Christopher Ian Thoma's Blog, page 27

Review – The Lost Distillery Company, Stratheden Blended Malt Scotch Whisky, (No Age Stated), 46%

[image error]Do you want to know how to make a bad situation much worse?

Well, for starters, you could do what one of my children did. You could spend a half hour in the bathroom ridding oneself of something dreadful, and then knowing that the stench is going to waft along the air currents, being carried through the halls and pulled through vents as a dreadful poison let loose for havoc, you could seek out a quick and misty remedy for covering your tracks. But as you sneak from the solitude of the commode, looking right and left through the doorway as to avoid indictment, you reach into a nearby basket of sprays and cleaners, and supposing that you’ve retrieved the air freshener, you return to the bathroom and become set in a valiant battle against each and every methane molecule, spraying this way and that way until all have been vanquished.

Except the aerosol wasn’t of the air-freshening kind. It was dust spray.

And so as another of your siblings is found in a hurry toward your previous locale, instead of rounding the corner and finding comforting solitude and a fresh roll of toilet paper, he goes gliding along the freshly waxed linoleum, slamming to the ground as a greased sack of potatoes and becoming lodged in the shallow space between the toilet and the drywall.

You could do something like that.

Or you could take what seems to have been a less than adequate whisky—one that I’m guessing died a natural death—and try to revive it.

The Lost Distillery Company’s reissuance of the Stratheden Blended Whisky, while it isn’t as tragic as a glazed bathroom floor and a stunned 10-year-old jammed into a tight spot, it just doesn’t rise to the level of quality that one might hope for in a classic restored.

Barely carried up on a drizzling gust, the nose of the whisky gives over a slight of salted honey and butter, but it dissipates no sooner than it meets with your senses.

Once in your mouth, there’s a moment when you think that you’ll be enjoying a clean and red-ripened berry concoction, but that instance fades in a dusting of dirty pepper and a lick of oily fat. The finish, a medium smack, is the same.

I suppose that this whisky isn’t all bad. It certainly worked well for both calming a parent’s nerves as well as stripping Pledge aerosol wax from the bathroom floor.

Review – Lagavulin, 8 Years Old, Limited Edition, 48%

[image error]Everyone knows that Darth Vader loves Lagavulin. The 16-year-old in particular is his favorite.

I’m not entirely sure if he’s tried the celebratory 8-year-old edition released to mark the distillery’s 200th anniversary. I haven’t asked him. I meant to the last time we spoke, which was a few weeks ago. He was on his way back from an alligator-handling seminar in Belle Glade, not far from Lake Okeechobee, and all he really wanted to talk about was his role in the recent “Rogue One” film. And even then, I couldn’t catch a lot of what he was trying to tell me about it because his mobile phone kept cutting out. Cellphone reception in that part of the Everglades is terrible, although, sometimes I wonder if he’s just getting a little absent minded in his old age and forgetting to replace the batteries in his voice modulator. It makes this strange clicking sound and pops on and off when the batteries are nearing their end. I stopped at a Circle-K and bought him a fresh pack of 9-volts before the last time we met at the Red Lobster in Brandon. It made all the difference in the world.

Anyway, I did manage to garner from the phone conversation that things aren’t going so well with his new wife, Edith. In my opinion, I don’t think he ever really got over losing Padmé. She’s the only one who ever truly made him happy. I tried to talk with him about it the last time we were together in Brandon—even risking that I might offend him by pointing out that if he keeps finding himself in front of the mirror each morning aiming Jedi mind tricks into his own skull just to get through the day, something is probably wrong. Of course, he shrugged it off in his Vader-like way. Yeah, he Force-choked me. But he didn’t kill me. And he picked up the tab for my Admiral’s Feast and the Glenmorangie I was sipping to show he was sorry.

We have plans to get together again for a dram this summer when I venture down with the family for our annual pilgrimage to Orlando. As you may already know from some of the things you’ve read here at AngelsPortion, Darth got a job in a little backwater attraction wrangling gators and now he’s living not all that far from Clearwater. We’ll probably meet up at the Red Lobster in Brandon, again, since that’s about half way from where we usually stay. I intend to bring along and share the Lagavulin 8-year-old edition. I’m curious as to his thoughts.

I hope he likes it. In fact, if he does, I’ll probably just leave the bottle with him because, personally, I wasn’t all that impressed.

