Try this if you drink whisky
There are plenty of stories doing the rounds about whisky. You mustn’t do this, you have to do that. Blah blah blah. Nonsense, of course. The only thing that matters is that you enjoy it. How do you know? Exactly: by tasting it. And recently, I learned some fun tricks for doing just that.
At Bar the Tailor in the Amsterdam Krasnapolsky hotel, Johnnie Walker Blue Label built a special whisky ‘Bothy’. A bothy is a simple mountain hut somewhere in the deserted Scottish heathland. This looked nothing like a shabby little hut (hello, leather benches and marble tables!) and the Dam is of course far from deserted, but what we did there was the same: drink whisky.
How do you smell whisky?
Or rather, smell whisky first. Whisky expert Herman, ‘The Herminator’ to friends – us, that is – explains how to do it. No. Not like with wine, sticking your nose deep into the glass and sniffing as though it were coke. Move the glass past your nose so you catch a whiff. Do that a few times and you’ll gradually smell more and more different layers.
Should you swirl whisky?
Sometimes we seem to forget that whisky isn’t wine. Swirling it around in your glass to give it air serves no purpose. At most, it lets you see what colour it is. What that tells you, read here.
Whisky tasting 2.0
Step 1: the mouth swirl
What does make sense is to swirl the whisky around your mouth for a moment when you taste it. Don’t gargle like you’re using Listerine; just let it move calmly across your tongue. Do that once or twice before moving on to step 2.
Step 2: iced water
I didn’t know this trick yet, and it’s great fun to try: take an ice cube or a sip of iced water and keep it in your mouth until you almost get brain freeze (try this entirely at your own risk, by the way), or at least until you have less feeling in your tongue. When you take another sip, the whisky suddenly tastes much softer. Only later do the flavours gradually reveal themselves. So funny to notice!
Step 3: a drop of water
This is a fairly well-known trick. In fact, in India you’ll usually be given a glass of water with your whisky straight away so you can add a few drops to it. The dominant first impression softens a little and the more subtle accents come through.
There you have it. Three different whisky flavours from one glass of whisky. Now that’s economical drinking.
Does that Bothy sound like your kind of thing too? Until 20 December, you can visit the Johnnie Walker Blue Label Bothy, where, together with just 7 others, you can taste special whisky (cocktails) by James Chaib – the best bartender in the Netherlands in 2019 – accompanied by small dishes from Michelin-starred restaurant The White Room. Reservations can be made via fbreservations.nhcollectionkrasnapolsky@nh-hotels.com
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- © Presstigieux
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- © Presstigieux
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