One thing that the United States does better than Canada...

[xiphias]

Canada does many things extremely well, but it doesn't have a lot of good whiskey. There are two places in the world that make truly great whiskey/whisky -- Scotland, and the Kentucky and Tennessee are of the United States. Ireland, other places in the Southern United States, and several other places also make good whiskey, but Scotland and the parts of Kentucky and Tennessee settled by Scots are the places that create the truly great stuff.

Canada? The only reason we have Canadian whiskey in the United States is that the Bronfman family smuggled it to us during Prohibition, and then a couple generations of people got used to it. I just recently bought a bottle, ostensibly to use as a mixing whiskey, but, let's face it, mainly because I needed a new dice bag.

The point is -- Crown Royal : whiskey :: Budweiser : beer

Comments

[sarianna.livejournal.com]

Dice bags are important! (I have an unopened bottle of CR. I also have a full bag of pound-o'-dice.)

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

You should try 40 Creek. It's won international awards.

uneducated question

[erik-j-meyer.livejournal.com]

Are there different names given to the liquor from different areas that all indicate the same general liquid? Whiskey, Scotch, Bourbon, etc? These things confuse me as a non-drinker who occasionally gets told that I bought the wrong liquid and that the wrongness should have been obvious. Yeah, they all seem the same to me.

Re: uneducated question

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, all whiskey has some things in common, which is what makes it whiskey, or whisky. Different kinds insist on different spellings.

All of it is made from some sort of grain, which is malted to turn the starches into sugars. Then that stuff is soaked and fermented, and then the fermented liquid is distilled.

But besides that, there are a lot of differences which make the final products distinct.

Most whiskeys out there are named based on their origins -- Scotch is from Scotland, for instance, bourbon is from Bourbon County in Kentucky, Tennessee whiskey is from a couple specific counties in Tennessee. That's pretty easy to understand (although not COMPLETELY true in all cases, but that's not really too important to THIS discussion). But what's more surprising if you don't know is that each of those location-named whiskeys is made in slightly different ways, unique to that location.

Let me see if I can go over some of the differences, in order. This is off the top of my head, so I'm going to get some details wrong, and forget stuff, but it should give you a basic idea.

The first difference is what grain the whole thing starts with. For instance, moonshine is most commonly made from corn, which malts and ferments well, but tends to have less complex flavors than most other grains. Scotch is always made from barley. I don't remember if that means "all barley" or just "mostly barley." Rye whiskeys have to be made from 51% or more rye. You can make it from wheat. The cheapest, and generally considered to be the worst, whiskey in the world is a rice whiskey made in Laos, and called lao-Lao, which is simply Laotian for "Laotian alcohol."

Most whiskeys are made from a combination of grains, and different grains add different sorts of flavors to the final product. Rye is often described as "spicy"; corn is usually sweet; barley has a number of sort of nutty, sweet sorts of flavors. And, while each whiskey-maker uses their own blend of grains, each style of whiskey and each place in the world that makes it, will be drawing from the same palette of ingredients that belong with that particular whiskey.

The malting process is pretty much the same for most whiskeys. Except Scotch adds an extra step in here which is its biggest claim to fame. At the end of malting, the malted barley is dried over a fire. And that is the biggest special flavor component to scotch, and one of several sources of regional differences in Scotland.

The reason single-malt scotch is a thing at all is those regional differences. There are six different whisky-producing regions in Scotland, each of which produces Scotches that are very different from each other, based on what's around them. And that drying process is the first part. Some of the regions have a lot of peat bogs, and the malt is dried over a very smoky, peaty fire, leading to an extremely smoky whisky. And I mean actually smoky. It's got peat smoke in it and it tastes like it.

Other regions use less smoky fires, and have less smoke. But most Scotches definitely are influenced by smoke to some level or another.

So, then there is the fermenting process. And THAT is a source of differences, too, especially, again, in regional Scotches. The water you use makes a difference; there are bourbons that claim that you can taste the freshness of the creek water they use. And so does the air. The Islay (pronounced "Eye-lah", it's Gaelic, what do you want) whiskys have definite influences from the sea water that surrounds the place. They don't use sea water, but because the whole island smells like fresh salt air, so does the whisky.

Re: uneducated question

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The next difference is distilling. This is a place where the differences are largely a matter of the skill of the particular distiller making the thing, but there are differences in method from whiskey to whiskey, as well.

An alcoholic liquid has lots of different kinds of things in it that all have slightly different boiling points. The idea of distilling is that you bring the temperature of the stuff just shy of the boiling point of water, so the various alcohols and aromatics come off and condense at the top of the still and drip down into a separate container. You get various forms of alcohol, and water, and esters, and various complex molecules, and like that. And you try to keep the temperature low enough that you get less water, but high enough that you get a lot of the other stuff.

