A comment on drinks
Sep. 14th, 2003 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasThe "manhattan" is a drink made with whiskey and sweet vermouth.
Except it wasn't always made with blended whiskey. When the manhattan was invented, it was made with rye whiskey. Rye tastes different than just plain old whiskey.
Let me back up and define terms for those of you who don't drink: "whiskey", or "whisky" is a general term for an alcohol which starts with malted (semi-sprouted) grain, which is fermented, then distilled, then put into wood and aged. As you can imagine, this can lead to all sorts of liquors that have very little in common with one another. At one end, you've got "moonshine" -- a raw spirit from corn (maize), hardly aged at all. It's clear. They sort of skip the aging step, which is where whiskeys pick up color. I suppose an argument could be made that moonshine isn't even really whiskey, because it's not aged, but, well, I wouldn't want to argue with someone mean enough to drink that stuff. It's vile. It's a little like drinking lighter fluid, only not quite as tasty.
On the other end, you've got single-malt Scotches, for instance. They're also whiskeys, or, actually, whiskys. Scottish distilleries don't use the "e". Probably has to do with tarriffs or something. They have to import all their "e"'s from overseas, so the cost is prohibitive, or something. Those add in a couple other steps, like roasting over peat fires, and adding the blood of an English baby, Something like that, anyway. A scotch tastes like scotch, not like anything else. I've said that it tastes "a little like you poured equal parts apple juice and rubbing alcohol into an ashtray, except it's good."
There are also Irish whiskeys, which have a distinctive process and taste.
In the United States, you've got bourbon, from Bourbon County, Kentucky, Tennesee Whisky, which tastes pretty much exactly like bourbon, but don't tell people from either Tennessee or Kentucky that, and rye, about which more later.
Then there's Canadian whiskey. "Whiskey with no qualifier" probably means Canadian whiskey. It's sorta the default whiskey. Seagram's Seven is an example of it. It mixes really well with ginger ale, which is why Seagram's makes ginger ale, and Canada Dry is a ginger ale. A "highball" is "whiskey and ginger ale." That drink became so popular that now, ANY drink which consists of a liquor and a mixer is called a highball (rum and coke, gin and tonic, Cape Codder, screwdriver, whatever).
But, frankly, and apoligies to any Canadian chauvanists reading this, Canadian whiskey is pretty boring, really.
A manhattan is "whiskey and sweet vermouth." That means Canadian blended whiskey. I've had them a couple times, and never really seen what the big deal is.
Anyway, then I read somewhere that the manhattan was originally made with rye whiskey, not Canadian whiskey.
Rye whiskey is almost unknown in the United States. And it's only made in the United States, so it's even less well known everywhere else. I've never managed to get it in a bar, and I only know of two liquor stores in the area that stock it regularly. I only know of two manufacturers of it: Old Overholt (the brand I drink), and Wild Turkey makes one.
Rye is made with at least 51% rye -- the grain. It's sweeter than other whiskeys -- about as sweet as some of the sweeter scotches. But it's a simpler taste than scotch, without scotch's smoky taste. I really like rye.
So I made Lis buy me some rye and some sweet vermouth, and I tried making a manhattan with that.
Okay. NOW I get it. Yum.
It's a completely different drink than a normal manhattan. It's orders of magnitude better.
Except it wasn't always made with blended whiskey. When the manhattan was invented, it was made with rye whiskey. Rye tastes different than just plain old whiskey.
Let me back up and define terms for those of you who don't drink: "whiskey", or "whisky" is a general term for an alcohol which starts with malted (semi-sprouted) grain, which is fermented, then distilled, then put into wood and aged. As you can imagine, this can lead to all sorts of liquors that have very little in common with one another. At one end, you've got "moonshine" -- a raw spirit from corn (maize), hardly aged at all. It's clear. They sort of skip the aging step, which is where whiskeys pick up color. I suppose an argument could be made that moonshine isn't even really whiskey, because it's not aged, but, well, I wouldn't want to argue with someone mean enough to drink that stuff. It's vile. It's a little like drinking lighter fluid, only not quite as tasty.