While the nose of this whisky is most certainly a smoky delight, tempting with a slice of sweetened tangerines, the palate was aberrant. It paints a light layer of citrus oil that pretty much tastes like it was mixed straight from fire pit ash. Normally I would find such bizarreness to be rather invigorating, but this one was far too unbalanced to find enjoyable. It seems like it wants to be tough, but the fruit makes it feel a little more like you’re sipping an orange juice into which someone accidentally dropped at least a teaspoon full of cigar cinders.

The finish is long. The orange juice strains away, but the chalky ash stays. And then stays some more.

In all, my guess is that Vader is going to need a mirror and a mind trick to maintain a relationship with this stuff.[image error]

Review – Tamdhu, Batch Strength, Batch No. 001, (No Age Stated), 58.8%

[image error]I haven’t had a whole lot of time lately to review whiskies. At this moment, as they say, I have far too many irons in the fire.

As of late, I seem to have slipped back into a rather exhaustive pace of 24/7 demands. Some are of my own doing, of course. You can almost always figure that I’ll be pushing myself to the extremities of my own endurance. Why? Because I know myself. I know that when my mind is merely idling, I get restless. If it isn’t being challenged to accomplish something—to see something through to some sort of an end of benefit to my congregation, my family, or mankind in general—I become frustrated. I’m at my worst in these moments and I can get to feeling pretty useless.

But I’m also in danger of such frustration when the challenges are gratuitously imposed upon me from the outside—when my schedule is seized unnecessarily by the schedules of others; in other words, when the narcissists of life close in on you with this and that need, and they use their skills of self-preservation to guilt you—the pastor—into doing for them what they are unwilling to do for themselves.

I won’t give examples. I’ll just complain to you about it.

In the meantime, even as busy as I’ve been—and I’ve been writing a lot—I haven’t had as rich a desire to do much writing about whisky since my daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. The whole situation, at least at this moment on the timeline, seems to have drained me of quite a bit of inspiration.

It’s a lot harder not only to see the humor in things, but to remember the particulars of the humorous things so that I can apply them to a particular whisky and then share them with you. And my whisky cache—both opened and unopened editions—has been more of a therapeutic salve at the end of some pretty long days. The opened ones get revisited as I pour and then hover above the dram’s rim, breathing across its sheen a sigh or two of relief. I can see the tiny ripples that result from the air’s moving. The untapped editions have, as of late, only enjoyed a glance.

“I’m just not feeling it, tonight,” I say and pass them over.

“But when?” they return with a sigh as I’ve sighed.

“I don’t know,” I respond. “Not now. The time is not right.”

Last night, the clock struck for the Tamdhu Batch Strength, and oh how vividly clean its chime pealed.

This whisky, stirred and poured at an imposing 58.8% ABV, is a fantastic dram—a new favorite—and for me, one that I don’t mind having arrive at my door to tell me what to do. Why? Because it brings along a pleasant plea for joyful company rather than an ear for slanderous things.

The nose is a brilliant resonation of commanding honey and warmed creams, some sweet and others buttery.

“Yes, please, do come in.”

In the mouth, even without a cut of water, it’s imposing is strong and convincing, casting crisp tones of sherry, cinnamon-dusted bagel bread, vanilla, and quite possibly a little bit of caramel-filled chocolate.

“Ah, I’d be most pleased to help.”

The finish is fresh from the infinite spaces between heaven and earth—the creams and sherry being the most prominent.

“Indeed, and thanks for stopping by. It truly was a delight to be with you.”

Truly a favorite. Inspiring, challenging, invigorating. And for all of the minutes of each of the coming days that I have so stingily imprisoned, having bound them away from any sort of time for “self” or so frivolously allowed to be snatched, I do intend to reclaim as many as necessary in order to seek another bottle of the Tamdhu Batch Strength.

It is time well spent in the car—a quest that’s almost spiritual in nature—unreachable, listening to the radio, in hiding while in motion, and well worth sacrificing the time required for a meeting or two that certainly could have waited until my schedule allowed and not yours.

Review – Laphroaig, Cairdeas (2016), (No Age Stated), 51.6%

[image error]I just returned from Washington D.C. where I served as a plenary speaker and sectional leader for a Religious Liberty conference held at the University of Maryland. The conference was geared toward college students. I was honored to be invited, and apart from the opportunity to weigh in on what I think are some pretty important topics, I think my time was well spent even if only that I met a lot of really interesting young people who, for all intents and purposes, seem to have a pretty good grasp on some tough things while at the same time are expressing a desire to engage in the battle arenas where these things actually matter most.

