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7. Greece and Cyprus. Ouzo. Flavoured with anise.

8. All tequila is mezcal, but not all mezcal is tequila. Mezcal is the generic drink, like brandy, Tequila is a place, a small town in mid-Mexico and the region round it, giving its name to the superior mezcal made there, like Cognac.

9. Tequila, Cointreau and lime-juice in a cocktail-glass with sea-salt round the rim. Lock your flick-knife away first.

10. Koumiss. Camel’s milk will do at a pinch. Chig-Ge is the Mongolian version.

SCOTCH WHISKY I

1. Whisky that has been distilled in Scotland. Not all these questions require deviousness or subtlety in the respondent.

2. Three years. In practice the time is usually longer.

3. From Irish and Scottish Gaelic “uisge beatha,” lit. “water of life” (cf. eau de vie, aquavit). Later usquebaugh, whisky-bae. The modern form is not recorded until 1746.

4. In efficiency, therefore economically. The patent still is continuous, turning out spirit as long as alcoholic wash is piped in. The pot still must be cleaned out and refilled after each run. In flavour, of course, the superiority is the other way round.

5. Unmalted maize (Indian corn, corn as seen on the cob) as well as malted barley.

6. If not from the drinker’s imagination, then from the smoke of the peat fire, or often just peat-smoke and hot air, used to dry the malt before it is ground and fed into the mash tun to have its sugar extracted.

7. The method of malting the barley, the shape of the still and the method of heating it, the distilling temperature, the wood of the cask, the length of time in cask, etc.

8. It means that, like most malts on the market, the one concerned is the product of a single distillery. A blend of malts is a vatted malt, of which there are a couple of dozen on the market but none very highly regarded.

9. Lowland, Islay, Campbeltown (at the end of the Kintyre peninsula).

10. True. An easy mark all round to dissipate any rancour over q 1.

SCOTCH WHISKY II

1. Chivas Regal is a blend. The others are single malts.

2. None. There may be a little more or a little less water, but everything else is there in the same proportions as before. Nobody really knows what happens in the cask.

3. In the 1880 s the vineyards of Cognac were devastated by the vine-aphid (see Q Wine—Intermediate, q 4) and production of brandy, the prosperous Englishman’s standard spirit, fell off disastrously. Scotch moved into the vacuum, though naturally not overnight.

4. 3,000. Many go straight for export and are never seen in the UK.

5. A dessert drink or alcoholic dish made from Scotch whisky, runny honey and a liquor produced by soaking oatmeal or porage oats in water. Sassenach recipes substitute cream for the oatmeal liquor. A partial exception to the statement in the headnote that Scotch will not mix. Atholl is a Scottish dukedom and “brose” is connected with “broth.”

6. Traditionally, oak casks that have held sherry. Of recent years the supply of these has fallen off and distillers have taken to importing casks used to age bourbon whiskey in the US.

7. Queen Victoria, probably under the influence of John Brown, her Highland retainer. Her choice of tipple is said to have startled Gladstone, probably because of the violence it did the whisky. He was a good friend to Scotch, legalizing its importation into England in bottle in 1860.

8. The more malt, the better the blend. Good blends, not much more than 50 per cent grain. Inferior blends, up to 80 per cent. Blending is a secret process.

9. Whisky out of the still is colourless. The colour comes from the cask and from additives such as caramel, sherry and molasses.

10. Japan; precisely, the Suntory distillery in Hakushu. It produces nearly 100 million gallons of malt whisky a year, more than the whole of Scotland.

WHISKIES AND WHISKEYS

1. Old Bushmills in the north of Northern Ireland, licensed in 1608. Its premium Black Label blend, “Black Bush,” has an unusually high proportion of malt whiskey in it.

2. A teaspoon (a true coffee-spoon is too small), over the back