Notes on Scotch

(with apologies to Susan Sontag)

by Charles P.

For several years prior to January 13, 1996, I drank about a quart of Scotch daily at home. Often I would also go out to a bar in the evening and drink even more Scotch.
Whisky — from a Gaelic phrase meaning water of life —has been distilled in Scotland for at least 500 years, but it is likely that it actually was invented in Ireland. The legend attributing whisky to St. Patrick, who lived in the 5th century, however, is almost certainly wrong.
When whisky comes from Scotland, the word is generally spelled without an ‘e.’ Whiskey from Ireland and elsewhere is generally spelled with an ‘e.’ There seems to be no real rationale for the difference in spelling.
Scotch whiskey begins as barley. It is steeped in water until it begins to germinate and sprout. Barley in the early stages of sprouting is called malted barley. The malted barley is then dried by a fire fueled by decayed vegetative matter called peat. The peat gives the barley a strong smoky flavor that persists through to the final product.
In my early drinking years, I drank vodka and orange juice, the classical screwdriver, once of the many drinks for people like myself who have cowardly taste buds. After a few incidences when I got sick from drinking too much, I switched to Scotch and water under the assumption that the taste of scotch was so bad it would slow me down.
The dried barley is crushed up with hot water to create a mash. The enzymes in the malt convert malt starches to sugars, primarily maltose and dextrin. Then, yeast is added. Yeast is a single-celled organism classified as a fungus. The yeast consumes the maltose, converting it to C₆H₁₂O₆, otherwise known as glucose, and then to CO₂, carbon dioxide, and C₂H₅OH, ethyl alcohol. The fermentation must occur with limited access to oxygen. If too much oxygen is available, the yeast converts glucose and oxygen entirely to CO₂ and the undesirable H₂O.
In 1989 I started drinking Dewar’s brand Scotch whisky. At the time the Dewar’s corporation had a famous advertising campaign called Dewar’s Profiles. These full-page magazine ads featured people who were successful in their fields but just beyond the periphery of actual fame. The Dewar’s Profile listed the subjects’ accomplishments, hobbies, last book read, a quote, and, of course, how they preferred their Dewar’s. In 1989, somebody I knew— programmer, writer, and software entrepreneur Peter Norton — had appeared in a Dewar’s Profile ad. Shortly thereafter I was out at dinner with some friends who had also known Peter and had seen the ad, and when I ordered a Dewar’s and water, I got a few chuckles. That’s how I became a Dewar’s drinker. It was a joke that became something of an affectation. Specifying Dewar’s rather than just ordering generic Scotch sends a subtle message that you don’t want crap but you’re not willing to pay more for really good Scotch either.
After the yeast has done its job on the malted barley, a mix of ethanol and water is left behind. Ethanol has a lower boiling point than water, and the combination has a boiling point somewhere between the two. When the mixture is boiled at a temperature below the boiling point of water, the vapor has a higher concentration of ethanol than the liquid. This vapor is collected and condensed in the process known as distillation. Whisky is distilled twice. Distillation extracts the essential quality of the liquid, its vital nature, its alcoholic essence, in other words, its spirit. Beverages produced by distillation are thus known as spirits.
I had originally switched from vodka to Scotch because I thought the taste would slow me down. Sometime in the early nineties the same logic persuaded me to switch from Peter Norton’s drink, Dewar’s and water, to the less diluted Dewar’s on the rocks. Dewar’s on the rocks, please. I’ll have a Dewar’s on the rocks. Let me have a Dewar’s on the rocks. I believe that I must have repeated the phrase “Dewar’s on the rocks” well over ten thousand times in my heavy drinking years. This figure would be much higher if I actually had to remind the bartender what I wanted. That would be a Dewar’s on the rocks, please.
After distillation, the whisky is aged in oak casks. To legally be called Scotch whisky, it must be aged at least three years, and it’s frequently aged much longer. The whisky in the standard Dewar’s White Label bottle has been aged twelve years. The wood adds flavor to the Scotch, and gives it a distinctive color not unlike gold. During the years that the Scotch sits in oak casks, some of the whisky evaporates and is lost. This is known as the “angels’ share.”
At my favorite bar, I tipped the bartenders two dollars at a time when the standard drink tip was one dollar. I have since come to understand that this is a form of larceny. In getting a larger tip from me, the bartenders pour me a bigger drink. More Dewar’s; fewer rocks. Even so, my rate was about three per hour, a Dewar’s on the rocks every twenty minutes. Sometimes I’d try to cut down to a Dewar’s on the rocks every half hour, but at the end of the twenty minutes my Dewar’s on the rocks would be gone and I didn’t have anything to drink and I would have to order another Dewar’s on the rocks before the allotted time.