The first things that boil off are icky things you want to throw away -- acetone, methanol, stuff like that. It tastes bad and makes you sick. It also smells bad, so it's easy to get rid of. The first stuff that drips out of the condenser smells like nail polish remover, because it IS nail polish remover, so you just throw that stuff away until it doesn't smell like nail polish remover any more.

Then you get the ethanol and the various esters and cojoiners that go along with ethanol. And that's the good stuff. You keep all that.

Once you get to the end of that, you start getting fusel oils, which are things like amyl alcohol and all sorts of icky things. Fusil oils create the most amazing hangovers.

What a distiller wants to do is to get rid of the "heads" -- acetone and methanol -- and "tails" -- amyl alcohol and other stuff -- and keep the "heart". And, of course, because life isn't all nice and neat, you don't actually get these things in exact precise marching order one after another. You are always getting just a little bit of all of it all the time, just in different percentages. So the distiller is choosing the parts with the most good stuff, and as little bad stuff as possible. But there's always a temptation to keep too much of it, too soon or too late, because you want more whiskey.

(As an aside: ever since the 19th century, there's been another option -- fractional distilling using a column still. It's possible to make a big vertical cylinder-type still, and bring it very carefully with instruments and thermostats and things to a specified temperature. And you have sorts of shelves at various levels in the column, and the stuff boils at the bottom, and the things that boil at the lowest temperature and are therefore the lightest go all the way up to the top and condense on the highest shelf, and you can automatically separate out all the different things very carefully and specifically.

This is GREAT for industrial purposes, but LOUSY for whiskey, because, when you get that precise, the cojoiners and esters and stuff actually separate out from the ethanol. You get very pure ethanol, which gives you extremely clean vodka, but vodka isn't whiskey. Whiskey is made in old-fashioned pot stills.)

So now you've hopefully got a liquid which includes very little heads-stuff like wood alcohol and tails-stuff like fusel oils, but lots of ethanol and flavor and smell compounds. And also some water, because you just do -- you can keep MOST of the water out of the process, but some is going to come along anyway. The main point of distilling is to remove water, but, most of the time, people are fine with a final product that is about half and half ethanol and water -- somewhere between 40/60 and 60/40, say.

You are now looking at a bunch of liquid that looks like water and smells more interesting than vodka, but still mostly like vodka. If you're making moonshine, you're done at this step. Put it in mason jars, and drink it. There are other "white whiskeys" like that, and they are generally not very good. The best 'shine actually IS good, though -- but that requires an INCREDIBLY good distiller to get the heads and heart and tails PERFECTLY cut.

However, most whiskey is now aged.

Re: uneducated question

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

This is the last major difference between types of whiskeys -- how they are aged, and in what.

All whiskey that I can think of is aged in wooden barrels. And it then draws color and flavor from the barrel over the months or years it sits in there. It might sit in a barrel for as little as three months; it might sit there for twenty years. As it sits in there, a little bit of the alcohol evaporates out (that's poetically called "the angels' share") which includes those tiny bits of those heads and tails you can't COMPLETELY eliminate, so that makes it smoother. But more importantly -- it pulls out all sorts of good stuff from the wood.

The biggest thing is vanillin. Wood contains vanillin, which is the main chemical in vanilla. That gives it a beautiful smell and that gorgeous amber color. But the different types of barrels add other things. Scotch is aged in sherry casks. In Spain, in Jerez, they age sherry and port for years, and then bottle it. Scotland imports the barrels and uses them to age their whisky, so it gets those sherry or port flavors in it. Bourbon is done in charred barrels -- they take a blowtorch to the inside to get a different kind of smoke than the peat smoke of Scotland.

Other whiskeys only use new French oak, so they can get the most vanillin out of it; others will go import THOSE barrels and use barrels that already have OTHER whiskies' complex flavors and smells in them.

Then they are aged, and that takes skill, too -- making sure to control temperature and so forth to let the spirits draw flavors from the barrels while outgassing any lingering less-than-good stuff.

Finally, it's ready to be bottled. Except there is ONE more step for blended whiskys -- in Johnny Walker and things like that, those are made by having master blenders get a whole bunch of different whiskys and mixing them together to get exactly the flavor that they want.

So, that's basically, off the top of my head, what I can say about the differences among whiskeys. They are made from different things, distilled with different degrees of skill, aged in different things. And, in a couple cases, there are a couple extra steps to add other flavors like smoke.

Re: uneducated question

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

You definitely asked the right person to explain this subject to you: I'm just commenting to sympathize, as telling someone "the wrongness should have been obvious" is so much less than helpful as to be worthy of a level of Hell.

Re: uneducated question

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, it's my skill set, isn't it? I'm a bartender, and pedantic, and a teacher.

Or, to quote Tyrian Lannister, "It's what I do. I drink, and I know things."