How to Drink Whiskey, and a Couple of Other Things
There's no one right way to do it. But I hope you'll choose this way.
You’ll need three things to start:
A good whiskey.
Two glasses.
A good friend or relationship partner to share the moment with.
The people part of this really matters. If I had to drink bourbon alone for the rest of my life, or scotch with other people, I’d actually consider becoming a scotch guy. Just kidding! Scotch is ass.
But seriously. Sip with other people, please. It’s part of it. I tend to not drink alone no matter how cool George Thorogood and Charles Bukowski made it sound.
Enjoying art alone isn’t weird. We read books and listen to podcasts and watch things on screens by ourselves all the time.
But life’s best moments involve walking with someone under a tree canopy during peak fall colors, or laughing together during the comedy show, or swaying to the music at the concert together, especially when the band plays that one very favorite song that makes you feel things on the inside that usually only other humans can conjure.
It’s no different with whiskey.
It’s a craft beverage distilled and aged anywhere between Not Long Enough on the short end and Over-Oaked on the far side. Done well, it’s pure artistry.
If you’re doing it right, every sip is like a ride in a time machine.
I’m 45 years old. Which is a whole damn thing in and of itself.
But what that means is when I’m drinking a newly released 25-year-old bourbon, I’m sipping something that someone made when I was 20 years old. Just a boy, really.
Bill Clinton was President of the United States. The lead singers of several of my favorite bands—Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Stone Temple Pilots—were still alive. The Wu-Tang Clan was Forever-ing.
Sometimes you must give it a few minutes or 10 after pouring an ounce or two into your glass. Wine people call it “letting it breathe.”
Ethanol fumes come off most flammable liquids. But after a little while your nose will start to pick up all the gorgeous little nuances that magically come together when you let distilled alcohol age in charred oak barrels through your college years, and 9/11, and your move to a Florida beach town, and during the road trip when you proposed to your college girlfriend, and she said yes.
Every hot and cold cycle affects the liquid inside of the barrels aging on the racks in the distillery rickhouse.
When the air temperature is hot, the whiskey expands and seeps into the charred oak’s wood pores, extracting more flavor and that rich amber hue. When the air cycles to colder temperatures, the whiskey contracts, pulls back from the wood, and the flavors become more concentrated.
And while all of that is happening, you’re getting married, fighting about whether you should live in Florida or move back to Ohio, and making that transition from the carefree party years of our youth to the humdrums of being a so-called responsible adult who sometimes stays in on Friday nights and goes to bed before midnight which feels like an existential crisis because Who even am I and what do I want the rest of my life to be?
The distillery workers sometimes turn the barrels or move them to different parts of the rickhouses while they’re aging, because most of these people are geniuses who should probably be involved with the space program and understand that certain flavors and characteristics will emerge with enough aging in certain locations on the distillery grounds.
I recommend using a Glencairn glass. Your non-whiskey-drinking friends will be like: “Ooohh, look at you and your fancy glasses!” and they’ll sort of make fun of you about it, but that’s okay because you’re sipping nirvana in a beautiful, perfectly shaped glass, and they’ll be drinking Coors Light and can shut their dumbass, lovable faces.
A good old fashioned heavy-bottomed rocks glass is fine too. Mine has the word “Rebel” etched in it even though I’m not nearly as cool and rebellious as the fictional version of me would be if I had my druthers.
Don’t put ice in your whiskey. More on that in a bit.
Give it a swirl. Watch it dance in the glass. It’s fucking beautiful. Look at it and remember that this near-perfect thing was quietly and unassumingly coming together in some non-descript warehouse the night your son was born.
This 25-year-old whiskey was about halfway to full maturity when corporate layoffs resulted in the end of your journalism career, and when your father-in-law died unexpectedly, and when your wife fully realized she couldn’t trust you or feel safe with you while needing to not feel alone on her darkest, saddest days.
The whiskey was minding its own business, growing into itself, when she moved out and you got divorced and you spent all those nights crying on the couch.
The Cleveland Cavaliers won an NBA championship on Father’s Day with your little 8-year-old sleeping on the couch next to you. Same couch. More tears. But this time, joyful ones. “Cleveland! This is for you!” the local kid LeBron James bellowed after delivering the title.
A reality TV billionaire real estate developer became president, and D.C. politics, which were always a little bullshitty anyway, got extra turnt.
