Glendfiddich 12

Yesterday was the last night of the Levitt Amp concert series at the IX art park. The Bumper Jacksons were the headline band, and there were many folks swing dancing throughout the evening. The band also sang some blues style songs. Here's one warning women not to marry...

After the music, I went down to Bang! for dinner and a Scotch. Of the five they had, the one I had yet to try was Glenfiddich 12, so I ordered a dram.

His nose was mellow and a little fruity. The first sip was warm, sweet, and creamy. Glenfiddich was a smooth character, for sure. As I continued sipping I tasted a gentle cinnamon and spice. Adding water didn't seem to change him at all except for becoming more bold with the cinnamon flavor.


My dinner came quickly, and one of the dishes was spicy, which seemed to bring out the spice of my Scotch in a stronger way.


A word that came to mind as Glenfiddich and I continued our conversation was "slick." He was very smooth, and mellow...charming really, but also had another taste to him that became more apparent as the evening drew on. I couldn't quite place it; I thought perhaps nutty..maybe tobacco or ash?  Slightly bitter - not unpleasant, but rather distinctive. It made me stop and notice that there were more layers to him than I may have originally thought.


As I ate my dinner and sipped my Scotch, snippets of the conversation between the bartender and another patron made its way to my ears. As I listened to the talk of love and life, my thoughts turned to gratitude. How we often find solace and joy in the little things of life to help us deal with the larger, more difficult things. Or at times we must remember to take a broader perspective when the bigger elements of life are going very well, and it is only the smaller issues that burden us.

As busy as most of us have become these days, it's hard not to get caught up in our own lives and challenges. But there's a lot going on in the world right now, and sometimes we need to change our focus in an intentional way - to keep from being overwhelmed, and to maintain a connection to why we're trying so hard in the first place.

In my work with emotions, I've come to think of gratitude as a re-calibration of sorts. It is a mix of many emotions, possibly even incorporating all of them. From sadness and envy to anger and joy, I see a mix and a re-balancing of the emotions occur when gratitude is present. It can be a very helpful practice. Turning my attention back to my meal, thankful for the small joys of food and drink, and the many other ways I am lucky as well, I decided to do some reading up on this new fellow...and I found some very surprising news.

Glenfiddich is married. How can a single malt be married, you wonder? I wondered too. This led me to finally find out something that's eluded me so far in this journey - what exactly does "single-malt" mean? Apparently, it is simply that a whisky is made from malted barley, and aged at a single distillery. Many different ages and barrels of a distillery's whisky are mixed together (often in steel, but sometimes in oak) before bottling. This is done to create consistency in a many-variabled production process. Unless a whisky specifies "single-barrel" it has, in fact, been mixed with many other batches of whisky.

So what to make of this new information? Not much will change, I imagine. It might be exciting to try and seek out some single-barrel Scotches, but I'm not sure if that's a route I want to take at the moment. I've been staying away from blended Scotches intentionally, but now I know that even the single malts are technically blended. That's okay, because there are still elements that hold single-malts apart. They are still only made from malted barley, and there is still the art to their creation that remains unique to each distillery, so the magic of the journey is still there. Unlike with what a single-barrel Scotch could promise, I'm grateful to know that if I find the perfect bottle of single-malt, it won't be the only one of its kind.

To quote this Bumper Jackson song: "Live and Learn."