DuckDrams

It has been gestating in my mind for some time, and has finally hatched and is ready to take flight: my personal blog about whisky (and other fine spirits™©℮)! Oh, does the internet really need another one of those?! Maybe not, so feel free to look at some serious web projects instead.

Now, any self-respecting blogger needs a mission statement; a guiding principle; a raison d’être… Mine shall be:

To practise the art of drinking with intention, by writing whisky reviews, perspectives, event reports, and running experiments.

There’s a lot more to enjoying whisky than just buying some, putting it in your mouth, and giving it a good gurgling, obviously. To get the most out of it requires effort (yikes): from figuring out what is worth buying, to learning how to attend to the nuances of smell and taste, to understanding how contextual factors influence the sensory experience. This blog will (hopefully) motivate me to put in that noble effort, for the sake of my personal enjoyment. If the results can be fun/interesting/useful to others, that’d be swell too!

Whisky reviews. Drink something, describe it, give an opinion. Sometimes I’ll just deliver my impressions of a bottle I had bought whenever for whatever reason. Sometimes I’ll put in effort to acquire bottles and samples to run a themed comparative review (even blind, when relevant), for example to hone in on the characteristics of a particular distillery, but I have wilder ideas loaded up too – so stay tuned.

Whisky perspectives. In this category I’ll share my (un-/semi-/quasi-)qualified opinions on things such as how to score whisky bargains, which new distilleries are worth keeping an eye on, how to move a whisky stash across country borders, and whatever else comes to mind.

Event reports. It’s a whole load of fun to go to whisky events and on whisky trips in good company. I’ll try to sum up such experiences and post about it here!

Finally – whisky experiments! Sometimes one wonders things such as, what actually happens if you store a bottle upside down for a long time? How quickly does whisky oxidize in sample bottles with plastic caps? Does the quality of water (tap/mineral) added to a dram make a noticeable difference? The only way to really find out is to run a controlled experiment and blind tasting. Which is what I will occasionally do.

Let’s see how this all goes, and if the metaphorical duck finds air under its wings.

Slàinte Mhath!