Lies my brain told me about whiskey

Adam of the Los Angeles Whiskey Society (LAWS) pulled the old slip-a-legend-into-a-blind-tasting trick, in this instance including Black Bowmore 1964 1st Edition in a lineup with a bunch of nobodies like Macallan 28yr Douglas Laing Premier Barrel and Bunnahabhain 1978 DL Platinum. And, as seems to always happen when this trick is pulled, the legend didn't particularly stand out:

Nobody jumped out of their chairs. Nobody even made much of a fuss. A few eyebrows raised, but nothing crazy. Most thought it was "pretty good," a couple "great." Some weren't terribly impressed. Nobody guessed it was Bowmore, nor did anyone seem to think it was anything super-special. These are all guys who know whisky, most of whom are serious, hardcore single malt veterans.

His explanation?

Any "legendary" whisky is good-to-excellent, but mind-blowing is impossible. Whisky can only get so good, and the rest is added in your head. Really.

When you're told something is excellent, expensive, rare, and revered, it's going to taste a lot better. It's a proven physical and psychological fact. And that's fine, it's part of the experience.

Which means that, at a certain point, the reason to spend more money, or more effort, to get a particular whiskey can't be based on the taste of the whiskey alone:

This is purely notional, of course. The curves are atan(x) and atan'(x).
If only whiskey pricing made as much sense as trigonometry.

This gets into the distinction between the taste of the whiskey and our experience of the taste of the whiskey. Or, if you prefer, it gets into the question of whether it even makes sense to talk of taste apart from the experience of taste.

Our experience depends on the context in which we interpret the sense data we receive from nosing and drinking, and that context includes not only what we know (or have been told) about what we are drinking, but also all the other circumstances -- the who, what, when, where, why, way, and means -- involved.

As Adam mentioned, one of the circumstances that improves our experience of the taste of the whiskey is the belief that other people value it highly. This effect occurs in experts as well as novices (which, I've read, is why some famous wine experts won't do blind tastings).

If you live only for pleasure, the scientific conclusion is clear: You're not spending enough on whiskey.

I'll assume without evidence that this effect dampens out at some point, that even the snobbiest orbitofrontal cortex doesn't insist that a $10,000 ounce of whiskey tastes fifty bucks better than a $9,950 ounce. If that gives too much credit to snobs, we can at least cap our pleasure in tasting increasingly expensive whiskeys by the increasing financial ruin that accompanies the experience.

The good news is that, while every possible experience of the taste of whiskey can't be known in this life, plenty of very pleasant experiences remain possible, even when balanced against all of life's non-whiskey-related experiences. As I've said before, if you can afford to drink whiskey, you can afford to drink good whiskey, and if you look after all the other things that affect your experience of that whiskey, drinking that good whiskey can make for a very pleasant hobby indeed.

Lies my whiskey told me make things worse

A good number of the posts on this blog touch, one way or another, on the topic of truthfulness and whiskey. I'm interested in the question of truthfulness generally, and I'm learning more all the time about the conventions of whiskeyspeak and the schools of thought about what is and isn't legitimate.¹

My own opinion is that, generally speaking, we have too weak an understanding of truthfulness. We tend, I think, to look at truthfulness pragmatically, as simply the absence of lying. We don't value truthfulness in itself; rather, we estimate the harm a particular instance of lying cause, and if the harm doesn't seem all that bad, we excuse the lie (particularly when we personally benefit, from either the lie or the excusing of the lie).

I'd suggest, though, that truthfulness isn't just the condition of not lying when asked a question, it's the positive virtue -- the good habit -- of telling other people true things they would benefit from knowing. Members of a truthful society learn things from others that can help them, in less time and with less trouble and doubt than they would otherwise. Truthfulness is a necessary condition for members of a society to thrive.

From this perspective, it isn't just flat-out lying that's contrary to truthfulness. There are all sorts of ways we might overstate and understate, dissemble, dissimulate, distract, and deceive. If we do so in order to prevent someone from learning something that they should know -- or to get them to think they've learned something that's isn't so -- then we've acted against the virtue of truthfulness, whether or not we have a clever argument that what we said was not quite entirely unlike the truth broadly considered.

Okay, so whiskey?

So a whiskey company that isn't truthful makes society worse.

The people who are subjected to the untruths are worse off for not knowing things they could benefit from knowing, and even worser off if they wind up thinking they know something that isn't actually true. And as they move about acting in ways they wouldn't choose if they knew what they should have been told, the negative effects of their erring choices spread out throughout society. (An honest micro-distillery, for example, might lose a sale, intended by the customer to support a local distillery, to Eustace Q. Hornswoggle's Backwoods Whiskeyworks' bottling of the six MGP barrels closest to the door.)

