My Handcrafted Opinions on Whiskies, Distilleries and Other Related Stuff
Since I moved from Texas in 2015 the one whisky I miss the most and find the hardest to source from other side of the world is Forty Creek. It is very special and unique and honestly I miss it more than my family. If they are reading, then that is a joke. But I do miss it a lot. I picked up this while passing though Texas on business and my bottle was number 9132 from Lot 11 (... you are welcome whiskey pedants). The nose has lots of familiar notes of vanilla and freshly sawn wood. Quite mild and sweet like those cheap cigars that are sold in US Drugstores. The taste is also sweet, with caramel, chocolate, butterscotch balanced with some grass and pepper notes. The finish does manage to muster a little spice and oaky resistance but still overall a typical Forty Creek "candy disguised as whiskey" (that I love). Perhaps not their finest work... but to honest even their "OK stuff" is better than most.
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Location: PS Cafe, Singapore
Date: February 2016
Price: 19 SGD ($13.50 USD)
Recipe: Not on menu so no recipe
Garnish: I cherry
Served: Up
Comments: Nice and fairly priced (for Singapore), perhaps a little sweet for my taste
What is this about? Check out http://www.somanywhiskies.com/item/749-the-manhattan-project-ii
Location: db Bistro, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
Date: December 2015
Price: 25 SGD ($17.70 USD)
Recipe: Rittenhouse Rye, Antica Formula Vermouth, Orange bitters
Garnish: Not 1, not 2 but 3 cherries!
Served: Up
Comments: High price for standard cocktail (welcome to Singapore) but very good, so I had two!
What is this about? Check out http://www.somanywhiskies.com/item/749-the-manhattan-project-ii
Location: Cru, Queenstown Hilton, New Zealand
Date: December 2015
Price: $22 NZD (15 USD)
Recipe: No recipe, bartender told me he used Sazarac rye
Garnish: Cherry
Served: Up
Comments: Mixed for me upon request, not on cocktail menu. Good but great which was a small surprise as I really like Sazarac rye.
What is this about? Check out http://www.somanywhiskies.com/item/749-the-manhattan-project-ii
Location: Homemade, Singapore
Date: December 2015
Price: NA
Recipe: 2 parts Marker's Mark, 1 part Antica Formula Vermouth
Garnish: Lemon peel
Served: Up
Comments: I recreated the simple recipe I recently tried in Dubai (with no bitters) and a lemon peel garnish. It worked well.
What is this about? Check out http://www.somanywhiskies.com/item/749-the-manhattan-project-ii
Location: Manhattan Grill, Hyatt Regency, Dubai
Date: December 2015
Price: 65 Dirhams ($17.70)
Recipe: Makers Mark, Carpono Rosso, bourbon infused cherry
Garnish: Menu said cherry but it came with lemon peel
Served: Up
Comments: Most expensive to date but good. Balanced and not too sweet. No mention of bitters in menu.
What is this about? Check out http://www.somanywhiskies.com/item/749-the-manhattan-project-ii
I recently moved to Singapore which for the most part has been a fantastic experience and a great professional and personal move. However whisky in Singapore is heavily taxed and expensive. How expensive you wonder? Let me put it this way, on the last occasion I purchased a few bottles of my favorite whiskies I soon received two phone calls on my mobile as I was leaving the store. The first was from my bank asking me if I aware that someone had obviously hacked into my account online and was draining all of my cash and savings at an alarming rate. The second call was from the Prime Minister of Singapore thanking me for the contribution I was making to their welfare budget and because of me the hospitals could stay open for another month. He also asked if I knew when I was next going to buy some whisky so they could place an advance order for a new fighter jet.
Aside - I have found this great new app on my iphone. Its called "Phone" and everyone who has it has their own unique number (It is usually the same number you use for texting people, I guess that is where they got the idea) and if you enter the number and press send the app connects you to them and you can actually talk to each other.
Then a couple of weeks ago I found the Vom Fass store in a mall. Vom Fass sells their own range of liqueurs, oils, vinegars, cognac and of course, whisky. But what makes it such a great place, especially in Singapore, is that they will let you sample anything in the store and sell the range in 100 ml, 250 ml, 500 ml and 750 ml bottles. This means I can try and buy a wide range of whiskies, and recently their 25 year old Armagnac, without spending so much money that even a corrupt FIFA official (that is all of them apparently) at a World Cup venue selection meeting would say “ooh, that’s a bit much”.
As I have said before, usually when discussing distillery tours, Seaton’s Success Formula is “Samples = Sales” and the more I have to spend (and in Singapore it is always more) the more I need to be sure I am buying something I will enjoy or at least find interesting (increasingly hard to do now I am 600 whiskies into this website). I will post notes for the first two whiskies shortly and you can expect to see many more, including the Armagnac, over coming weeks and months.
Location: Homemade, Singapore
Date: November 2015
Price: NA
Recipe: 2 parts Bulliet Bourbon, 1 part Antica Formula Vermouth, 2 dash Peychauds bitters
Garnish: Sour morello cherry
Served: Up
Comments: I liked the ever so slightly sour cherry note with the sweet bourbon / vermouth in this one
What is this about? Check out http://www.somanywhiskies.com/item/749-the-manhattan-project-ii
Location: JW Marriott, Juhu, Mumbai, Reflections Bar
Date: November 2015
Price: $11.49 (753 Rupee)
Recipe: Not observed but bar tender told me used Canadian Club
Garnish: Maraschino cherry
Served: Up
Comments: Nice and cold on the larger side. Use of Canadian Club meant it was less sweet than one made with bourbon. Good one.