The clocks tick. The calendars flip. You start to feel more like you again after it seemed like you barely survived the divorce. Unlike the barreled whiskey, you don’t have any charred oak to interact with, but you’re maturing and rounding into shape yourself.
You started writing personal stuff on the internet and people actually read some of it, which is honestly wildly improbable. People hired you—YOU, some divorced asshole writing woe-is-me stories on the internet—to coach them through relationship issues. Bonkers shit.
The whiskey was just about ready to come out of the barrel when The New York Times wrote about you and then Harper-Collins gave you money to write a book.
You let yourself date again and subject yourself to emotional discomfort, and by discomfort, I really mean the threat of having your insides gutted. Most of the women were great people who helped you heal—no one more than the last one who turned out to be beyond smart and hilarious and the person you share almost all your whiskey pours with, which you might do forever.
After all of that happens, that delicious spirit, aged 25 years, is finally ready to be dumped from the barrel and preserved in bottles, just waiting for us. Our future days, days of you and me.
A Few Notes About Whiskey (But Mostly Bourbon, Because That’s For-Sure What You Should Sip)
Whiskey 101: There are many kinds of whiskey. Some might write it as “whisky.” I wish they wouldn’t, but they’ve been doing it longer than me in Scotland, Ireland, and Japan so I can STFU about it, probably.
Scotch, Irish whisky (sic), Canadian whisky (sic), Japanese ウイスキー, are all legitimate types of whiskies.
I happen to be a bourbon guy, because bourbon rules.
Also, there’s Tennessee whiskey (not to be confused with Tennessee Williams, who coincidentally drank like he was Hunter S. Thompson’s high school guidance counselor).
If you don’t know, bourbon and Tennessee whiskey are chemically the same thing. The starting ingredients (the mash bill) tend to be the exact same: Various combinations of corn, malted barley, and rye. (Sometimes, distillers replace the rye with wheat for a sweeter flavor profile. Some crazies do all four grains because they’re mad scientists, and don’t you dare tell them what to do.)
The differences between bourbon and Tennessee whiskey are so nuanced as to essentially be a public relations battle the equivalent of Tennessee Volunteers and Kentucky Wildcats sports fans being at odds with each other. Often, the only distinction is that one was produced in Tennessee instead of Kentucky. (For today’s purposes, Tennessee whiskey IS bourbon. Chill TF out about it, Tennessee whiskey people.) It should also be noted that bourbon can be produced outside of Kentucky. Kentucky is just, overall, the best bourbon-producing state.
Also, rye whiskey is a thing. A delicious thing. It’s like bourbon, but turnt. Rye is just bourbon with less corn, and more rye. Imagine if we called bourbon “Corn.” No one would drink it.
Remember the song “American Pie”? Don McLean sang:
“And them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
“Singin, ‘This’ll be the that I die
“‘This’ll be the day that I die.”
I can’t logically explain that. Because rye IS a type of whiskey, and I can appreciate how confusing that might seem to you on account of how badass and memorable the song is. He could have just as easily sang “And them good ol’ boys were eating Mexican food and tacos!” and it would essentially be the same dumb thing. Try not to let it bother you. Tacos are great. So is rye.
Let’s assume Don just needed to make the lyrical rhyme scheme work, and that he wasn’t being a dick and trying to confuse us whiskey novices, even though I was nearly 40 years old before I understood this distinction.
Anyway. Rye is good. It’s the second-best whiskey variety behind bourbon. Tell your friends. Especially if they drink scotch.
A bunch of people will likely try to tell you that scotch or Irish whiskies are better than bourbon. They’ll be kind of right in that they’re allowed to think whatever they want, but also, they’ll be kind of wrong in the same way someone would be if they said something like “2 Fast 2 Furious is a much better film than GoodFellas!”
You know what I mean? No one should live like that.
Some people will tell you that the color of whiskey doesn’t matter. Almost all of them will be scotch drinkers. Scotch looks like apple juice.
Bourbon looks like Jesus came to your wedding and turned apple juice into whiskey.
Bourbon gets its rich amber color because bourbons (and Tennessee whiskey and rye) are aged in barrels intentionally charred by fire at the cooperage. The liquid is clear when it’s first put into the charred barrel. Then it sits there in the barrel between three and four years on the low end, and north of 20 years on the high end waiting and waiting and waiting to seduce your nose and bump uglies with your tongue.
In order of importance, here are the most important factors to consider when selecting a bourbon:
Age – Five years on the low end. Anything younger, no matter how tempting the price tag, tastes young and bullshitty. Things start getting delightful around seven years. The sweet spot is 10-12 years.