Moreover, the people in a whiskey company who are themselves untruthful -- and of course companies don't have virtues or vices, except in a manner of speaking as they derive from the virtues and vices of the individuals acting on behalf of the companies -- are worse off, both because they are cultivating their own vices² and because they are also members of a society in which there is less truthfulness than there ought to be.

If a whiskey company that isn't truthful makes society worse, then we should not lightly dismiss their habit as an inconsequential circumstance of the whiskey they sell.

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1. Let me just say I'm not really interested in the question of what is legal. That's a more or less objective question on a subject about which I know essentially nothing. I assume that everything companies do or say in public is legal, even if, say, I can't figure out how to square it with a casual reading of the Code of Federal Regulations. And, of course, just because something is legal doesn't mean it's right. Or vice versa.

2. Vice is, after all, its own punishment, as unsatisfying a thought as that it when considering the vices of others.

So you want to be an NDP

MGP helpfully lists all their products on their website. Here's a table of the mashbills for the whiskeys they offer.

Whiskey Product	% Corn	% Barley Malt	% Rye	% Wheat
Bourbon (45% Wheat)	51	4	0	45
Bourbon (49% Barley Malt)	51	49	0	0
Bourbon (21% Rye)	75	4	21	0
Bourbon (36% Rye)	60	4	36	0
Bourbon (99% Corn)	99	1	0	0
Corn Whiskey (15% Rye)	81	4	15	0
Light Whiskey (99% Corn)	99	1	0	0
Malt Whiskey (100% Barley Malt)	0	100	0	0
Rye Whiskey (49% Barley Malt)	0	49	51	0
51% Rye Whiskey	45	4	51	0
95% Rye Whiskey	0	5	95	0
95% Wheat Whiskey	0	5	0	95

You can see how a blender who knew what they were doing might do some interesting things. Want a rye whiskey that's a blend of 70% rye, 20% corn, and 10% barley malt? Try 12.4% of the 49% barley malt rye whiskey, 44.4% of the 45% corn rye whiskey, and 43.2% of the 95% rye whiskey. If you weren't concerned about calling it a straight whiskey, you could probably bottle pretty close to any combination of the four grains listed.

Or you could set up like Whisky Blender, stock up on a few barrels of each, and let your customers design their own blends on a per-bottle basis. I expect most of the results would be uninspired, and I don't know what you'd do with all that light whiskey you bought just in case, but it might be fun.

Water of Life

Lies my whiskey told me: prologue

Philosophers and theologians have spent a lot of time down through the generations thinking about the different ways people bend and break the truth. In part because people have spent so much time down through the generations bending and breaking the truth, but also because -- despite what our mothers taught us -- there are times when not telling the truth seems like the better choice. The "murderer at the door" scenario has been a standard hard case for centuries.

There are all sorts of categories to describe the different ways what we say relates to what we think is true. For example, there's:

• Plain truth: I say what I think is true ("I am typing these words with my own fingers").
• Conventional speech: I say something that doesn't literally mean what I think is true, but that is conventionally understood to mean something I think is true ("I'm fine" as an answer to the question, "How are you?").
• Equivocation: I say something that has multiple interpretations, usually with the intent that the hearer either settle on an interpretation that isn't consistent with what I think is true or at least be unsure as to which interpretation is consistent ("These are not my own words," which is true in the sense that these are English words, which are not my personal property).
• Mental reservation: I say something that I don't think is true in itself, while thinking of words that, if added to what I say, would make a statement that I think is true ("I don't much care for whiskey," mentally reserving the words "in my morning coffee").
• Bald lie: I say something that I in no way think is true ("I had dinner with the Peruvian ambassador last night").

Add to that the various rhetorical devices, the distinction between literal and literalistic, the different theories on how signs signify, cross it all with the various schools of thought on morality, justice, and virtue -- and it's no wonder people don't pay much attention to philosophers and theologians.

Instead, they have their own ideas about what ways of bending or breaking the truth are always okay, are sometimes okay, and are never okay (not to mention their own ideas of what "okay" means).

Whiskey stats

Soon after the news broke that Campari has bought Forty Creek, @65glenfarclas tweeted a link to a PDF of their "Acquisition of Forty Creek Distillery Ltd." investor presentation.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, if that's the sort of stuff you're interested in. For instance, Slide 5 distinguishes "premium" brands from "low price" and "value" brands, reminding everyone that "premium" doesn't refer to what's in the bottle, but what's coming out of your wallet.

