October 27 Meeting

As planned, our October 27 meeting focused on smoky scotch whiskies. The smoke enters the whisky by way of the peat that is burned to dry the malted barley. That the chemical essence of this smoke stays with the whisky all the way through the mashing, fermenting and distilling process is astonishing to me, but clearly it somehow manages this trick as the resultant smoky nose and flavour was evident in all three whiskies we sampled. 

We began with the Glenfiddich Caoran, moved on to the Kilchoman and finished with the Ardbeg 10 year old. The Glenfiddich was the most peaty and, to use the laughably obscure descriptor favoured by whisky writers, the most "feinty", the Kilchoman the most subtle and the Ardbeg the most straight-forwardly smoky. Having said that, the Ardbeg wasn't as smoky as I remembered it being, but perhaps I had sampled a different bottling before. Nonetheless, a lovely drink, as in fact were all three. 

We soaked up all this smoky scotch with smoked gouda, smoked havarti, a marvelous terrine of baked brie, figs and pepitas and some samosas and papadums. Someone had read that Indian food went well with smoky scotch, someone else had read that pepitas went well with smoky scotch and a third person had read, or more likely just decided, that smoked food went well with smoky scotch. All three were correct. 

We spaced out the scotch with samples of Aecht Schenkerla Bock smoked Bavarian lager and "Lava" Icelandic smoked porter. Both were tastier than expected (feared), but the Schenkerla was the clear winner for sheer smokiness amongst everything that passed our lips that evening. No, there were no cigars.