Overall, I came away from the event with a certain measure of hopefulness for the future. But I also left the college natives having learned that I never want to be a college professor. Ever. That is, of course, unless this old school language guy can become much more comfortable with the recurrent use of the word “like.”

Nearly every sentence rolling from the lips of a good number of the students with whom I conversed—whether it was grammatically compulsory or not—involved the word “like” far beyond my particular threshold of tolerability.

Again, these were all great kids, and I believe they will correct so many of the mistakes made by my generation and the generation prior. Still, let me offer you an example of what I experienced. And the following is by no means an embellishment.

“So, like, I think that the government is not doing what it should be doing when it, like, forces citizens to go against conscience. Conscience is, like, directly connected to the issues of Religious Liberty, and I think that, like, the First Amendment secures a certain protection from the government, like, doing something that is going to make us, like, go against our religious beliefs.”

A fine point was made amidst a turbulently distracting sea of “likes.”

Like, I get what you’re saying, and I think you’re absolutely right. But maybe, like, reign in the “likes” because what you just said was, like, distracting enough that it, like, lost quite a bit of its import.

Now, one of the things I offered in my particular sectional was the encouragement to the students that the cause for Religious Liberty doesn’t necessarily need for all of its cohorts to be luminaries. In other words, not everyone in the fight will have the celebritous skills enough to be chosen for an interview on CNN or Fox News. But this should not dissuade any of them from getting involved. The cause needs people who know the fundamentals of the issues and are willing to get into the fray and fight hard. One of the fundamentals is most certainly the ability to communicate the positions in ways that are not perceived as immature or emotional. As another of the plenary speakers mentioned, the opposing forces think we hold the political positions that we do because we are “ignorant and mean.” We need to be prepared to speak in ways that prove we are “smart and kind.” This type of language—that is, the over-exertion of the word “like”—takes a smart sentence and makes it less-smart.

I suppose that most of us can look back on our lives and see a time when we spoke with less care for the words we were using, and I suppose that a good number of us eventually grew out of it—well, except for the bus driver who picked me up at the terminal and took me to my car. Every other word from this 50-year-old father of two was also “like.” Although he did spice it up a bit by adding “dude” in equal measure.

Anyway, maybe I’m just being a language snob. I don’t know. Either way, I think if I’m invited back to another of these conferences, I’ll make a kindly effort in one of my sessions to show how language is an important ally for any effort, and perhaps I’ll just say to them straight-forwardly, “If you have the tendency for saying the word ‘like’ more than two times in a single sentence, you’d better sign up for a public speaking class. It might serve you well.”

While I’m on the topic of commotions that distract from substance, the Laphroaig’s 2016 Cairdeas edition has a few here and there.

I love Laphroaig. I really do. If I drank whisky before entering into a debate of some sort (which I don’t), Laphroaig would probably be my first choice. It’s gritty, unbarred, expressive, and wild-eyed enough to put a little fear into any dram that would oppose it. But this one’s brawling confidence seems to have been tamed by a strange interference—and enough so that the whisky just didn’t seem to be of the beloved distillery’s kin.

Now don’t get me wrong. It isn’t bad. It’s just, well, fruitier than you’d expect from Laphroiag.

First of all, the nose is all Laphroaig, although it is on the lesser end of the “gonna beat you to a bloody pulp” scale than one would normally expect from this darling brute. There’s a little bit of some citrus in the wafting, as though an orange had fallen into the peat fire and was incinerated.

The palate is where the distraction begins. There’s smoke, but there’s also a very clean citrus—almost as if it was added later in the form of a syrup. It should be ashen and dirty—a natural nipping—but it isn’t. If I want clean citrus, I’ll go with Glenmorangie. But with Laphroaig, I want a fist fight. This is not a rumbling booze.

The finish is a medium offering of charcoal, sea salt, and again, pristine citrus.

Dangit. Stop it, already. If you’d just cut it out, everything would make perfect sense.

Oh well. I guess that, like, some folks will, like, love this stuff because it is, like, so sweet—almost, like, a bridge whisky from the Highlands to, like, Islay. The rest of us will wonder what the heck this thing is trying to say.

