Rymerpt said:
What's the deal with single malt?
What's the deal with "12 year old scotch" or aged whisky for that matter.
Is bourbon and scotch hugely different?
Id kinda like to buy a couple of those tiny bottles of "really good" whisky just to see what people think is GOOD.
Single malt means that it is not blended whisky - when they lay out the grain on the floor in a malt barn and spray it with water and then use the resulting malt to make a beer (mash) that they then run through a still and put into barrels to age. Certain malts are cheaper to make than others, which allows the producer to reduce production costs by blending some of the cheaper (read "rotgut") whiskies with enough of the better stuff to have a reasonably sellable (palatable) product.
Single malt whisky can also be rotgut - garbage in garbage out. But when a high-quality malt/mash is used for distilling, gold in gold out.
Whisky that has an age declaration is seen as a form of quality control - the longer the aging, the smoother and more complex the whisky. Aging whisky costs money (land rent, barrels occupied, warehouse occupied, staff to keep it all from falling apart, etc). It has recently became popular for some of the more "campish" whisky houses to stop providing age declarations in the hope that they can lure newbies into buying their youngish (inferior) product for a relatively high price. As a rule, I don't buy anything less than 12 years old and prefer 15 or even 17 years old with my budget.
Bourbon and scotch are hugely different. Number one, bourbon is sort of like a vanilla-sweet alcoholic drink whereas scotch is not sweet at all and the flavours are generally orders of magnitude more complex. Now don't get me wrong - I will certainly grab a bottle of Jack or Jim from the liquor store now and then and just drink it straight out of the bottle. Scotch is way more powerful in terms of both taste and alcohol percentage - pretty damned difficult to swig it out of the bottle. A lot of scotch will range from 46-58% alcohol, whereas most bourbon comes in at 40% (Jack used to be 45% back when I was younger). Finally, bourbon is made from 1) limestone water and 2) corn mash. Scotch is made from various water types, does not require limestone water. Scotch is made from malted grains (wheat, barley, rye, etc), not corn.
There are quite many mail-order subscription services where you can get micro-sized bottles of scotch exactly for this purpose - to find out what you like before laying down serious cash for a bottle. Google is your friend here.
