Scotland Day 10

American tourist move of the day: needing to buy a piece of luggage to get all the souvenirs home.

Britishisms: too many to count. Heck, I found myself slipping unintentionally into a vaguely Scottish accent at one point…

Look, one of my suitcases was on its last legs anyway, OK? Yes, I most certainly DID leave room in my bags on the trip out for expected souvenirs.

I just didn’t leave nearly enough. Even with another bag it was a tight squeeze.

The American Contingent spent yet more time with the newlyweds. Notably, six of us went to the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society.

The SMWS is not a normal bar, nor do they even have a normal selection of whiskey. All the bottles behind the bar are the same shape, color, and have labels in the same pattern. The labels do not bear the names of distilleries, they bear numbers. And almost every one of them contains cask-strength single malt Scotch.

Cask strength means that the whiskey has not been cut with water (a normal step in the bottling process) after it is taken from the cask it was aged in. Thus while normal whiskey is ~80 proof, cask strength is ~120 proof.

I had assumed that something with that high an alcohol content would overwhelm the flavor. Laphroaig had already corrected that impression.

The SMWS showed me what I’d been missing. Cask strength not only gives fuller flavors, it makes it easier to pick out the subtle flavors one often sees listed on the better grade of whiskey. I suppose a connoisseur might find this like hitting a tack nail with a sledgehammer, but I do not have that refined or trained a palate. Four of us were drinking, and each of us ordered three drams, with much exchanging of tastes.

You might wonder how we decided what to order, there being only numbers to order by. Well, each number has a description. Not a sentence or two on the side of a bottle, a long paragraph of whimsical text which is as likely to note a hint of gasoline, or advise you to call to mind a Christmas dinner, as it is to mention a ginger finish. Names are applied, but no boring distillery name – “An enticement of sweet oak.” “Heather honey and burnt toast.” “Doctors’ surgeries and flower shops.” Drams are placed in one of 11 categories based on cost. This range from ~$7.50 for a Green Dram to about $50 for a White Dram, not forgetting the Copper Dram (which is more than the Gold Dram) or the Tartan Dram. I think whoever made the list had a few too many drams in their system at the time.

Sadly, they were out of “Below the Decks of the HMS Britannia.”

They do tell you the region (Speyside, Islay, etc.), the cask type, and so forth, in addition to the more entertaining elements of the description. For that matter, crowdsourcing has provided an app which you can use to look up the distillery, as part of the number is keyed that way. Without this aid I still managed to order three delicious drams, and I don’t think anyone got one they didn’t like.

I shall be exploring cask strength whiskeys with great interest from now on.