Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [67]
You can produce something in the same range as the Old-Fashioned with less trouble by knocking out a Manhattan, once one of the great standards, now rarely seen and overdue for a revival. Mix a dash or two of Angostura bitters, 2 or 3 oz of bourbon and an ounce or so of Italian vermouth, the sweet red kind. Add ice cubes and a maraschino cherry. Sometimes called the Sweet Manhattan to distinguish it from the Dry Manhattan, which is similar with French vermouth instead of Italian, and very nasty indeed according to me.
Bourbon is popular as the base of the Whiskey Sour and the Whiskey Collins, also known as the Colonel Collins. The Sour is whiskey with fresh lemon juice, melted sugar and ice, the Collins adds soda water. If you feel you can’t face toiling away with squeezer and strainer and whatnot at your time of life, there’s an excellent cop-out. Pour a good shot of bourbon over ice cubes in a long tumbler. Fill up with standard bitter lemon drink. Stir. Drop in a cocktail cherry. That’s it, your instant Whiskey Collins.
Southern Comfort, being a bourbon-type liqueur, is a suitable and enjoyable substitute for bourbon in, at any rate, the Old-Fashioned. Its fruitiness and sweetness mean you can go easy on the fruit and sugar in the recipe. And take it slow, man.
By common consent, Irish whiskey comes third in the league after Scotch and bourbon, with a much smaller output than either. Nowadays most Irish is made in the same basic way as most Scotch, being a blend of malt and grain products but with a malty emphasis.
This comes out strongly in the much-praised Old Bushmills Black Label (“Black Bush”), a premium blend from Northern Ireland. It’s supposed to have once been sprung on a French expert, completely flooring the poor gent, who after much consideration said it could only be a fine and unusual Armagnac. I don’t quite know what that story proves, but however you look at it Black Bush is a splendid drink for sipping not swilling. But Irish whiskey in general is indispensable only as the foundation of Irish coffee.
Canadian whisky is often thought and spoken of as a rye whisky, and indeed rye is used in its manufacture, though corn (maize) normally preponderates. All Canadian whiskies are made with the patent still and blended with a proportion of neutral grain spirit, so that the final result is lighter than any other type, that’s to say with less body and less fullness of flavour, half a step towards vodka. It seems to be benefiting from the recent trend towards light drinks. I can’t help thinking that the Canadians are a great crowd, but are perhaps the only people who could have produced a boring whisky.
Japanese whisky isn’t exactly boring, or at least isn’t a boring subject. They’re very keen on the stuff there—they drink more of it than anyone else except the Americans. How could they resist trying to do with whisky what they were already successfully doing with their car, television, and electronics industries? The making of whisky, of fine whisky at least, is notoriously a long-term matter, one where experience and climate and all sorts of X factors play their part. The Japanese effort is a fascinating demonstration of how far adaptability, patience and boldness will take you instead. Especially boldness—it seems that, in 1973, Suntory, the principal firm, opened the largest malt distillery in the world, a structure covering three times the area of Liverpool Cathedral, if my calculations are correct.
On admittedly very small acquaintance, the product seems to me unlikely to drive anyone out of business, except makers of bad whisky everywhere. The comparison with Scotch is inevitable. It put me in mind of instant versus real coffee—very like in one way, and yet nowhere near. Never mind. What they must be looking for over there is a style of whisky as distinctive and different and striking as any other, and when they find it we can