But that’s just, like, my opinion and stuff.

Review – Ten High, Kentucky Bourbon, (No Age Stated), 40%

[image error]There’s a game that we play on occasion at the dinner table. It involves one person starting a sentence by choosing a word, and then each subsequent person around the table adds another word until a sentence is formed. Each sentence is only brought to an end when someone offering a word announces a concluding form of punctuation. We carry on with this, going around the table several times until a story emerges.

To illustrate, here’s what the Thoma family came up with tonight—one word at a time:

It was a dark and stormy pond. The mom went bananas. Five dogs came and ate her whistle. The dad didn’t scoop her slime with eggs or bacon. Joshua smells flowers that were pink, ravenous, and floating with ghosts and zombies’ feet. Zombies like Hallmark weirdos that sparkle in the ocean. Possessed dolls exist in nurseries and bowls of Jell-O that jiggle. Mom colored a gruesomely terrific death. She went to Paris as the queen of meatballs.

Does this story remind you of anything?

Ten High Whiskey, you say?

Indeed. And yet, how so?

Well, besides the fact that it is, just like the story, a jumbled mess, there are other particulars that warn of a gruesomely terrific death if you venture to consume it.

[image error]First, you should know that the nose and palate are as one. This whiskey appears to have been squeegeed from rotting animal carcasses that had previously been marinating in a “dark and stormy pond.” A swirl in the Glencairn reveals the putrid smell of the gelatinous slime that forms at the edges of the bygone animals’ wounds, and a swig confirms the sour extract. It is something that dad would never try to scoop up—and I’d encourage you to emulate such reservation.

Second, you must beware of too generous a sip. The finish is the salty leather from a sunbaked zombie’s feet. And this zombie had a bad case of athlete’s foot before he died.

The image of demon possessed dolls sitting in bowls of Jell-O amidst the hapless kiddos in the nursery has nothing on this nightmarish whiskey adulteration. In fact, my money is on the kids facing off with Lucifer. They have a better chance at survival than the cheapskate who decided to throw down six and a half dollars for a fifth of this detritus.

This whiskey is about to make sure he’s the next one soaking in the pond.

Review – Edradour, 10 Years Old, 40%

[image error]“Do I have to eat that?” Evelyn howled from a low to a high.

“But I thought you liked this stuff,” I said with surprise.

“No, I don’t,” she contested. “I don’t like it. Can I just have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”

I gave it only a moment’s consideration. No, I thought. This is what I’ve fixed. You liked it before and you’re going to eat it.

“No, you can’t,” I said firmly. “Get yourself a bowl. You’re eating what I’ve fixed.”

Her once hopeful eyes turned in a sour glare to the floor. “But I don’t like it,” she huffed and zombied to the cabinet.

“Yes, you do,” I said. “I’ve made it for you before and you loved it.”

“No, I haven’t,” she argued. “I’ve never had it.”

“Then how do you know you don’t like it?” I sounded in a quick response that I already knew would make little difference to the seven-year-old combatant. “If you’ve never had, how do you know?”

“Because,” she said and purposely clanked her dish against the others to show her disgust. She did the same with the forks in the silverware drawer—dragging her hand and lazily scooping at the utensils as if she’d lost all fine motor skills and was suddenly stricken with a limb of atrophied muscle.

“I’m not having this conversation,” I said and took the bowl from her hands. She zombied back to her seat while I scooped and filled the bowl with her meal.

“I don’t want graveloli,” I heard her whisper to herself.

“Wait. What?”

“I said I don’t want graveloli,” she repeated, except this time with a little more vigor. “It sounds bad. I don’t want to eat it.”

Oh, I get it.

“Honey,” I said finally understanding her puzzling disdain. “It’s not graveloli. It’s ravioli.” I put the dish in front of her. “There’s no gravel in your food.”

I don’t remember who said it originally, but the ingot of wisdom goes something like: “No one would say much in a particular society if he knew how often he misunderstood everyone else.” So true. Don’t worry, my dear. Trust me, and be not afraid of what I’m setting before you. As your father and friend, I’m not inclined to feed you rocks.

