Louche life

Dave Broom 4:09pm

It recommenced with the finding of a bottle. The art nouveau label showed a beauty, hair swirling, holding a glass in which a green liquid glowed. ‘Fleurs du Mal’ read the text. It was a thing of beauty. It was absinthe, a drink which, they say, promotes visions, heightens creativity, creates illusions. It’s said to contain a green fairy. I thought back to my first time, on the French-Andorran border looking for a drink which was so dangerous it had been banned. It was the spiritous equivalent of laudanum. It was, the rumours went, legal in Andorra. Damn right it...

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A true taste of the Caribbean

Dave Broom 4:16pm

Though I hail from the land of whisky I’ve long lain under the sweet spell of sugar cane. When you think of it, this makes perfect sense. After all, rum was once more popular than whisky in my home city of Glasgow, which in the 18th century was noted for making the best rum punches in Britain. Not that I was alive at that time you understand.

Glasgow was built on trade with the Caribbean and the American colonies – tobacco mostly, but also sugar and where there was sugar there was molasses and where there was molasses there...

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Guilty pleasures

Johnny Ray 3:50pm

I must be getting old. I’ve recently developed quite a taste for after-dinner liqueurs. Years ago when dining out, I used to shudder at the sight of elderly sommeliers shuffling in huffing and puffing behind clinking liqueur trolleys. The offerings were invariably the same, Drambuie, Tia Maria, Crème de Menthe and Cointreau, their capsules and corks encrusted in dried sugar. ‘And something for the lady?’ was the inevitable refrain.

Now, though, I crave them, either because I’m gaining a sweet tooth or simply because there are increasingly delicious examples on the market. I console myself that they must be...

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From medicine to Martini

Geraldine Coates 3:31pm

One of the most surprising things about gin’s current revival is how few people are aware of the complex array of exotic ingredients inside a bottle of gin. And just how closely connected England’s great national spirit is to other world elements such as witchcraft, superstition, bizarre folklore and ancient healing.

All gins are made with a neutral grain spirit that is then redistilled in a copper pot still with a range of natural flavourings – berries, barks, seeds, peels, roots and flowers – known collectively as ‘the botanicals’. It’s a craft process that can be traced in a...

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Rapper's delight

Peter Grogan 3:23pm

Brandy seems to travel these days with a certain amount of baggage. Any exercise in word-association involving the name ‘cognac’ is likely to reference quite an acreage of oak panelling, some wing-back leather armchairs, at least a couple of bristling moustaches and – who knows? – maybe even a cravat.

So it is with some relish that I have been conjuring for myself a monocle-popping, H.M. Bateman-esque scene in which The Man Who... is the rap mega-star (or, according to his country’s president, ‘jackass’) Kanye West and he is strolling through the library of White’s Club swigging from a...

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The untamed spirit of Islay

3:11pm

One of eight distilleries on the Hebridean island of Islay, Ardbeg (meaning ‘small headland’ in Gaelic) makes the peatiest whisky of them all. The house style is briny and phenolic – all tarry rope and smoked fish. However, Ardbeg is never one dimensional as the peaty thwack is balanced by sweetness and citrus.

Ardbeg is renowned within expert circles, winning numerous accolades over the years. Whisky industry insiders were not surprised to learn that an Ardbeg scooped the 2010 Scotch Whisky of the Year Award in Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible for the third year in a row...

The...

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Whisky island

Marcin Miller 3:04pm

Islay may not be the easiest place to get to but it is always worth the journey. The Queen of the Hebrides, an island off the western coast of Scotland, is a deeply spiritual place with a population of 3,200 and eight distilleries, each of which produces distinctive single malt whisky. The island is a rock with a sponge on top; three metres of peat, decomposed vegetal matter, which is the defining characteristic of Islay whiskies.

My preferred time to visit is early June. Feis Ile, a week-long celebration of whisky and music, takes place at the end of...

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The oldest distillery

Charles MacLean 2:50pm

Yesterday I was writing tasting notes for two malts distilled in the 1950s and bottled in the 1960s – a Glenfiddich and a Dufftown-Glenlivet – and their flavours, very different from their contemporary equivalents (richer, drier, smokier), set me musing on how whisky has changed over the decades. In turn this led to thoughts about the oldest surviving whisky distilleries, and when I scratched below the innocent surface of this question I found that answers are not as straightforward as they might be.

Last year was the 400th anniversary of ‘the world’s oldest distillery’, Bushmills in Co. Antrim. The...

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