What is this about? Check out http://www.somanywhiskies.com/item/749-the-manhattan-project-ii
Location: Moscow Monarch Centre Hotel, Lobby Bar
Date: October 2015
Price: $12.50 (800 Rubles)
Recipe: No info provided / not observed
Garnish: Maraschino cherry
Served: Up
Comments: Nice, clean, not too sweet. A well executed "classic" Manhattan
What is this about? Check out http://www.somanywhiskies.com/item/749-the-manhattan-project-ii
The original Manhattan Project was a research and development project that produced the first nuclear weapons during World War II. My personal Manhattan project will be slightly less impactful. Probably. As readers know in 2011 I set myself the task of finding and reviewing every whisky in Ian Buxton’s recent books 101 Whiskies to Try Before You Die and 101 World Whiskies to Try Before You Die. I was successful (pausing for gentle round of applause) but it did have a side effect. I know Ian won’t mind me saying that some, while interesting, were not that great and so I frequently found myself with bottles that I did not particularly enjoy. I have enough Scots blood in me to know that I could not see them go to waste so I started to dabble in mixing cocktails and found two that I particularly enjoyed. For unwanted or unloved scotch I would mix Rusty Nails (equal parts Drambuie and Scotch over ice) and for American whiskies, bourbon, rye and Canadian, I started mixing Manhattans. The simple and classic Manhattan recipe is 2 parts whiskey, 1 part sweet vermouth, 2 dash of bitters a garnish (cherry or citrus peel) served usually chilled but occasionally (and as I came to like them best in the Texas summer) over ice.
I have the great fortune to travel a lot for my job which means I frequently find myself in airport lounges, hotels and restaurants and often bored to tears by their whisky options I started to order Manhattans (a classic cocktail so there is a variant of it on almost every cocktail menu). And so like the thermonuclear chain reaction that was at heart of original Manhattan project, one passion led to another and now I find myself trying Manhattan’s all around the world. From now on, armed with a trusty camera phone (and probably a little too much jetlag), I will also use my website to track my Manhattan project noting location, price, quality, garnish, recipes and any other tweaks or embellishments of interest. Like the England football team in a World Cup penalty shootout I won’t be trying to score them, I don’t score whiskies either, just sharing my experiences and opinions with all of my readers (if there are any left).
As the Great Labelling Debate around words like “Small Batch”, “Artisan”, “Traditional” and “Handmade” continues apparently forever and mega distillers, micro distillers and even Pepsi (see last blog) cling to the word “craft” like a sailor clings to wreckage in a storm it seems to me that the value in these labels must be that people perceive it to be a better product. It is rare on Scottish distillery tour if at least once the guide doesn’t point to a particular piece of equipment – usually the spirit safe – and explain how it was “the original one and built in eighteen blah de blah” as if somehow installing one less than 200 years old would run afoul of the SWA regulations and ruin the flavour. I can assure you that plenty of average to poor whisky has flowed through old equipment; Bruichladdich with their vintage and largely original Victorian distillery for example has had a few lows as well as lots of highs. However in general most whisky people seem to value “handmade” and by default see “technology” as somehow a bad thing. I have also observed the same people often seem to prefer it if their whisky was made by a character and have nice signature printed on the label to prove it. I have met plenty of whisky (and other industry) characters; often it is just a polite way of saying “important but occasionally grumpy bastard”. If someone put “Made mainly by Computers” on the label and the bottle was signed by a member of MegaDrinkCorp’s Graduate Trainee program people would run screaming but in many cases it is might be closer to the truth than many of the labels we see today.
With this in mind I recently made a trip to Alaska and was killing time in Anchorage airport when I found a museum style diorama (see picture) depicting the traditional method the Athabascan tribes, native to the Cook Inlet, used to hunt beluga whales. It involved a massively complex system to find a spruce tree, create a platform out of the root structure, drag it out into the inlet at low tide and erect it. Then one hunter would climb onto the platform wait until the tide came in and for the whales to come by, then harpoon it and the others would come out and help drag it in. I read this story, utterly absorbed and fascinated and then at the end read how the last time someone hunted for beluga like this was 1880 – ironically about the time that all those Scottish distilleries were all installing their “vital to the taste” spirit safes – because then they got rifles and could shoot the belugas from safety of beach. Ta da! Technology arrived. I am pretty sure and will go out on a limb (out on a limb – come on that is a hilarious Athabascan hunting on Spruce tree platform related joke) and say no-one complains that their blubber doesn’t taste the same when it isn’t traditionally hunted. Google reveals no whale blogs with reviews along the lines of “I can taste notes of the spruce platform and harpoon tang in the meat”.
I suspect there is not a major “craft Beluga blubber” craze sweeping Southeast Alaska. At the end of the day technology provided a better way to hunt. It is clear that sometimes technology can also provide us with a better way to make whisky and it makes no sense to me to reject something (or for that matter enthusiastically embrace something) because of the way it is made and then labelled. We simply should try it first. It’s a radical idea I know… but like the whale hunter who bought that first rifle and thought “Hey this just might work” I suggest we at least consider it.