Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
There are perks to my job beyond just being able to say I’m living a 15-year-old’s dream by writing about football and beer each week. A rash of PR emails hits my inbox each day, and while most aren’t anything worth covering here there’s occasionally a gem in that minefield. An offer to sample some great beers. A month’s supply of caffeine in a single UPS box of energy drinks.
And, as happened this summer, a bottle of scotch older than I am.
Benriach reached out with the opportunity to try a whisky I could otherwise never afford. The Scottish distiller’s mailer consisted of a 100 milliliter package of 40-year-old scotch, roughly the size of a shampoo bottle you’d find waiting at a nicer hotel. With a suggested retail price of $4,500 for a fifth, that put the estimated price of this mini-bottle at $600.
And they sent it to me, the guy who compares every drink he reviews to Hamm’s.
I’m not a scotch expert, but it is one of my favorite spirits. I tend to steer toward the peaty, salty Islay malts — one of my rare trips overseas involved a trip to that lovely island and what felt like 400 drams in a three-day period — but for the most part there’s no such thing as a bad scotch. Like pizza or sex, even when it’s awful it’s still better than most things.
This stands as my introduction to Benriach’s offerings and, damn, what a way to start. Well, it’s time for me to go drink a car payment’s worth of whisky. Let’s see how it is.