Proof – Everyone who is accustomed to pouring 80-proof vodka or tequila into glasses of ice, and then pouring in a bunch of non-alcoholic mixers to water down the alcohol flavor aren’t going to want to hear this, but proof really matters. Most bourbon is sold with a bunch of water added to it. Imagine if we all took buckets of water to the art museums in New York and threw them against the oil-on-canvas masterpieces lining the walls. That’s what the distilleries do. To be fair, they do it to make whiskey that is more approachable to all of the people who love knitting and umbrella drinks, because 90 proof sounds like a lot of alcohol to people accustomed to watering down 80-proof liquor. But pretty much everything under 100 proof is lame. You can’t even light it on fire! Depending on the alcohol content of the non-aged brew that entered the barrel, the alcohol content of most well-aged bourbon sitting in the barrel tends to be between 115-130 proof, more or less. Watering down bourbon is mostly a travesty and done primarily for economic reasons. People should already be drinking a lot of water when sipping whiskey anyway.
That’s pretty much it. Age and proof. Other things matter, but not as much as those.
Distillers who know what they’re doing help too, but none of you have time for that conversation.
Some people don’t like whiskey because they remember shooting a bunch of Jack Daniels and Jim Beam in college, and I can appreciate how those nights might not have ended super well for you, Sean. My “friends” were feeding me Three Wisemen shots on my 21st birthday in college. That 25-year had just entered the barrel back then. The Three Wisemen shot is Jack, Jim, and Jose Cuervo mixed together. Only masochists drink that on purpose.
We’re not slamming shots here.
We’re sipping whiskey like the good lord intended.
As the excellent whiskey YouTuber Jason C. of The Mash & Drum says: “It’s not about the whiskey, it’s about the people you share it with.”
And it really is.
Whiskey isn’t something to be experienced passively.
It’s about being present. It’s about capturing a moment with the people who matter most.
It’s about pausing time for just a moment. It’s about noticing.
That one smell. That one flavor. When the finish peppers your tongue or the roof of your mouth like your favorite hot sauce.
It’s about seeing and being seen.
It’s about shared experiences.
It’s about cataloging scents and flavors you’ll remember in five years, or that will take you back to when you were five years old. (Because of your great-grandma’s Danish butter cookies, or because of the vanilla extract your mother put into her French toast, NOT because you were drinking whiskey when you were 5, probably.)
It’s about making new memories with new people in new places with new pours.
And somewhere, more liquid like this one sits in a barrel, quiet and somewhat invisible among the racks and racks of others. And it’s nowhere near ready, which we both have in common. It just sits there and waits while the world turns and we live through and feel all of the things.
Just waiting for whatever’s next. For it. For us.
Waiting to meet our glass in some inevitable encounter down the road, where hopefully we’ve learned what should be so real and so obvious that I pray I’ll remember every day from this one to that—that what’s in the glass won’t matter nearly as much as who’s holding the other one.
Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.
P.S. - I know these things can present really small to some of you in your busy lives and marriages/partnerships. But that’s exactly why developing mindfulness and communication habits around these domestic scenarios is so critical to maintaining peaceful, loving relationships. If you have trust erosion, and/or pain points and frustrations around things like this at home, consider working with me as your relationship coach to develop these skills and habits. This stuff matters. Book your next appointment here. - MF
As someone who sold bourbon for 10 years with a distributor, as a “whiskey specialist,” (receiving the job having never drank an ounce of bourbon/whiskey, save for 2 of the aforementioned wisemen, Jack and Jim. Shudder.) this piece resonates so much more than any other I have read of your writing.
The unlikely story of how I came to love bourbon is one I tell often, and one of the rare stories that nearly everyone I engage with in telling it will actually resonate and absorb it. Even if they say they do not like to partake, they will almost always try at least one pour with me.
Thank you for your experience. I share a very mutual viewpoint.
Cheers! To many more years and pours to come!
I would have turned my nose up—literally and figuratively—at such a glowing description of whiskey and bourbon. My belief being that both are too popular to be really that good or worth the hype. But then you mentioned Rye. Redemption. Templeton Rye completely changed my perspective on the entire whiskey and bourbon family. I was finally able to appreciate the nuances of such a strong liquor (which, like you mentioned, was introduced by way of Jack and George Dickel. If you haven't tried it Templeton yet, I highly recommend it.