Onward into autumn and September. The busy season at work starts up again in the middle of the month. I’m teaching online again this term but that amounts to more work than teaching in person. The missus is teaching online too and the boys are going to be at home as well—we passed on the in-person school option for them. Hopefully, we won’t go crazy and hopefully, our little town will not be hit too hard by the fact that both the local colleges are bringing all or most of their students back to town from all over the country and the world. Let’s see how it goes,

In the meantime the blog will carry on as normal with the usual complement of booze reviews and takeout meal reports. I’ll also be filing regular entries in my new series, Bombay Cinema: A Rough Guide. If time permits I hope to get another longer piece on Indian food started and finished as well. The experiment with ads on the blog will continue as well for now. The gap between page views and ad impressions suggests most of my readers have ad blockers on but the ads still generated enough money to cover August’s hosting costs. Ads should no longer be appearing inline in posts—hopefully those of you who’ve turned off your ad blockers are not finding the ads to be too disruptive. Do let me know if that proves to be the case. Continue reading →

I think it might be August. There will once again be a number of booze reviews, three a week, mostly whisky. I do have a few more rums and brandies listed than usual so if you’re looking for a malternative month on My Annoying Opinions this is your opportunity to get at least half a month out of it. (As always, I invite your nominations from things to promote from the long list of potential reviews below to the shortlist). There will also continue to be a couple of food posts per week. My pandemic takeout reviews from the Twin Cities metro will continue (we’re not eating in anywhere till at least the end of the year, probably) and I’ll post a recipe most every week. I hope to also finally post my last report from our Calcutta trip and my last report from Delhi from the winter. And I may also have a fresh annoyance for the food media in the form of yet another piece on writing about Indian food. On the non booze and food front, I’m also planning to start a regular series of capsule reviews of Bombay films; and I’d like to revive my literary posts from the spring. Let’s see how these big plans go. Continue reading →

Another month of barely leaving the house behind us, another about to begin: good times! In keeping with the unchanging nature of our days here is the latest evidence of the unchanging nature of this blog. I will once again offer you three booze reviews a week, along with at least one restaurant review and one recipe. And possibly the occasional post on books and movies. And if I can be arsed to do it I may become the 543rd person on the internet to offer a take on Padma Lakshmi’s new Hulu show, Taste the Nation, which I was looking forward to but found extremely disappointing.

By “restaurant review” above I mean takeout reviews. I do still have a few reports from our India trip remaining that were of actual meals eaten in actual restaurants but there will be no dine-in reports from Minnesota for a long time. The state has allowed restaurants to re-open with social distancing but it’s going to be takeout-only for us for a while. Anyway, here is the usual long list of potential booze reviews. If there’s anything that catches your eye please nominate it to the shortlist in the comments below. Continue reading →

Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, here we are. Both my countries continue to plumb the depths of their foundational pathologies. In India Kashmir continues under a repressive and brutal lockdown, while the ruling BJP takes advantage of the pandemic to crush political dissent elsewhere in the country as well. In the US the march of fascism gets more open and confident every week, seemingly. And last week the Minneapolis Police Department re-confirmed what should need no re-confirmation: the enduring—because foundational—racism of American society, and the particular inequities and contempt faced by black Americans, 155 years after the end of the Civil War. There seems to be no end to the shit coming relentlessly down the pike, no sign of hope convincing enough to believe in. And here I am blogging about whisky and food. Continue reading →

April is in the bag—I think. Another month looms and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be very different from the one ending. Minnesota’s “stay at home” order will continue for another two weeks but it’s hard to see how we’ll be returning to anything resembling “normalcy” after that. On the home/work front we’ve been doing four simultaneous Zoom sessions most days and that’s going to continue through May as the kids’ school and our colleges are all staying online. The question right now is what the fall term will look like, for us and for all the people who work at schools and colleges with less security than we are privileged to enjoy.

