If the drinkers are hunters, lone wolves or Facebook-linked packs, then whisky writers, both professional and amateur, independent and organized, are the scouts, the explorers, out on the borderlands or deep in the forgotten haunts of territory deemed to be settled years ago. We stoke the evolutionary hothouses with discoveries and rediscoveries, with histories that fire the imaginations of drinkers and distillers alike. We retrieve and revive ideas, we wonder on the whens, the whys, and the always important why nots. When did we decide corn was bad? Why did we decide blending was suspect? Why not try this traditionally 80 proof bottling at cask strength? Why not try this in a cocktail? When did that process become a requirement, and why? Why are warehouses built that way, why not try different sizes of barrels: bigger, smaller, lots bigger. These can become evolutionary dead ends when new ideas become too tightly focused or recursive. When every whisky magazine is talking about the same ‘new’ thing, reviewing the same whiskies, it starts to look like Darwin’s finches: all the same bird, just different beaks. One for Scotch, one for Irish, one for American...but the same stories. So perhaps we need a new whisky magazine like the world needs a mutation of species, or some catastrophic change that upends how everything interacts. Or maybe it’s more like a deliberate corrective action: clearing the air, pruning back invasive species, reintroducing species to a former range. A real change that has the potential to reorder the world. Is that a realistic expectation? Consider the first whisky writer: the venerable Alfred Barnard. He traveled in Scotland and Ireland in the 1880s, visiting distilleries and describing their equipment and the landscape around and between them. He clearly had fun, he admitted getting a bit spiffed at times – shock! – and he did it all without modern transportation, and often without modern plumbing. That was world-changing, because no one had ever systematically written about whisky before. Writers call back to Barnard all the time. I took part in a seminar about it, and we surprised ourselves with how much that’s true.
How can we hope to measure up to something that ground-breaking? Well, we don’t really promise that we will. We can only try, with open eyes and questing brains, to do something as vital as Barnard. That’s cutting the line through the thickets of words that have grown up, that have evolved around whisky. We hope, we plan to find species and habitats that are new to us, new to you. What are they? We have no idea, happily! It might be new or rediscovered strains of yeast, or grains. It might be new thoughts on aging, new mechanics or geometries of stills. It might even be new ways of malting; experiments are going on continuously. It’s bound to be new ways and places to enjoy, find or share whisky, and all the new people who are making whisky. It’s a whole world out there, both old and new, and we want to explore it all, right now! Forgotten things are found and new things happen, almost every day. Like the scouts we are, we seek them, we share secrets, we keep our ears open for the slightest murmur of that new thing, waiting to be discovered. Does your favorite whisky news source really cover all of it? Well, neither will we. But with a world of whisky to explore, what we can promise we’ll bring you are things you may never have considered.
Eyes wide, now; here we go!
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the whisky explorer magazine
FALL 2023
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