

“If you can make bread out of it, you can make whisky out of it,” said Really Smart Guy with the moussed hair at the Longs Peak Scottish Irish Festival. The RSG was a sales rep for The Macallan Scotch Whisky company.

He and RSG2, his partner who looked a bit like Adam Levine, provided us with a Scotch 101 lesson during the annual festival where it appears it’s OK to wear kilts and Crocs. Or kilts and Deadpool masks. Or corsets and flip flops. Anyway . . .

RSG2 talked a lot about the chemistry behind whisky making. Stuff like how yeast eats sugar and how if you spray water on barley it thinks it’s a plant. But no, they mess with the germination process and yada, yada, yada, it turns sort of porridgey … This is a great time to disclose Scotch 101 came after 3 hours of Irish Ales.

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The first three sips of Scotch-y goodness.

We had sips of five of their amber-colored liquid yum during the lesson. Here’s what we learned. Give or take. Apologies in advance for the disjointedness and most likely somewhat inaccurate translation of my notes. Reference the last sentence of the previous paragraph.
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• Macallan Scotch is double casked. First it sits in American oak. Then it goes into Spanish oak. Sherry is what makes it Spanish Oak. “It’s all about Sherry,” RSG2 said.
• Virgin wood casks are too strong for Scotch. The casks house other liquor, think Sherry, first, before nurturing Scotch. For Macallan – maybe all Scotch folks – it is uncommon to use a cask more than 3 times.
• 80 percent of the flavor and all the color comes from the wood. The American Oak provides flavor notes like vanilla, caramel, and butterscotch. The Spanish Oak provides more herbal notes – think baking spices and dark fruits.
• It’s legal (and common, says RSG2) to color whisky in Scotland. Typically, companies use a couple drops of caramel color per some sort of ration. But not Macallan. They don’t use coloring.
• Buttload is real unit of measure: it is 500 liters of whisky (more than 132 gallons).
• Supposedly a Piña Colada recipe substituting rum for Macallan Scotch is amazing.
• Single Malt Scotch is barely older than we are. It was first introduced in 1967.
• Peat is sometimes used in the distilling process.  Peat tastes like what’s in it. Just saying.
• Peat taste isn’t always bad. Sometimes it’s floral, like in the Scottish Highlands.
• If you like the 12-year – like we did – you’re really going to like the 18-year, said RSG.  Of course we didn’t get to taste that one.
• As whisky ages, more evaporation occurs, producing less volume and more concentration. I take this to mean, the older it is the stronger and darker it is.
• There was a 1926 vintage 60-year-old bottle of Macallan that had really cool artwork on the bottle. It sold for $1.1 Million. MILLION. Six zeroes. WTF? Bet if anyone opened it, it wouldn’t taste like it was worth $1.1 Million.
• Scotch, says RSG, is a snapshot of time. For example, during World War II, Macallan used peat for its distilling process, because war. I suppose it’s cool to think about whisky in that way.

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It's rough becoming a Scotch expert.

After becoming Scotch experts, like the RSG twins, J and I have determined we prefer The Macallan 12 year Sherry Oak to peatier (Highland Park Magnus) or the lighter Macallan Double Cask 12 year or smoky ones like Naked Grouse. But, as we always say: You do you. Just branch out and Scotch it now and again.

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