doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com OT, Bourbon or Scotch

I developed a taste for scotch when I turned 50. Glenlivet 12 is my everyday Scotch but I keep a bottle of Laproig Select, Talisker Storm and Arbeg around for special occasions. I really like the smoky peaty stuff. I recently developed a taste for Bourbons but some are a little "hot" for me but some of my favorites are George Dickel and Four Roses. But alas, where I live Bud Light, Busch Light Peach and Windsor are considered top shelf and for the few Scotch drinkers Passport is top shelf.

I just picked up a bottle of Balvenie 12 year double cask. I have something to celebrate next week, a mighty fine shipment of guns is arriving and we dram or two is called for.

On the subject of beer, this summer I was enjoying Smithwick's, a nice beer for the warm weather.

Ooh! I've had a glass of the Midwinter Night stuff during an informal dégustation in a Kentucky-born friend's Manhattan apartment almost a decade ago. He gave me a crack at a half-dozen bottles he'd refrained from draining until I could show up to visit, all bourbons and ryes. (T'was an, ahem, interesting 60-block walk back to my hotel afterwards.) That stuff and Colonel Taylor 100-proof straight rye were the standouts for me, and there wasn't an uninteresting bottle in the lot.

60 blocks?

63, to be precise. I got some good pictures, walking south along Broadway that night.

Laphroaig, Lagavulin, and Ardbeg. Islay in winter is on my bucket list, to see the geese and visit the distilleries. Highland Park or Balvenie when feeling wan and pale.

Glenmorangie brings me back to Aberdeen 50 years ago, and the sainted Professor Dunnett, who at a party one night took me by the hair, tipped my head back, and said "Young Frank, it is time you learn to drink whisky", and put the bottle in my mouth. He would bring his own bottle to parties, finish it off, and be at his desk analyzing data the next morning at 8.

Can't drink Bourbon. It goes back to Christmas Day 1966 and an unfortunate collision between Montagnard rice wine (complete with insects) and the bottle of 4 roses I stuck into my jungle fatigue trouser pockets to retaliate against the Montagnards making me drink that warmed over p---s.

I fell in love with Scotch in Pakistan in 1975 - the Pak Army at the time ran not on gasoline but on Scotch Whiskey before the Zia Coup against Bhutto. Can't drink it much any more. Am now limited to the occasional Vodka. But scotch whiskey is smoke and acid and an inescapable addiction. I also guess most of the South has Scot ancestry . . .at least it used to be except for Baldwin and Huntsville Counties in Alabama which are German. . . before the flood of Yankee migrant refugees seeking a better life.

Having a Scot ancestry doesn't necessarily mean you like Scotch, Gene. Tastes like bad scorched moonshine to me. I tried very hard to "acquire a taste" for it, but sometimes the juice ain't worth the squeeze. I'm a bourbon man.

Stanton, it's interesting conundrum. I came to understand early in my married life (about 1982 during a visit up from Africa) that the French absolutely love Bourbon. I can't explain it. I carry bottles of it when I visit relatives. I took engraved bottles to the mayor of Pretot-Sainte-Suzanne in 2019 and to the French Historian Dominique Francois for the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

I figured this out about 1982. If I had not been in government service, I would have immediately cornered the market on selling American bourbon in France. (And at a recent party for a hard corps group of para military contractors at my home, 4 bottles of bourbon disappeared in an instant - fortunately reinforced by bottles they had brought); the Glenlivett sat unused.

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