Whisky Advocate Spring 2017

Many of you have reached out to me recently, expressing displeasure about whisky prices increasing, brands losing their age statements, and difficulty finding your favorite whisky at your local retailer. In many instances, your gripes are warranted. Those of us who have been enjoying whisky for the past 20 years or more know that the “good old days” of seemingly unlimited sup-plies of well-aged, high-quality whiskies at great prices are over. That doesn’t mean you should give up drinking whisky and convert to vodka. There are still plenty of delicious whiskies, many of them readily available and reasonably priced. You just have to put a little more effort into your search. This is our annual awards issue, and I think that many of the whiskies featured prove my point. Sure,…

PLENTY TO DISCOVER AT WHISKYFEST Dear John, WhiskyFest was an enjoyable evening as always. As with many/most attendees, I have my list of tables to visit set up in advance, both for VIP hour and the rest of the evening. And things never go 100 percent according to plan. Sometimes the lines at popular tables are very long, or the VIP stuff runs out very quickly, or maybe didn’t even make it from Scotland, Kentucky, Japan, etc. To make up for that, I always manage to find something interesting, maybe not on the list, or at a table that hasn’t attracted much attention. This year, those surprise whiskies turned out to be the BenRiach Authenticas 25 year old and Balblair 1983 (the year before I got married). Not too bad.…

What, you were expecting “Sweet Home Chicago,” the toddling town’s sappy-sweet blues anthem? Chicago is more than its clichés, like “The City that Works.” Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, but it is never boring. You can still hear live blues in dingy dives decorated with Christmas tree lights any night of the week, but you can also see the world’s best live theater. Chicago contains the world’s most influential architecture, such as the Sullivan Center, formerly known as the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company building, and architect Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Plaza. With its Cubs now baseball’s champions, anything seems possible in Chicago. One thing that works is public transportation. By choosing buses, trains, cabs, or ride shares it is easy to avoid the trials of operating a…

Have you ever wondered why many craft distillers seem to be fond of diminutive barrels? It’s not because they haven’t learned how to lift with their knees. According toMarkMcDavid, cofounder of Ranger Creek Distilling in San Antonio, their smaller 5-gallon and 25-gallon barrels yield a very different whiskey from their standard 53-gallon. “The way I describe them is oak forward, punchy, and compact bourbons,” saysMcDavid. The difference arises from the greater surface area of oak exposed to each bottle, which increases dramatically as barrels get smaller; a law first described by Galileo in 1638. Some promote this as small barrels aging faster. While McDavid says whiskey from small barrels will become over-oaked more quickly, “age” is a different matter. “Oxidation and other things happen that only time can induce, so…

Arouse your senses and prepare to deconstruct the flavors found in your whisky glass. Tasting Lesson is a drink hack to help anyone identify common whisky flavors and their origin. Fruity notes are one of the easiest flavors to recognize when you evaluate a glass of whisky. They are ascribed to esters, a group of compounds that form principally during fermentation, following the stage where yeast converts glucose to ethanol. Close to 100 different esters have been identified as originating during the fermentation process. Fruity ester characteristics can be concentrated during distillation and molded during maturation. Still size and shape, spirit cuts, and wood quality influence whether these characteristics are detectable in the whisky’s final profile. Different people describe esters according to their own flavor vocabulary. Isoamyl acetate can be…

Parker Beam, the longtime master distiller at Heaven Hill, a familyowned distilled spirits company based in Bardstown, Kentucky, passed away in January. Parker had been fighting amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS—also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) for the last six years—a public battle that brought the entire Kentucky bourbon community out to rally around him. Parker grew up learning from his father, Earl Beam, who was master distiller at Heaven Hill before him. Parker officially started his career in 1960, although he had worked odd jobs at the distillery even as a child. He became master distiller in 1975, and over the course of his career was an industry leader in innovation and quality through brands like Evan Williams and Elijah Craig. He had been master distiller emeritus at Heaven Hill…