On the other end, you've got single-malt Scotches, for instance. They're also whiskeys, or, actually, whiskys. Scottish distilleries don't use the "e". Probably has to do with tarriffs or something. They have to import all their "e"'s from overseas, so the cost is prohibitive, or something. Those add in a couple other steps, like roasting over peat fires, and adding the blood of an English baby, Something like that, anyway. A scotch tastes like scotch, not like anything else. I've said that it tastes "a little like you poured equal parts apple juice and rubbing alcohol into an ashtray, except it's good."
There are also Irish whiskeys, which have a distinctive process and taste.
In the United States, you've got bourbon, from Bourbon County, Kentucky, Tennesee Whisky, which tastes pretty much exactly like bourbon, but don't tell people from either Tennessee or Kentucky that, and rye, about which more later.
Then there's Canadian whiskey. "Whiskey with no qualifier" probably means Canadian whiskey. It's sorta the default whiskey. Seagram's Seven is an example of it. It mixes really well with ginger ale, which is why Seagram's makes ginger ale, and Canada Dry is a ginger ale. A "highball" is "whiskey and ginger ale." That drink became so popular that now, ANY drink which consists of a liquor and a mixer is called a highball (rum and coke, gin and tonic, Cape Codder, screwdriver, whatever).
But, frankly, and apoligies to any Canadian chauvanists reading this, Canadian whiskey is pretty boring, really.
A manhattan is "whiskey and sweet vermouth." That means Canadian blended whiskey. I've had them a couple times, and never really seen what the big deal is.
Anyway, then I read somewhere that the manhattan was originally made with rye whiskey, not Canadian whiskey.
Rye whiskey is almost unknown in the United States. And it's only made in the United States, so it's even less well known everywhere else. I've never managed to get it in a bar, and I only know of two liquor stores in the area that stock it regularly. I only know of two manufacturers of it: Old Overholt (the brand I drink), and Wild Turkey makes one.
Rye is made with at least 51% rye -- the grain. It's sweeter than other whiskeys -- about as sweet as some of the sweeter scotches. But it's a simpler taste than scotch, without scotch's smoky taste. I really like rye.
So I made Lis buy me some rye and some sweet vermouth, and I tried making a manhattan with that.
Okay. NOW I get it. Yum.
It's a completely different drink than a normal manhattan. It's orders of magnitude better.
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ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-14 12:17 pm (UTC)Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-14 02:17 pm (UTC)A.
Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-14 06:36 pm (UTC)Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-14 11:52 pm (UTC)"uisce beatha" is, however, what whiskey is called by the tourist marketing board in Ireland, the same way that leprechauns wear green, rather than their traditional dress, and shamrock looks suspiciously like its bigger clover cousins. (Leprechauns traditionally wear mixed primary colours, in case you're curious).
"uisce beatha" in conversational use means something produced illegally which isn't poitin. You had the spelling quite correct; it's the spelling of "fuisce" I'm unsure of, since I don't know what is taught as standard.
Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-15 04:39 am (UTC)Hm. My prof doesn't teach strictly from book learning or anything. He's normally at a university at Nova Scotia, and he's spent lots of time in the Irish-speaking parts of Ireland (such as they still are) as well. He wasn't one for giving us Irish Tourist Board usages when he knew the conversational instead.
(Leprechauns traditionally wear mixed primary colours, in case you're curious).
I'm aware, thanks.
"uisce beatha" in conversational use means something produced illegally which isn't poitin.
It wouldn't surprise me to find this usage current in some places also.
Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-15 06:23 am (UTC)There's some apparent disagreement over whether "uisce beatha" was originally brought into Irish out of Latin (from aqua vitae) or merely from the same Indo-European roots. The sources I've found more reliable in the past prefer the second theory.
It's pretty likely that by now the usage you're familiar with has more conversational currency since a recent borrow-back is more likely to be heard from speakers, I would think.
Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-15 09:43 am (UTC)I wonder what the Gaelic for whisk(e)y is? Could that be where the American spelling "uisge bagh" comes from? Any Scots around to let us know?
Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-15 10:36 am (UTC)OED
Date: 2003-09-15 11:47 am (UTC)And since the etymology uses images to represent some of the charaacters, here's free access to the OED entry usquebaugh for the next three days
Re: OED
Date: 2003-09-16 03:12 am (UTC)Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-16 03:16 am (UTC)Also, I was wondering whether you were ever taught the whole bean mna mnai mna mnaimh thing, as some people who learned their Irish formally (rather than as a first language were). You may not have been, because it's kind of out of date now according to the official curriculum in Ireland. But you may have been, because some speakers still use it.
Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-16 05:01 am (UTC)Also, I was wondering whether you were ever taught the whole bean mna mnai mna mnaimh thing
Yeah, I believe I was. It probably is out of date now, then, since I took those classes about...gah...eight years ago now. :) What're speakers using these days?
My source material consists of Too Many Books plus a few internet sites that most of the folk I've met seem to agree are useful. If you do a google search on any Irish word, at some point you will turn up lincolnu.edu's Focal An Lae site, which is spiffy. There're oodles of other good ones, some of which will be more useful to you than me at the moment since your fluency is bound to be leaps ahead of mine at this point. Must...take...refresher...course.
Re: ObGeekage
Date: 2003-09-16 07:09 am (UTC)"bean mna mnai mna mnaimh" is what my mother's generation was taught, though her younger sisters weren't. Now the nouns are standardised (Irish school curriculum post-1955) more like in English than Latin, so although bean and mna are still around, they are both treated as entirely seperate words. The forms mnai and mnaimh are almost completely gone, though I have heard some speakers from Cork use them and it's possible that some teachers in Gaeltacht areas condone their use, similar to the way "chim" and "chifigh" are being brought back into currency (or were when I was at school, 1983-96 approx). I don't know whether you were taught "bean" and "mna" seperately, or together as part of a old-vocab revival (which wouldn't be a bad idea, since different whattycallems in nouns are useful).
I don't have much in the way of Irish language reference books, since most of what was around when I was looking was Dineen-based and the rest was relying heavily on the Connemara / Dublin focussed standardisation, which annoys me much the same way that ignoring American or Hiberno or Scottish English in favour of Estuary English does. Thankfully, the OED just includes everything, as long as it has appeared in at least two published works (yes, even if it's by the same author - I know someone who had a zoological term added because it was in her thesis and one of her reference books).
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 12:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 12:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 03:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 02:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 03:46 pm (UTC)It depends what you mean by "vodka".
Vodka, traditional Russian vodka, is made from potatoes, mostly. (Like the drink in Discword that's made from "apples, mostly".) There is grain-based Russian vodka, too, but I tend to think "vodka <-- potatoes."
However, AMERICAN vodka is actually just dilute GNS -- "grain neutral spirits." "Grain neutral spirits" is you take any sort of grain, ferment it, then keep distilling and filtering the thing until there's no flavor left.
Why would you do such a thing? Well, for instance, you might be evil. Or insane.
Or you might be trying to make up a new liquor or liqueur and not want any new flavorings in it to mess things up, or you might be making perfume or something.
Or you might just want to get drunk and not have to deal with things like, y'know, taste.
Yeah, so I don't have much respect for American vodka. I have some on the liquor shelf, but I mainly use it for things like aftershave.
So let's say you've got a really unimpressive batch of grain you've fermented. It tastes all icky, and will never amount to anything. So you distill and filter and everything this stuff, until you've got grain neutral spirits, which is basically inoffensive, if boring. Now you have to do something to make it interesting and drinkable.
The Dutch, in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, found that if you stick juniper berries in grain neutral spirits, it tastes good.
Well, actually, they found that, if you stick pretty much any old crud into grain neutral spirits, you can get people to drink it: "gin" recipies from the seventeenth century include such yummy treats as tar and turpentine. But, because the Dutch and the British controlled the spice trade, they could come up with all sorts of things, better than tar, to put into grain neutral spirits to make things taste good.
Whiskey, however, is made from malted grain. The malting process turns some of the starches in grain to sugars. Fermenting turns starch to sugar and sugar to alcohol, but if you malt the grain first, you skew the balance of sugars to make things sweeter.
The other major, major difference between whiskeys and GNS based liquors is the cask-aging. You stick GNS in wood for a couple decades and Good Stuff Happens. It picks up a wonderful golden color, it tastes much better. . . .
Much of the art in whiskey, and whisky, making is choosing barrels made out of tasty wood.
