Of flavours and bouquets
It was one of those evenings when the mind is eager to get layered in bouquets of flavours. The mind is open and receptive and is ready to accept a new facet, a new truth, a new way, a new snippet or nugget of information. It is generally observed that at such moments, some information-laden...
The battle of ‘e’
I know a lot of my readers will have the first impulse of associating the ‘e’ in the title with some new-age word like email or e-governance or electronics. The truth is that right from words like evolution to emergence, from elevation to energy… e has had a pretty good run. This alphabet rules the...
Water opens it up
This happened in a discussion I had with a bartender of a well-known pub in the NCR. I asked him, ‘What is more important to a whisky blend, the way the nose sensors behave or the way the taste buds respond?’ The bartender thought for a while and then replied, ‘What is more important to...
My whisky notes
A friend asked me, ‘You’ve been writing a lot of posts on whisky these days. Do you have any reason for this?’ ‘Reason?’ I said, ‘You want a reason? By the time we reach the end of this month, I’d have given you at least thirty reasons to appreciate this alcoholic beverage. But in this...
Emovere
Emotions are human experiences that are subjective and can have a strong presence in one person with little effect on another. Diane Raymond writes that the word emotion comes from the Latin word emovere, in which “e” means “out” and “movere” means “move.” The 7 basic emotions that most of us are aware of can...
Cocktails that you’ve never dreamed of
If you think a cocktail is a flavour-sensitive merger of two alcoholic beverages, you are both right as well as wrong. No, I’m not trying to sneak in mocktails here that have a shrewd leaning towards the tipsier ingredients. But then I am neither trying to say that a cocktail is necessarily a drink that...
Between bliss and a smile
Bernard Shaw called it ‘liquid sunshine’ and James Joyce was convinced that the light music when it is ‘falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.’ They were both talking about whisky… but I’m sure had they tasted Black Dog TGR, they’d have had similar words for it. Whisky is one beverage that has managed to...
With or without ice-cubes?
Neil Fusillo recounts a personal story on the internet: My father often, on occasion, when asked if he’d like water added to his whisky, said something along the lines of, “Water?? I’m thirsty, not dirty!” I have taken the title of this post from his lines… however, I must clarify here that in this post...
Tipsy twitter
‘Life is lived in 140 characters,’ said Specky that fine evening as she took a sip of Black Dog TGR. I agreed with this notion and replied, ‘True. We are so like tweets, full of spelling errors, without the grammar of sanity, and in a hurry to say everything fast.’ Specky laughed. Sometimes I wonder...
Ideas that work
It is often said that where MBAs are known to strut around with strategies that fail, an ordinary man on the street is replete with ideas that are workable… and often work. So it is with the mighty writers and food specialists telling us of what can be subtle and what is too raucous for...
Art-forms for a brew
It is a speech that I am going to quote here in this post… a whisky speech… and then I am going to try to write the same speech as if it were a poem. I’m sure all those who love their malt are going to be nodding in appreciation. Noah “Soggy” Sweat made his...
Tones, textures, and an evening with a 12 YO
Words, aromas, and flavours have the power to evoke a sense of oneness if they are the right ones coming together. Almost like the time I sat with my wife on the terrace and poured from a bottle of Black Dog 18 YO. ‘Deep, golden, glossy, and mahogany,’ I said softly. My wife looked on...