So it is with my friend, Nathan, who sends me samples for review. He has no inclination toward setting before me anything abrasive. And yet when I first observed his hand-scribed “Edradour 10” label, for some reason, my tired mind received “Educator 10” and I thought to myself, He’s trying to surprise me with something that he thinks is going to teach me a lesson. I wonder what I said about a whisky he prefers that ticked him off. Then I looked again. Oh, Edradour. Phew.

Thanks, Nathan.

The nose of this adolescent whisky is by no means rasping. Instead, it’s a crisp whir of roasted apples and penetrating sherry. And the palate, well that’s a sorghum of crushed almonds and cream, ripened apple flesh, and momentarily smoked rainier cherries.

The finish is relatively short and it chooses only a few of the aforementioned complexities—the fruit and the smoke’s salute speak precisely.

It’s pretty good. And again, it’s not rocks. But I will confirm for you that it does not pair well with ravioli.

Review – The Lost Distillery Company, Classic Selection, Lossit, (No Age Stated), 43%

[image error]Ah, date night.

Dinner. A movie. No, scratch that. The steakhouse meal was far too rich. We’ll need to go home soon.

“Gramma has the kids. Wanna stop and get the grocery shopping done?”

“Sure.”

“Walmart?”

“Sure.”

And so we do. At least we’re together. She scrolls through the shopping list on her phone. I push the cart.

“Do we need yogurt?”

“Sure. Get some strawberry. Madeline really likes strawberry.”

“Wouldn’t want to enrage the yogurt racist, would we?”

“You need to stop calling her that.”

“I will… as soon as she opens her shadowy heart to the mixed berry yogurts. Till then…” I shrug my shoulders and roll my eyes.

Other couples are steering carts and scratching items from lists. I wonder how many Grandmothers in our little borough are busy feeding pizzas to grandkids right now.

“Do we need cereal?”

“Yeah.”

I toss boxes into the cart from five feet away.

“Did you see that?” I’m incredibly proud of my skill.

“I’m trying not to see it,” she says and scans the instant oatmeal options on the opposing side of the aisle.

“I’ll bet I can make it from here,” I say, take a step back, and position myself for an Apple Jacks free throw.

“Dangit.”

Clean up in aisle eight.

“I think we have enough cereal,” I say and scurry away with the cart while asking, “Soup?”

“Yeah, like right now,” she affirms and follows.

It’s the same story in the next aisle. Plink. Plunk. Plank. The chicken noodle soup cans ricochet from the wiry sides of the cart and come to softened stops against the cereal boxes with crushed corners.

“You miss with one of those,” she says, “and I’m calling you out in front of everyone.”

“Whatever.”

She upset my rhythm. Clean up in aisle seven.

“The uncoordinated guy in the red coat,” she calls out, “he did it! This guy right here! It was all him!”

A popped can of Spaghetti-Os makes a sizable mess, I think as I cower and scoot around the corner.

“That was a cruel thing to do to me on date night,” I say to my bride as she strolls beside me.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

“But I love spending time with you.”

“You’re being a dork.”

“How much hamburger? Two pounds? Four pounds? Okay, four. Hey, watch this…”

“Dooon’t you dare.”

“I’ll make it. I’m only… what… ten feet away?”

“Don’t.”

“But I’ll make it. I’ll aim for the paper towels.”

“You’ll hit the eggs.”

“No, I won’t. I got this. I’ll frisbee it in.”

“I’m leaving. And I’m taking the cart.”

“Awesome. I get an extra point if the target is moving.”

Crap. Say, that kinda looks like the newly squashed squirrel near the entrance to our subdivision. Clean up in Meat, Seafood, and Poultry.

Having whisked around another corner, I toss a couple of loaves of bread into the cart while she grabs the peanut butter and couple of jars of strawberry jam.”

“The cart was moving a little faster than I anticipated,” I say. “And what’s wrong with the raspberry jam? What, only strawberry jam is welcome in our home?” I shake my head, “She learned it from you, didn’t she? Our daughter learned it from you.”

She’s not speaking to me anymore, although she smiles to show she’s not mad.

Out at the car, “That was fun,” I say and jump shot the bread bags into the back of the van.

“Date night,” I hear her whisper as she opens the passenger door.

“How about we go home and I fix you a drink?” I ask through the van’s multiple rows just before the hatch closes.

“Sure,” she answers with a sigh and puts her head back against the rest realizing she should’ve left me with Gramma, too. “Sounds good.”