For a couple hundred years since its origins in the fifteenth century, only the strongest of Scots could get the strong smoky flavor of the whisky made from malted barley past their noses and tongues. Grain whiskeys, however, made from unmalted barley, wheat, or corn, have the opposite problem, emerging from distillation in a fairly bland flavorless state that can’t be improved with aging. In 1860, an Edinburgh distiller named Andrew Usher combined a malted whiskey with a grain whiskey, and created the first blended Scotch whisky. With this innovation, Scotch whiskey became more palatable outside Scotland. By the beginning of the twentieth century Scotch whisky was known throughout the world.
Dewar’s became very popular in the United States when Andrew Carnegie gave a keg of the stuff as a gift to President Benjamin Harrison.
For many years my refrigerator was broken. The landlord could have fixed it, but I didn’t like people coming into my apartment. If I wanted ice, I had to buy a bag of ice, so when I started drinking a lot at home, in the afternoon and eventually the morning, it was mostly without ice right out of the bottle. In the afternoons I might buy some ice, and as the evening approached, it would be cocktail hour, and I could finally get a glass and put some ice in it, and pour the Scotch over the ice, and make my own Dewar’s on the rocks.
Companies like Dewar’s that make blended Scotch whiskies are able to manufacture a large quantity of a consistent-tasting product because they blend together various whiskies from up to fifty different distilleries. In recent decades, single malt Scotch whiskies have become trendy. I briefly sampled some of these, thinking that I might become a connoisseur, but I had other priorities concerning Scotch.
In 1973, a book entitled Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key revealed that magazine advertisements showing drinks with ice were not actually photographs because ice could not be successfully photographed under hot lights. These drinks were, instead, painted, and the advertising artists took this opportunity to imbed among the sultry swirls of ice and brown whiskey images of skulls, wolves, naked bodies, and the word “sex.” The images that Wilson Bryan Key was wrong. The seductive images he saw in those advertisements do not need to be painted. They exist in Scotch in its natural form.
When I visited England for the first time in 1994, I was astonished that at the over-regulation of bar service. All hard liquor was sold in increments of sixths of a gill, a gill being one-quarter of a British Imperial pint, which is 20% larger than an American pint, and hence five fluid ounces. A sixth of a gill is therefore five-sixth of an ounce. I soon found myself ordering “Triple Dewar’s on ice, please.” In Paris I ordered Johnny Walker. The French love the name Johnny, and movies with the word Johnny in the title.
Dewar’s comes in a variety of sizes, each with its own unique use. The 50 milliliter bottle — a bit over the standard jigger of 1½ ounces — is served on airlines and can even fit conveniently into a front pants pockets. The 200 milliliter flat bottle, sometimes known as a half pint, can be tucked away in an inside jacket pocket for attending the movies. The pint size, actually 375 milliliters in a flat bottle, fits nicely in the hand and can be carried like a security blanket around the home from kitchen to living room to bathroom. The 750 milliliter bottle is good from bringing to parties. It’s not as tacky as a pint, but not as expensive as the standard 1 liter bottle. You can drink from the 1 liter bottle but it’s better for pouring. Beyond the liter is the economical 1.75 liter jug. By saving bottles you can decant the economy size into smaller sizes for all possible occasions.
I remember once in the summer taking a train out to visit my mother. I had a couple refilled airline bottles of Dewar’s in my front pocket that I drank on the way. From the heat and the bottles being pressed against my thigh, they were particularly warm. Forced down my throat they made me shudder and gag. It was like drinking Scotch for the very first time.
My mother kept a 1.75 liter jug of Dewar’s in a kitchen cabinet just for me. On Christmas morning in 1995, I sat on my shaking hands on the couch in the living room while my mother aimlessly puttered around the kitchen. I was obsessed with wondering when I could wrap my trembling hands around that bottle and get that golden Dewar’s out of that jug into my queasy morning stomach. I decided I could have a drink with lunch, and when my mother began fixing lunch at eleven AM, I decided lunch had officially begun. I walked into the kitchen, calmly got a rocks glass out of the cabinet, dumped in a few ice cubes from the freezer, and made myself yet another delightful Dewar’s on the rocks. My mother never said a word.
The next time I talked to my mother I was a few weeks later when I was in St. Vincent’s Hospital loaded up on Librium. I had been diagnosed with gastrointestinal bleeding, malnutrition, and dehydration. The real problem was obvious, however. It was way too much Dewar’s.
When a script for a movie or TV show calls on characters to drink Scotch, in most cases real Scotch is not actually served on the set. Instead, the color of Scotch is mimicked with another popular beverage, ice tea.
I no longer drink Scotch but I drink about a quart of ice tea every day.

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