What I've Read: 99 Drams of Whiskey

I picked up this book for two reasons. 1) It was part of a "buy 2, get 1 free" when the Borders down the street was having a closeout sale; 2) It is about whiskey.

I'm becoming ever-more enamored with whiskey, and more specifically, bourbon. Sure, I loved drinking the stuff when I was in college, and I have fond memories of standing next to my father every Saturday night at the drug store buying my grandmother another 750 of Heaven Hill. But I'm now trying to gain an even greater appreciation for the aqua vitae.

Written by some girl who has a blog that's apparently rather popular (I've still never read a word on it), this book is also really two tales in one: 1) A travel book about the author and her friend as they travel through Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee tasting numerous whiskies from those areas (some you know, others I had never even heard of); and 2) An uber-brief history of whiskey, a kind of Whiskey for Dummies.

It's an enjoyable read if you breeze through the travel section parts and ignore that the author is somehow a popular blogger but has no idea of how to work various other forms of technology, or seems to not possess much in what we'd call streets smarts. The beginning of the book starts off well in the travel department, but by the middle I found myself rolling my eyes every time she talked about the troubles she had driving.

The whiskey history part is decent, but after reading 700 pages about Prohibition, her 12-page chapter about Prohibition seemed a bit lacking in the detail department. Clearly she's writing for the In Style magazine crowd. But once she stepped foot onto distilleries and started breaking down the whiskey tours and the multitude of whiskies she drank, I was left with my mouth drooling in need of a glass of the amber goodness. I wished she had written up more distilleries and sampled more, but she was under a tight deadline to get as much accomplished as possible. There were just times when she sampled one whiskey but mentioned the greatness of five or six others that she gave no detail about, leaving me wanting more information.

But, really, the greatest knowledge derived from this book was the reinforcement from numerous whiskey "experts" that repeated a familiar theme: That finding the best whiskey or bourbon is not about participating in hundreds of blind tastings or controlled drinking experiments in a vacuum (all good to do these, mind you, if you have the money and time). No, the real key is finding what tastes best to you, brand or price or setting be damned. It's about creating memories through which, in my case, this beautiful glass of liquor hailing from my home state is but a player in the great game of life. A drink that is along for the ride, and through which the mere mention of Woodford Reserve, Knob Creek, Old Pappy, Rowan's Creek, Blanton's, Old Willet or a thousand other great ones on the market conjures up a wonderful memory to savor for a lifetime. And this is just one reason why I am swimming in the deep end of my obsession with bourbon, and loving every minute of it.