Daniel Yaffe - Drink More Whiskey!: Everything You Need to Know About Your New Favorite Drink

To my (older) brother Jonathan,
who will eventually learn to love whiskey.

Copyright 2013 by Daniel Yaffe.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2634-0
The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous edition as follows:
ISBN 978-1-4521-0974-9

Designed by Alice Chau
Illustrations by Mary Kate McDevitt

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

This is not your granddaddys whiskey book. It is a book for a new generation of whiskey drinkers. I dont mean eighteen-year-olds who are raiding their parents liquor cabinet or frat boys who are celebrating their twenty-first birthday. I mean anyone who has fallen in love with the food revolution and liquefied it. This is for folks who are looking to drink better whiskey and attempt to understand it.

Back in the golden days, my grandfather had his CANADIAN CLUB whisky and would drink it the same way whenever he decided to reach for the bottle: a whiskey sour before his meat loaf or, on occasion, after a Jell-O salad. He was part of the old generation of drinkers. It was the generation that drank a Coke every day with lunch, ate spaghetti and meatballs every Wednesday night, and went to the local buffet every Tuesday.

Thats not us. Our generation wants to know the next best thing. Were the sushi generation because we had never tasted anything like it, and were at a new restaurant every chance we get. Never had Burmese food? Bring on the tea leaf salad. Were an eclectic and experimental bunch that marvels at international and local quality over familiar comfort. Were the generation that will change careers every five years, start up the company of our dreams, and wave to llamas on top of Machu Picchu. Whether you remember it or not, we are the generation that welcomed Harry Potter jelly beans in such flavors as grass, earwax, and dirt, knowing that the point wasnt to find your favorite flavor. The age of discovery has transformed into the age of sensory exploration.

Weve finally stepped up from a low point on the American cultural palate. The 1970s and 1980s were marked by a surge of vodka consumption because people didnt want to taste their alcohol. Things are changing. Going out is no longer about super-sweet grenadine cocktails and soda-laced Long Island Iced Teas. Its about fresh thyme and knowing the name of the cow whose carcass was made into the truffled meatball youre about to fork into your mouth. The mere fact that youve made it this far into the book means that you want to know more about whiskey. If you were just drinking to get buzzed, you could have already been shit-faced by now.

Ive had an incredible whiskey journey chock-full of mind-blowing scenery and characters. Ive visited more distilleries than I care to count, drank whiskey with distillers across the globe, and marveled as a 3-D drink became four-dimensional. Thats what this book is about. Sitting with people who have made their livelihood from whiskey, Ive geeked out about yeast strains, the genus of oak trees used to make barrels, and how best to cut peat from bogs on Islay. Its a trip to sit with a fifth-generation whiskey mogul and tell him that his Scotch tastes like rotten grass (to his delight). All of this has been a ton of funjust the way drinking whiskey should be.

Millions of intimidated consumers feel as though they should open their mouths to drink whiskey rather than to ask questions about it. I believe its time for a new discourse about the spirit. I did not write this book because Im an expert on whiskey. There are hundreds of people who could teach a college-level course on the subject. But we need to take whiskey off of its throne and bring it onto the playground. Im tired of pompous old men telling me how to drink whiskey: Dont add water. Add precisely two drops. Dont ever mix this single malt. You added what to it? Its confusing and its pretentious.

You dont need to know everything about every bottle. Im giving you the background information so that you can go out and learn for yourself. If you step back from all the chemistry, tradition, rules, regulations, and names, whiskey is simple and can be enjoyed without an encyclopedia in hand. Too often it is enveloped in dusty rhetoric and esoteric jargon that does little more than prompt blank stares. When it stops being fun, put down your drink, go for a hike, and then reach for an iced tea.

Im not saying that you should turn to whiskey for everything, but the beauty of the spirit is that, like music, there is a whiskey for nearly every occasion. Perhaps you sip on a LAPHROAIG single malt one evening before a warm fire and pour BULLEIT bourbon over ice on a warm summer afternoon. You might have your favorite brand to crack open at a wedding, and a different bottle to confide in after a breakup. Ultimately, whiskey is a social drink; it always tastes better among friends.

Im intentionally breaking the code of conduct and talking about whiskey the way I would if we were friends hanging out at a bar. This book does not employ all the traditional terminology. Its here to help integrate whiskey into your life without having to spend a lifetime to learn every minute detail first. You dont need to be a mechanic to enjoy driving fancy cars. Youre not a distiller and youll never need to know the optimal temperature at which column stills operate or the genetic makeup of the barley in your favorite Scotch. So for now, just learn enough to know what the hell youre drinking and, more important, why youre drinking it.

The following chapters are not a reference guide. You can find handbooks on the shelves of bars and liquor stores and enough second- and third-hand volumes on eBay. Not every brand in the world is included in this book, and the ones that dont appear are not intentionally left out because I dont like them. Im not going to list bottles for you and tell you a hundred times over that youre going to taste vanilla and oak in this bourbon and peat and ripe fruit in that Scotch. If thats the kind of information youre looking for, youre in luck, because enough budding whiskey critics exist to fill a small country. Whiskey drinkers love to vocalize their thoughts, and volumes have been written on nearly every bottle. Your goal shouldnt be to read through piles of CliffsNotes; instead, you should be writing your own. This book is a smattering of stories, history, anecdotes, and approachable ways to understand whiskey. It will help you visualize what youre drinking and bring cultural relevance to a bottle of booze. Use this book as a jumping-off point.

Any way you drink it, whiskey is one of the worlds most iconic spirits, with a tremendous character and history. It was there when the United States was fighting for independence. It has been poured down throats during celebrations and soirees and coveted during triumphant battles and historic moments. I can guarantee you that Winston Churchill wasnt downing shots of cherry vodka and doing sake bombs while sending his men into battle.

Whiskey is a cultural celebrity everywhere from China to Brazil. It stars in shows like Boardwalk Empire and Mad Men, is a favorite drink of Lady Gaga, and has been memorialized by authors Hunter S. Thompson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is poured in country songs and across hip-hop stages and has the kind of cultural cachet that the world hasnt seen since the Pet Rock craze of the mid-1970s. Starting to learn about whiskey can seem more daunting than trying to analyze nineteenth-century Russian literature. Begin by simply enjoying it. You probably didnt like your first beer, but if youre anything like me, you crossed that threshold long ago and are now reaching for double IPAs and Belgian tripels. Whiskey can take you on a similar ride.