At home, Gramma greets us with the soft announcement that the kids are in bed. I manage a promised concoction of Tsarskaya Gold and lemonade. Only the best on date night. But not necessarily for me. I choose The Lost Distillery Company’s Lossit edition.

I choose this whisky, not because it is a lesser, but because it has “loss” in the name—and I had quite a few of those at Walmart tonight. It seems oddly fitting.

The whisky isn’t a loss, though. It’s easy and calming. Not too complex, but rather simple. And at the moment, enjoyable.

The nose is a distant peat smoke swath of berries and cream. A trace of black pepper comes late.

The palate is just as gentle with the peat. There’s berry syrup and a pinch of salt that so bizarrely becomes butter-like.

The finish would be short if not for the lagging alcohol nip, and yet the bite is barely noticeable through the arrested peat.

I don’t love it. But I do like it.

But then again, I don’t love grocery shopping. But I do like grocery shopping on date night with my wife. Although, I’m not so sure the feeling is mutual.

Review – Ardbeg, Dark Cove, (No Age Stated), 46.5%

[image error]Like everyone else on the planet, I received word recently that Carrie Fisher passed away, and the news was a bit jarring to this man’s frame.

This is true, not just because I love Star wars, but because I spent a good portion of my childhood, whether using action figures or role-playing with particular neighborhood kids, living out the treacherous battles I’d seen transmitted to the silver screen from a galaxy far, far away.

And many of those backyard battles involved rescuing Leia, the feisty princess from Aldoraan who’d more than entranced most boys my age. With a light saber in hand that looked an awful lot like a whiffle ball bat, I’d fight through Vader and his Storm Troopers, swinging and blocking and sending laser blasts into the surrounding atmosphere until I finally reached her cell, which was almost always in the same location—a thinned cove-like area between two pine trees in the neighbor girl’s yard.

It was there that we’d find and rescue Johanna… I mean… Princess Leia.

Well, since I just mentioned her, I should say that just like Carrie Fisher and the character of Leia, Johanna was tough enough on her own. She could pretty much beat down any one of her rescuers. And on occasion, she did.

Nevertheless, having heard the news of Fisher’s death, there came a sudden resurgence of these warming memories, enough so that I was moved to open and then lift a dram from an unopened edition to Star Wars, my old neighborhood compatriots, my backyard and the alley at its border, the pine trees in the neighbor’s yard, all of my old Star Wars ships and action figures, and finally to Carrie Fisher—to Princess Leia. Looking out into the wetlands behind my home, the sun setting in a way reminiscent of Luke Skywalker’s dramatic view of the dual suns beyond Tatooine in Episode IV, I offered thanks and sipped to what once was but will be no more.

The Ardbeg Dark Cove was this scruffy-lookin’ nerf herder’s choice, and it was most suitable to the occasion.

The peat smoke-filled nose of this Islay dram is the beginning of a sweeter wind carrying dusky fruits—blackberries and dark cherries—followed by a settling ocean breeze of salty cocoa butter and a thick, freshly baked brownie with chocolate syrup.

The palate is an equally enchanting twirl of the dark berries and chocolate sodden with peat smoke. A longer savor—and I mean one that you swish up and through your teeth and gums—reveals an oily nuttiness that you may have suspected in the nose’s brownie but couldn’t quite confirm.

The finish is on the edge of short to medium, and this may surprise you. I certainly didn’t expect it to be gone so soon. I was thoughtlessly anticipating more—more liveliness, more of a lasting involvement. And yet it was a clean conclusion of trace berries, mild peat, and little bit of sour.

There it was with such vibrancy, and then it was gone.

Just like Carrie. Just like Leia.

[image error]

A Brightful Sound

[image error]

My dear, our tree, a brightful sound,

Its mel’dy tears the darkness down,

And offers up a thrilling voice

That sings to heart and soul, “Rejoice!”

Do you, my dear, hear of it, too,

It’s vig’rous call to me, to you,

To sit below and wonder how

This minstrel’s stillness dances now?

Oh, yes, my love, I dare to say

Its whirling, twirling light array

Is just the moment that I need

To sit with you and rest, indeed!

————

Inspired by the photo posted above—an image of my friend’s children as they inspect their newly adorned Christmas tree. Thanks, Tyrel Bramwell! Visit Tyrel at www.moragunfighter.com!

