David Driscoll has been on a strange tear on Spirits Journal in the last few months. Bloggers have been the target of his ire but it’s really logic and coherence that have been the victims. One day it’s important to have knowledge and “critical context”, other days all that matters is to have fun and not worry about knowing things and people who know things are a drag, and so on. There’s about as much consistency in his narratives as in those in the professional wrestling world he keeps referencing. I’ve stopped calling this stuff out on the blog as I don’t really have anything personal against Driscoll or K&L–I purchase from them and generally have enjoyed K&L’s selections. Also, even for a blowhard like me it gets tiring saying the same thing over and over again. And at this point I think most whisky geeks are wise to his schtick anyway. But his most recent post is quite something. Continue reading
Category Archives: *Annoyances
Marketing, Investment Whisky, Bloggers
[Let me make some apologies before you read this post. First, for the length. It’s a bit of an occupational hazard with me, I’m afraid (well, occupational for me, hazard for you). Secondly, for the genre of this post, which is the universally unloved one in which bloggers critique other bloggers–even I’m sick of it and barely engage it in anymore (not that I ever engaged in it much on the blog–just this post and this post, really). But the problem, you see, is that I’m contractually obligated to live up to the name of my blog from time to time. Anyway: you might want to come back to this when you have a lot of time on hand to read it.] Continue reading
Were you looking for a long, unfunny and transparent “joke” post?
Fuck off.
Glendronach Revisited: The Allure of Single Casks
Last month I made a post I wasn’t planning to about confusions about Glendronach’s prized single cask releases. You can read it and how/why I came to write it here. Long story short: the term “single cask” probably rarely means what you think it means. This may have been the most read of any post I’ve made in the year (almost) since my blog went live. It’s no real big surprise why: Glendronach is a rising star distillery among geeks, and geeks love discovering “dirty secrets” of the industry–as I’ve said a number of times in a number of places, most of us actually know very little about what goes on at the production level in the Scotch industry. The outrage that my post sparked, at least for a day or two (and, for a change, not directed at me) had its source, I think, in the fact that the “dirty secret” being revealed is connected directly to the chief source of Glendronach’s growing cult status among geeks: the cachet of the single cask. I’d like to possibly annoy you about that today. Continue reading
Glendronach Confusion (or What is a “Single Cask”?)
[Update: See the follow-up post here.]
Warning: this is long and symptomatic of obsessive compulsive disorder, and in any case may be something you already know or don’t care about. If you do choose to read the whole thing what are you going to find? Well, after a long’ish setting of the stage in which I describe how I came to think about this issue at all and the conversations that led me to explore it further, I detail how I came to discover that the term “Single Cask” may not refer to a whisky that was matured for its entire life in one cask; and furthermore that the cask type stated may not refer to the only type of cask in which it was matured. My chief reference here is to the Glendronach distillery but I suspect this is far more broadly applicable. Continue reading
The Culture of Cask Strength Whisky
If you haven’t read Jordan Devereaux’s post, “Cask Strength: Panacea or Gimmick?” on Chemistry of the Cocktail, you should. It’s a fine piece critiquing the notion that cask strength whisky is necessarily better than whisky diluted down to 46% or lower or even that it’s a better deal per se. The kernel of what I am about to write now I actually first posted as a comment on that post on Friday but for whatever reason it hasn’t appeared. Perhaps the comment got swallowed up by the internet or perhaps I did not pass a quality control test; or perhaps he just hasn’t gotten around to his comment queue yet. But since I don’t really want to spend my time checking to see if the comment has in fact finally appeared there I thought I would (re)post my thoughts on my own blog while they’re still fresh in my mind, and in a longer form than I would want to inflict on the comments section of someone else’s blog. Continue reading
Whisky, 2014: Some Reasonable Requests
This is my first year as a whisky blogger and, as my handful of readers know, I try not to buck convention. Everyone else is producing end of year lists or giving out awards. From the big boy end of the spectrum we’ve already had the postmodern comedy stylings of Malt Advocate and the yearly celebration of hard to find malts from the Malt Maniacs. At the regular folks end of the spectrum Sku has already summed up the year rather well (and given out a hard-fought “Worst Whiskey Company” award as well); Macdeffe has issued probably the best list of actually thoughtful awards (white text on black background alert!); and Tim Read has mocked the year in marketing hype in great style. There’s little left for me to do in retrospective vein and so I have instead a list of things I’m hoping to see in 2014. Some of these are even serious. Continue reading
Great Moments in Marketing Hype
No review today but as I was going through the week’s worth of marketing blasts from K&L* it occurred to me that it may be important to preserve for the sake of future generations the impressive body of work of David Driscoll Esq. in the area of shameless hype. However, as much as he has contributed to this genre in a short period of time he is far from alone. Others have paved the way, and yet others continue to fill the spaces around his work. For this reason future iterations in this category may occasionally feature other luminaries, and I encourage my readers as well to share instances of marketing hype that I may have missed or to nominate challengers to the belt currently worn by David D.