So: vodka and gin are different from whiskey because the grain they are made from is not malted, and they are not aged in wood. Also, you stick stuff in gin -- juniper berries, yes, but also a LOT of other stuff, could include fennel and anise, nutmeg, and, in at least one gin of which I'm aware (Hendricks, one of my favorites), cucumber.
Me being a smartass...
Date: 2003-09-14 03:56 pm (UTC)Re: Me being a smartass...
Date: 2003-09-14 04:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-15 08:49 pm (UTC)After drinking some, I decided that the vodka hadn't so much been exported from Russia as deported.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 03:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 03:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 04:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 02:20 pm (UTC)As a point of reference, what I usually drink is Bushmills 12yo single malt.
A.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 04:04 pm (UTC)I need to introduce you to Pikesville Supreme brand rye whiskey, the Thunderbird of rye whiskeys.
FWIW, the absolute strangest Manhattan ever had to be one I tasted involving Canadian whiskey and vermouth's alhoholic cousin: sweet white wine. But not just any sweet white wine, no. Kesser "Niagra Blanc," which is sweeter than anything even Manischewitz produces, but not as cloying and syrupy. It was interesting. I would recommend it precisely once.
Apparently this version of the Manhattan is popular with some Lubavitchers because Kesser is "Crown Heights K," and they don't hold by the hecksher on the King David brand vermouth.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 04:09 pm (UTC)Um, Scott -- imagine that YOU said that "interesting" up there. That will give you the proper intonation.
Copenhagen
Date: 2003-09-15 08:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 04:06 pm (UTC)But not whiskey.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 04:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 04:13 pm (UTC)I'm willing to do any proportions of gin to vermouth from 3:1 all the way down to 5:1.
Heck, I'm even willing to do it either stirred OR shaken!
I'm VERY flexible with my martinis.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 04:29 pm (UTC)Visigoth!
Heck, I'm even willing to do it either stirred OR shaken!
I assume you've seen the Straight Dope's take on the shaken versus stirred argument. At some point I must have a party, all in the name of science you understand, at which the experiments listed in the article are repeated. We must all do our parts in the quest for knowledge.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 06:03 pm (UTC)Hey, I didn't say I'd drink a 5:1 martini. Just that I'd make one.
As far as the "shaken-vs-stirred" argument, I feel that it has to do with the fact that a shaken martini will have ice crystals floating directly in the drink itself, both somewhat diluting it, and making it that much colder. I like it both ways, but I find them notably different.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 06:59 pm (UTC)I went out and ordered a martini once in a bar, and the guy poured the Bombay Sapphire in the glass, *misted* the top with vermouth, and put an olive in it? To me, that is NO martini. Neither is anything made with vodka.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 07:40 pm (UTC)Oh, and another thing...
Date: 2003-09-14 07:24 pm (UTC)Re: Oh, and another thing...
Date: 2003-09-14 08:15 pm (UTC)That is: as I said above, a "highball" is "whiskey and ginger ale." But, a "highball" is also "any drink served in a highball glass which is made the same way as a highball, i.e., pour liquor in a glass, add mixer, stir, garnish."
So, I'm starting to accept that the term "martini" is beginning to mean, besides meaning "martini," "any drink served in a martini glass which is made the same way as a martini, i.e., pour liquor and a liquer in a shaker with ice, shake, strain into martini glass, garnish."
I still twitch about it though.
Re: Oh, and another thing...
Date: 2003-09-17 05:52 am (UTC)Actually, I'm a gibson man myself.
Tanqueray: OK, plain, crisp-ish.
Bombay: OK+.
Sapphire: What I'd like to have as my 'everyday' gin.
No. 10: Very good, smooth, almost a touch sweet.
Malacca: What I'd like to have when I want a 'special' gibson. Wonderful flavors; half the time doesn't need anything with it at all.
Hendricks: well... if I get a bottle I'll send it to you as a present, then. Sorry, too sweet and thin for my tastes.
- TheAdmiral
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-14 05:02 pm (UTC)After all that alcohol...
Date: 2003-09-14 05:14 pm (UTC)This was really informative!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-15 11:15 am (UTC)Except for the Cape Breton single malt. MmmMMMmmm.