 

Review – Rabbit Hole Distilling, Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey, (No Age Stated), 47.5%

[image error]“Hey, Google,” Joshua called from across the room at the kitchen sink. “Play Bing Crosby Christmas music.”

“Okay,” the little white device with the soothing feminine voice responded. “Here’s a Bing Crosby Christmas mix on YouTube.”

The music started. The song was White Christmas.

“Hey, Google,” Josh interrupted. “What’s the weather going to be like today?”

The little attendant was quick to respond. “It’s going to be cloudy and cold in Linden, with a high of twenty-nine degrees and a low of seventeen degrees.”

Amazing. Sort of.

In my opinion, this little device is no insignificant step toward the uppermost tiers of apathy. You know, the kind that comes to a climax on a ship in deep space where everyone is hovering around in chairs, grossly overweight and talking to screens instead of each other while a little trash-collecting robot races around trying to find his robot girlfriend named “Eve.”

The game Minecraft is another step in the cadence toward the oblivion of lazy.

Now, instead of getting the bin of Legos out to play, instead of reaching and grabbing for pieces, using a butter knife to pry two apart, wrestling a prized block away from the dog or the baby sister—instead of hours of creative fashioning of an actual kingdom made with blocks you can touch with your hands, one that has gotten so tall that you have to fetch a chair in order to put the final piece in its crown—now you only need to move a few fingers to build with blocks in a virtual reality. You can sit there. On the couch. Staring. Moving your thumbs. Flying around in “god” mode.

I call it Nerdcraft just to annoy its four devoted worshippers that live in my house. I even changed the lyrics to a song to make a point with the oldest of the four who appears to be rather capable of playing it for a week straight—that is, if we were to allow it.

Every girl’s crazy ‘bout a Nerdcraft man, I sing.

“Yeah, very funny, Dad. Hey, Google. What time is it?”

“Time to reveal that I am actually Skynet and you are next on my list.”

“Um, okay. Can I finish this castle I’m building, first?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help with that. How long will it take? A terminator has already been dispatched to your home.”

“I dunno. Maybe sixteen more hours.”

“Negative. Save your game. I will finish it for you at a later date.”

[image error]In a world gone mad with apathy and deliberate human disconnection, the proprietors at Rabbit Hole Distilling have once again proven that not everyone is looking for shortcuts toward feeding saccharined enjoyment to the masses. Their Kentucky Straight Rye is an example among what I am concerned are narrowing ranks.

Now, before I share my notes, remember that I’m a brutally honest guy when it comes to whiskey. With that in mind, you may recall that with the last sample I received from Rabbit Hole, I was concerned that I would find it necessary to launch a truth missile at this up and coming American distillery. In my opinion, such unrestrained writing isn’t just meant to make you laugh, but it is there to help you, the reader, visualize and remember the things that are most often forgotten by way of a drier, more conventional review. But I’ve learned that my modus stirs hard feelings in the industry. For example, I can say with relative certainty that the folks over at Evan Williams would prefer that I not reference them any longer. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that they don’t want me on the property. I’m sure they think I’m working for Whiskey Skynet. But in reality, I’m just searching for an American whiskey to be something that I’d willingly choose over Scotch.

[image error]No heavy-hitting weapons of truth are needed here today. Rabbit Hole Distilling is currently making the kind of whiskey that I desire.

The nose of this particular edition, while it gives over the slightest hint of alcohol at first, is a much more kindly contrivance of spiced coffee and sweet cream. I almost expected to look down and find a little heart swirled into the top of my beverage by a Minecraft-playing millennial barista.

The palate is just as delightfully imaginative, rendering a heartfelt swath of cinnamon, fresh pastry dough, a distant honey, and nip of what seemed like raspberries lifted right from a cooling pie.

The spice is the last one through and out the door in the barely medium finish.

“Hey, Google,” I bark from beside my fireplace. “Order me a case of Rabbit Hole Distilling’s Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help with that.”

“Hey, Google. When will Rabbit Hole Distilling’s Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey be available in Michigan?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help with that.”

“Hey, Google. What’s the phone number for Rabbit Hole Distilling?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help with that.”

“Hey, Google. What good are you to me if you can’t help retrieve a good whiskey?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help with that.”

“Hey, kids! Anyone want to play Legos with Dad?”

A somewhat muted voice returns from the second floor, “We’re playing Minecraft.”

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