Special Guest post

The famous Malt Impostor logo. What’s not to like about Groucho Glasses and a full Glencairn glass?

It is with great pleasure that I turn this blog post over to Stephen Mathis from The Malt Impostor for a special guest post. Stephen will be the moderator at our August 7th tasting. Stephen, and the rest of the team, at The Malt Impostor, brings not only a significant amount of expertise to the world of whisky but also bring a good measure of fun and humor to counter-balance the tendency of some whiskyphiles becoming just a bit too serious. And for the record I’ll let you ask Stephen why The Malt Impostor is singular when there is a team of guys behind the wit and wisdom of their website.

So without any further ado here’s Stephen writing on the value of a tasting.

On the value of a tasting

by Stephen Mathis

I’ve attended a large number of tastings in my time as a whisky blogger. And I love them.  But a good tasting isn’t about, or shouldn’t be about, drinking a lot (thus the moniker “tasting”). And I’d be willing to go even further and suggest that they aren’t just about tasting whisky, either. Sure, when I started going to tastings, I scanned the list of whiskies on offer at a given tasting and then asked myself if it would be worth the admission price to taste those whiskies. Most of the time, if I had tried fewer than half of them and if the higher priced ones were among the ones I hadn’t tried, I’d be more inclined to go.

But over time, I learned that there’s more to it than just having the opportunity to taste the whiskies: there’s the presentation, the new information, the venue, the structured character of the event, and the opportunity to taste whiskies up against each other and compare them. The first four of these are inextricably tied together.  Doing a tasting out somewhere—preferably a nice somewhere—with other people similarly interested in having a unique whisky experience and with someone walking you through the tasting and being informative and entertaining along the way is an experience that’s hard to duplicate at home, with all of the distractions you tend to have there.

At a tasting, you have the extraordinary luxury of doing nothing but focusing on the whiskies:  on their backstory, on their terroir, and on each whisky’s appearance in the glass, and then its nose, its mouth, and its finish. Tastings must be structured to go well, to take you through the whiskies properly, and that structure encourages you to focus in a way that even we whisky bloggers can find difficult to pull off when we’re at home on our own.

Perhaps the most important feature of a tasting is being able to taste a number of great whiskies at the same time. Doing so affords you the luxury of comparing and contrasting the whiskies in real time, right there in front of you. Rarely would you ever do this at home, and you’d probably be refused service if you tried to do it in a bar. Comparing whiskies in this way has led me to more interesting revelations about whisky—and about whiskies with which I was already familiar (or so I thought at the time)—than any other whisky-related activity.

So with WhiskyRI’s first tasting just a few days away now, I hope you’re as excited as I am to experience the peculiar luxury of tasting and comparing whiskies—and doing nothing but that—for a good part of an evening.  I look forward to seeing you there, and slàinte!