Well, let’s get started with some of the recent entries that inspired me to finally create this category of posts. First up is this relatively innocuous claim for their most recent Glendronach cask: Continue reading
Does Age Matter? (Malt Maniacs Awards 2013 Edition)
So, the Malt Maniacs Awards for 2013 were announced today. These are, as most whisky geeks would agree, the best by far in what is a rather dubious genre. The whiskies are tasted and evaluated (more or less*) blind by a large number of the Malt Maniacs (with none of the professionals in the group participating) and the scores averaged. Those above 90 points on average are given “Gold Medal” status, those between 85 and 90 points are given “Silver Medal” status and those between 80 and 85 points are given “Bronze Medal” status. Continue reading
Freaking out about Mortlach
News came out today that Diageo are finally going to feature cult Speyside distillery, Mortlach as a mainline single malt. The only official Mortlach now available is the 16 yo at 43% in the Flora & Fauna series (which I have reviewed here). This generally well-liked bottling is going to be discontinued and is to be replaced by four new bottles, two of which will be older at 18 and 25 years old. Since the news came out a number of whisky geeks online seem to have got their underwear very tightly knotted by this “bad news”. It’s not clear to me, however, why this is bad news. Rather than mourn the F&F 16 I’m more inclined to be pleased that there will be far more official Mortlach out there–and presumably more of this official Mortlach, unlike the F&F 16, will actually come to the US. Continue reading
Annoying the Whisky Retailers
It’s the holiday season in the US and people are making recommendations for whisky related gifts. As my preferred stocking stuffer has always been coal I thought I would help instead by making some suggestions to whisky retailers to make online shopping less annoying. As I shop predominantly in the US this list is largely restricted to the practices of American retailers, and if some of the names I mention are less familiar it’s because they are stores in Minnesota. And I don’t mean to pick on the few stores I name–most of these issues are widespread, but I’ve encountered them myself at these stores. It goes without saying that almost all these retailers are in fact very helpful and when you call them it’s very easy to sort things out and get personalized help. But with a proper online store that shouldn’t be necessary.
I know this is a highly unoriginal list of complaints and also a highly unoriginal genre of blog post. But it’s maddening that so many of these problems persist in 2013. Continue reading
Annoying the Whisky Bloggers Again
[Note: The original version of this post contained another paragraph that paraphrased the discussion on a Facebook group for whisky bloggers. While I had anonymized my references and not quoted anyone directly, some in the group expressed discomfort with that material being included. Since I don’t really want the focus of this to be diverted to that non-issue, I have edited the post to remove those references. Everything else is as it was before.]
When this blog was only about a month old I posted this long piece critiquing many practices and habits of whisky bloggers; it was simultaneously intended as a kind of manifesto and as a public check against any temptation I might feel to slide into the same habits/practices (post your standards publicly and it becomes harder to contravene them for convenience). Towards the end of the piece I said the following: Continue reading
The Whisky Blogger Commandments
1. Thy blog shalt not feature white text on a dark background.
2. Thou shalt not worship false gods, whether their names be Michael Jackson, Jim Murray, Jim McEwan, Stitzel-Weller, Pappy Van Winkle, Ralfy Mitchell or Serge Valentin.
3. Thou shalt not blog about or post photographs of the time thou and thy friends drank 10 ml each of 80 whiskies in one day.
4. Thou shalt not mention haggis or refer to Robert Burns as Robbie or Rabbie Burns unless thou is Scottish, and then only once a year. Relatedly, thou shalt lay off the Gaelic unless thou is one of the three people who actually speak it. Continue reading
Annoying the Whisky Bloggers
Over on K&L’s Spirits Journal blog, David Driscoll posted yesterday his reservations about “the future of internet whisky blogging“, asking if “we really need this much information about whisky…?” (good question) and calling out most bloggers as egoists (well, duh) and generally predicting the demise of whisky blogs. As someone who has only recently started his blog, if I’d read this yesterday I might have been prompted to do some soul searching about the point of yet another whisky blog. However, I read it today, and right above it was another blog post in which he proclaims the future of whisky blogging. All of this, by the way, comes two weeks of posts after a long four part series on the “whisk(e)y burnout”. Clearly, the key symptom of this “burnout” and the coming demise of whisky blogging is that it leads to a lot of whisky blogging. And so I don’t need to close shop after all, which is a relief as I’ve paid for a year’s hosting in advance.
Shining Moments in Spirits “Journalism”: April 11, 2013 edition
Benjamin Phelan worries that Scotland may run out of peat for making smoky whisky, discovers there’s little risk of that happening but writes an article about it anyway. The first page of the (two-page) article sets up the faulty premise, and the second page explains why it is faulty. And then we have this exercise in implausibility to justify the whole thing:
In fact, the coming fossil-fuel crunch could make the peat situation—and therefore the Scotch situation—a whole lot worse. As the price of oil and coal rises in concert with scarcity, peat could well be reassessed as a source of energy. Peat consumption could skyrocket, ringing down the curtain on peated Scotch forever. Meanwhile, its combustion for fuel would fill the air with ever more carbon dioxide, making the Earth uninhabitable.