Those questions are also looming large over the industries whose products I cover on the blog: spirits and food. In all the talk about social distancing and industrial workplaces I haven’t heard too much about what is happening at distilleries. People are certainly drinking more at home but what is going on with employees at distilleries, distributors, importers, stores? Is production being/going to be affected? Casualties in the restaurant world have begun to pile up. The Bachelor Farmer is the most prominent Twin Cities restaurant so far to announce that they will not be re-opening at all. Other smaller restaurants have closed too and I’m sure many others will as well. Will our favourite places survive? Will the industry—farming/food production, distribution, retail, restaurants, bars, food media etc—be able to remake itself to be more equitable and sustainable? Will any of the political and economic transformations that will be necessary to allow all of that actually happen? I hope so but I am not confident. Continue reading →

I just took a look at the March edition of “Coming Soon..” and man, that’s from another universe. It was business as usual; no sign of what was coming. In addition to whisky reviews I was going to finish up my reports of restaurant outings in Goa and Calcutta in January and post a bunch of Twin Cities reports as well. A month later, I’ve barely left the house in the last three weeks and I have no idea when we’ll ever eat at a restaurant again. We have hit up a couple of our favourite places for takeout but at my most paranoid—or it it my most responsible?—I wonder if even that will seem untenable in the near future. And while I posted the usual number of whisky reviews in March, most of those were notes taken before the virus hit the fan. Since the middle of the month I’ve been finding it difficult to summon the energy to write tasting notes. And with the entire family working/going to school from home for the foreseeable future, things are a little chaotic all around. But routines preserve us, I guess and so I’m going to try to keep getting back on the blog horse. I hope to have the usual complement of whisky reviews this month. I am going to try to finally finish up with the Goa and Calcutta reports—if only to remember a time when going out into the world seemed normal. I’ll have more recipes too, as well as some more things that will further alienate my whisky-only readership. You’re welcome! Continue reading →

I turned 50 last month and the blog turns 7 this month. We’re both clearly entering our prime. While I wait for my AARP card to arrive, here is a look at what’s coming on the blog in March.

This month I might finally finish up my endless series of the K&L exclusive casks I seem to have been reviewing for the last three years. I also have a few bottle splits of some Whisky Barrel exclusives on hand, as well as a few others I’ve been threatening to review for a while now. Not sure if I’ll get to all of the K&L and Whisky Barrel casks but there are a few bottles in the list below that I will be writing up for sure: a few whiskies that I opened the week I turned 50. Everything else is up for grabs so if there’s something that interests you, please write in as usual. On the food front I’ll be finishing up my Goa reports and hopefully my Calcutta reports as well. In between there’ll be some reports from the Twin Cities as well. Continue reading →

As our time in India comes to an end here is a look ahead to February on the blog. On the food front there will be a lot of reports from this trip. I still have about five reports to come from Delhi, about eight from Goa and then a few from Calcutta. I do have a few in the backlog from the Twin Cities but it’s entirely possible we won’t eat out for at least a month after we get back home—this has been an excessive four weeks of eating. On the whisky front I will try to finally finish up with my reviews of the recent run of K&L exclusives. I’m sure K&L staff—who seem to have a lot of time to spend on policing reviews of their whiskies online—will be very pleased with my opinions. Other than those, the long list of possible reviews includes mostly a bunch of things that have been on the list for a few month and some bottles that I’ve been planning to open for a while. And there are a couple of brandies and a rum on there too. Let me know if there are any you’d like to nominate to the shortlist. Continue reading →

In last year’s version of this post I noted that 2018 had been the busiest year thus far on the blog by some distance with both page views and the unique visitor count going up over 2017. Well, 2019 was busier still: page views went up by 24% over 2018 and unique visitors rose 13%. The chief interest of those new visitors, however, I suspect was different than in years past. I suspect that 2019 was the year in which this became more of a food than whisky blog, at least from the point of view of the majority of visitors. Yes, there were more food than whisky posts in my year-end top 10 rankings by page views last year as well but in 2019 there was only one whisky post in the top 10 (the perennially popular discussion of Glendronach’s “single cask” shenanigans) and only eight in the top 50! Given that this coincided with the number of unique visitors rising as well, I suspect it’s less the case that the whisky readers have gone away than that there are just a lot more food readers now. For what it’s worth, I still think of this as a whisky and food blog, in that order, and the number of whisky reviews per week/month/year has remained constant for a number of years now. If that’s what you’re most interested in, that’s not going away. Continue reading →

Or an essential gift guide for any time of year, really.