Which adds an ominous note to Slide 18's statement that "Gruppo Campari is well positioned to... [f]urther premiumise Campari’s brand portfolio." Wouldn't "premiumise" mean "raise the price"?

There's also some great pie charts in the presentation, for people who like numbers. These are from ISWR for 2012:

72% of the sales is in premium and deluxe price tiers. Canadians drink better.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why Canada should in fact spell it "whiskey."

And these are from DISCUS, for 2013:

I don't know which category Red Stag falls in, but it certainly should be counted as part of the US spirit breakdown.

Guess they're still spilling more Bourbon and Tennessee than selling rye.

A lot of people would never guess that one out of every twelve ounces of spirits sold in the United States is Canadian whisky. (Of course, a lot of people would never guess that Crown Royal is Canadian whisky.)

Slide 13 presents the case for "The US opportunity for Forty Creek whisky," including my favorite statistics of the whole package. In the past year, Canadian whisky has had:

• Volume growth of 2.9% overall
• Value growth of 6.1% overall
• Value growth of 9.1% for super premium whisky
• Value growth of 62.8% for high-end premium whisky

(Forty Creek is super premium, costing half again as much as the market average (keeping in mind the market average comes in plastic bottles).)

All this sounds great for the Canadian whisky industry, but when one category has ten times the value growth of the whole industry, then it had better be a tiny category, or the other categories are going to have a considerably smaller value growth than the overall number -- and may even be shrinking. Here's a nonsense chart showing the sort of value growth the non-premium Canadian whiskies must have had as a function of the percentage of the whole market the high-end premium had, if super premium started at 5% of the overall market:

The math may well be correct. The assumptions almost certainly aren't.

For all I know, the makers of low cost and value Canadian whisky are happy with low or negative value growth. If they aren't, though, they might respond by, say, releasing better whiskies to get a slice of the premium pie. That would be good for premium whisky drinkers in the U.S. -- at least as far as selection goes -- and it might even be good for Forty Creek (which has not yet been producing to capacity) and Campari, if U.S. drinkers get used to the idea that Canadian whisky isn't just for mixing.

A cloud no larger than a man's hand

It's coming.

I got the PR email. That means real whiskey bloggers also got the PR email. And that means, some time in the next several weeks, my blogroll and Twitter feed will be painted Cutty Sark yellow with comments on their new blend.

The "fact sheet" included with the PR email begins with a number of not-altogether- and near-facts:

Released 80 years after the end of the era which it celebrates, Cutty Sark Prohibition Edition has been crafted as a salute to the notorious Captain William McCoy, who smuggled Cutty Sark blended Scotch whisky into America during the Prohibition era (1920-­‐1933). Captain McCoy’s impeccable reputation for dealing only in the finest, genuine and unadulterated liquor gave rise to Cutty Sark being referred to as “The Real McCoy.”

It's been more than 90 years since the notorious Captain William McCoy was arrested, and he wasn't particularly associated with Cutty Sark while he was still bootlegging. He "mostly hauled Rye, Irish and Canadian whiskey," if you can believe Wikipedia (and if you can't, then we're all lost).

Even if we accept the false etymology about "The Real McCoy" deriving from the smuggler's reputation and grant that Cutty Sark was might just barely have been (see UPDATE) among the brands he smuggled, it wouldn't follow that this "gave rise to Cutty Sark being referred to as 'The Real McCoy'" -- except in the trivial sense that any unadulterated liquor could be called that, even today.

But the true history of the phrase makes its use in this ad campaign more entertaining. The Dictionary of the Scots Language reports that "the orig. of the ph. is obscure," but adds that the phrase "was adopted as an advertising slogan by Messrs. G. Mackay and Co., whisky distillers of Edinburgh, in 1870 and must have been already current by that date."

Cutty Sark, then, is using a corrupted form of an advertising slogan for a different Scotch whisky to advertise their own whisky -- a slogan that means "the real thing, the genuine article."

UPDATE: Something was nagging at me about this story, so I double-checked, and it turns out that Cutty Sark Whisky was only conceived of on March 23, 1923 (if you believe their website).So, okay, it's possible that, some time in the eight months to the day between the brand first being discussed and the bootlegger being arrested, some amount of Cutty Sark was smuggled by McCoy. But that's a pretty weak peg to hang your ad campaign on.