The latest from the Whisk(e)y Explorers Club

[Our apologies for our taking so long to get to this flight. We won’t bore you with the details of Bill’s otter farming mishap that’s taken him many weeks to rectify, but he’s finally put a few words together on the June 2015 flight from the Whisk(e)y Explorers Club, all without giving anything away.]

Before my eyes were opened to the glory of whisk(e)y, I was a drinker of wine, port, and cognac. (With the occasional armagnac and sherry thrown in, too.) Every now and again, I’d have the opportunity to sit in on a tasting group that had been meeting every two weeks for over 20 years. The tastings were blind, some participants were experts I’d seen quoted in the Wall Street Journal, and everyone came with eight glasses marked A – H and a check to cover the pro-rated share of the cost. It planted in me the strong belief that blind tastings were the best way to determine what one truly likes, regardless of cost or reputation.

And that is what is so enjoyable about the Whisk(e)y Explorers Club; for each of the four expressions, members work their way through very different whiskies and try, to the best of their abilities, to surgically identify the characteristic odors, tastes, and finishes while knowing literally nothing about them. The club supplies a palette of choices and the player clicks on those that best capture the experience of the whiskies. A score is tallied and one can ponder how well one succeeds in finding in an expression what the maker of the whisk(e)y found!

I won’t reveal any of the particular expressions in the June 2015 batch on the off-chance that some reader might still be waiting to encounter them, but I’ll note that the Club puts together an interesting slate of drinks and even sells bottles to members at a discounted rate! I should also note that one of the whisk(e)ys included this time hailed from a country that we had not whisk(e)y explored before, and that’s no small feat.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering how I did on the tests? Let’s just say…I’m an Impostor.