Here is a brief list of things that I think you could give people that they would be very happy to receive. Only some of these things were published or produced in 2019. Why restrict yourself to strict novelty when what you want to do is buy people things they will like? The list includes things to listen to (children’s music); things to read (cookbooks and more); things to cook with (knives and pans); and things to drink (whisky mostly) . Some of these things are made by friends of mine (and are marked accordingly). The things that are linked to Amazon will make me a small commission if you purchase them there. I feel dirty about this as I am not a fan of Amazon’s business practices, but I also have no other way of trying to generate a little bit of money to support the web-hosting costs of this blog. Nonetheless, I have not linked the  recommended books available from American publishers to Amazon—if you have an independent bookstore in your town, I am sure they would be happy to order it for you. Or you can click on the links below and get them shipped to you from our town’s excellent bookstore, Content Books, who ship cheaply all over the United States and to Canada, and apparently also to Hungary. Continue reading →

Well, the year’s almost over. It’s the end of a decade as well, I guess, but I don’t have a month of reviews of 10 yo whiskies planned. (Or should it be a parade of 10-19 yo whiskies?) Instead, I have my usual grab bag. Less usually, I have a fair number of actually available and/or recently released whiskies in the mix. Through bottle splits I acquired a large parcel of K&L’s recent exclusives and seven of them show up on the list this month. There’s also the new batch of the Springbank 12 CS, which is doing the rounds in American stores and this year’s Ardbeg Day release, the Drum. The rest are mostly my normal mix of irrelevancies. Let me know which of these catch your eye and I will try to get to them. There were some nominees from November’s list that are still un-reviewed—those will probably get priority. Beyond the booze I’ll keep to my schedule of weekly Minnesota restaurant reviews and recipes. There’s even a chance that a certain book review I’ve been threatening for the better part of the year will finally get written. Let’s see how it goes. Continue reading →

October, 2019 may have been the month when this finally became a food blog more than a whisky blog. I don’t mean in terms of how I see it or what I post but in terms of what the blog’s readership indicates. The top 10 most-read posts this past month were food posts, either restaurant reviews or recipes. In fact, 15 out of the top 20 most-read posts were food posts. (Which were the five booze-related posts that snuck into the top 20? Port Charlotte 13, 2001, Millstone 100, Ben Nevis McDonald’s Traditional, Glen Scotia 12, and Longmorn 36, 1976.) And, of course, there are fewer and fewer comments each month on my whisky reviews. This is not very surprising. If I take my own reading habits as representative it would appear that interest in reading about whisky online has flagged considerably in recent years. ScotchWhisky.com announced its shutdown in October; I was disappointed but not shocked. I barely read any whisky sites these days—a far cry from a time just a few years ago when my morning routine involved checking in on a number of whisky blogs. Frankly, the state of the Scotch whisky industry makes it hard to stay excited—rising prices and high concept whiskies seem to be the only constants these days. I’m going to keep on doing what I do: three booze reviews a week but whisky readers, if you’re still out there and still interested, send me a sign. Continue reading →

Another month, another look ahead to reviews and such on the blog. As the king of empty promises let me lead by saying that this will DEFINITELY be the month when I will finally get around to that review of Indian-(ish) that I’ve been threatening since May. Look for it any day now or maybe in December. Of 2020. But seriously, I am going to do it: I’ve begun to draft it in my head and only need to find a couple of hours in a row to sit down and type it up. Speaking of finishing things, I posted the last of my DC meal reports last month. I was hoping to get done with the New York reports this month but there are still quite a few of those to go and so they’ll likely trickle into November. They’ll be interspersed with Twin Cities Metro reports as usual and maybe a recipe or two. And, of course, booze. Though I’m not sure if I really have much of a booze following anymore—does anyone still read whisky blogs?—I will be keeping up my usual schedule of three reviews a week: mostly whisky, some brandy.

