WHAT IS WHISKEY?

Day 182 of the Lower Puna Eruption, and there is no activity.

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At 10 AM Hawaii time, the auction for a bottle of Yamazaki Single Cask 2018 ends.  The current bid is $75,101.  Interested?  Click here.  (Whoops, tomorrow is today and you're now too late.)

However, that's nothing compared to the 50-year old Yamazaki that sold for $343,000 a couple of months ago.

Every year a new top batch is selected as the World Whiskies Awards.  But what is whiskey?  Simply:

Scotch is whisky made in Scotland, while bourbon is whiskey made in the U.S.A, generally Kentucky. Scotch is made mostly from malted barley, while bourbon is distilled from corn. If you’re in England and ask for a whisky, you’ll get Scotch. But in Ireland, you’ll get Irish whiskey (yep, they spell it differently for a little colour).

Or, from Wikipedia:

Whisky or whiskey is a type of distilled alcoholic beverage made from fermented grain mash. Various grains (which may be malted) are used for different varieties, including barley, corn, rye, and wheat. Whisky is typically aged in wooden casks, generally made of charred white oak.

A few other interesting facts:

• Old Bushmills Distillery in Northern Ireland is the oldest licensed whiskey maker in the world., beginning in 1608.  They make Irish whiskey.
• You think moonshine came from our hillbilly South?  Nope.  The malt tax of 1725 sent Scotland's producers underground, and they called their libation moonshine.  In those days half of what was drunk was illegal stuff.

• George Washington operated a large distillery out of Mount Vernon.  An additional tax in 1791 spurred the Whiskey Rebellion, which ended in 1794 when Washington was president.
• Whiskey from India is scotch, introduced in 1820.
• During the Prohibition era alcohol was banned from 1920 to 1933.  However, exemptions could be prescribed by doctors through licensed pharmacies.  Sounded like marijuana today in most states.  The benefactor was Walgreens, which grew from 20 to 400 outlets.
• The USA imports the most scotch, supporting 35,000 jobs in the UK.

To differentiate:

• Single malt whisky is whisky from a single distillery made from a mash that uses only one particular malted grain. Unless the whisky is described as single-cask, it contains whisky from many casks, and different years, so the blender can achieve a taste recognisable as typical of the distillery. In most cases, single malts bear the name of the distillery, with an age statement and perhaps some indication of some special treatments such as maturation in a port wine cask.
• Blended malt whisky is a mixture of single malt whiskies from different distilleries. If a whisky is labelled "pure malt" or just "malt" it is almost certainly a blended malt whisky. This was formerly called a "vatted malt" whisky.
• Blended whisky is made from a mixture of different types of whisky. A blend may contain whisky from many distilleries so that the blender can produce a flavour consistent with the brand. The brand name may, therefore, omit the name of a distillery. Most Scotch, Irish and Canadian whisky is sold as part of a blend, even when the spirits are the product of one distillery, as is common in Canada.^[33] American blended whisky may contain neutral spirits.
• Cask strength (also known as barrel proof) whiskies are rare, and usually only the very best whiskies are bottled in this way. They are bottled from the cask undiluted or only lightly diluted.
• Single cask (also known as single barrel) whiskies are bottled from an individual cask, and often the bottles are labelled with specific barrel and bottle numbers. The taste of these whiskies may vary substantially from cask to cask within a brand.

So here are the 2018 World Whiskies Awards:

Best Scotch Blended:  Johnnie Walker Gold Label Reserve.  But this is getting complicated, for now you have Johnnie Walker Gold Label 18-year old ($85) and Johnnie Walker Gold Label Reserve ($87), the latter supposedly only a limited time offering.  Supposedly, the Reserve is closer in taste to bourbon.  However, Johnnie Walker has in the meantime announced that they will be ending sales of their 18 year version, so, perhaps this one would be the better buy in terms of long-term investment.

The best single malt is Hakushu 25-year old from Suntory.  Great if you've got $6000 to spare.  Or, perhaps you can afford Suntory's Hakushu 25-year old Rare Limited Edition.  This one goes for $9,600.  However, the pedestrian Hakushu single malt whiskey is only 12 years old and costs "only" $160.

I can go on and on, but if want to read more, click on World Whiskies Awards.

I might, though, also report on something from the latest issue of TIME magazine:

This 60-year old Macallan scotch sold for $1.1 million.  But a $1.3 million bottle of vodka was stolen in Denmark earlier this year.  The bottle itself is made of 6.6 pounds gold and an equivalent amount of silver, with a diamond-encrusted cap.  The culprit drank the contents and threw away the recovered bottle.

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