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We’re back home in Minnesota after a couple of weeks on the East Coast, and gearing up for the start of the busy season at work. Life on the blog will continue as normal. I have a lot of food reports yet to come from DC and New York—those will probably spill over into October. Alas, I did not have the opportunity in either city to visit any whisky bars, so no reports on anything like that: we were too tired every evening after full days of museums etc. We walked an average of five miles a day on the trip (the boys slept very well each night and so did we). I will, however, have the usual complement of spirits reviews: three per week, mostly whisky, some brandy. The long list of potential reviews is below, as per usual. Take a look and if anything catches your eye please nominate it to the shortlist. I was hoping to get to the new Laphroaig Cairdeas in August but didn’t have time to look for a bottle. I still don’t have my hands on one but expect to rectify that shortly. So that will be coming for sure(ish). Everything else is up for grabs. Continue reading →

August is here, summer is almost over. It’s going to be a busy month for us, however. We’ll be spending most of the second half of the month on the east coast, visiting first DC and then New York. The agenda is mostly to take the boys to the major museums and other big tourist sites but I’m not averse to checking out a whisky bar or two if the opportunity presents itself. So if you have any recommendations reasonably close to the Convention Center in DC or within easy reach of the Upper Westside in New York, please make them below. Please also, as usual, look at the long list of potential reviews below and nominate to the short list any you’d particularly like to see reviewed. On the food front I will be wrapping up my reports from Canada in June and the North Shore in early July and maybe I’ll have another Twin Cities report or two before we leave town as well. And, who knows, I may even get around to posting my review of Priya Krishna’s Indian(-ish). I checked and I’ve actually been threatening that since May…

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The summer is the slow season on whisky blogs but a) I have a lot of samples to get through and bottles to open and b) I’m not sure if this is really a whisky blog anymore—my food posts seem to get a far larger readership these days. Be that as it may, I will be posting the usual schedule of three whisky/spirits reviews a week in July; I will, of course, also have a lot of food-related posts: I’m going to power through my remaining Montreal and Toronto posts this month. And I’ve just discovered that I actually have a couple of restaurant reports left over from our trip to Scotland last June (from Orkney and the Highlands)! There’ll be some Minnesota reviews too, as we’ll be taking advantage of the free babysitting provided by my parents who are visiting from Delhi. And I promise that I will finally post my long-threatened review of Priya Krishna’s Indian (-ish), if only to get those of you who keep asking me about it off my back—yes, I know I promised it last month as well, what’s your point? Continue reading →

The best part about June is that Game of Thrones is over and I no longer have any of Diageo’s Game of Thrones malts to review. I liked some of those but, on the whole, the set was underwhelming and I grew to regret having announced that I would review them all. Yes, I know, no one is going to hold me to a contract but I do like to honour the constraints I place on myself. There were a few requests from last month’s long list that I did not get to, and I’ll try my best to cover all of those this month. If there is anything else in addition that grabs your fancy please write in below.

On the food front, I will be done next week with my Los Angeles reviews from our trip in December. I’ll have some Twin Cities reports in the next couple of weeks. After that I’ll be in Toronto and Montreal for a week on work and you can expect some more Canadian entries. Beyond restaurant reviews my long-threatened review of Priya Krishna’s cookbook, Indian (-ish) will be up soon and I hope to get as well to a piece I’ve been mulling for a while on the place of so-called “ethnic” food in the mainstream foodie ecosystem. And maybe I’ll have another recipe or two as well. Continue reading →