How to Best Enjoy a Glass of Whiskey

what is the most you've ever enjoyed alcohol like like that first sip oh that reminds me of Tom weight's quote I don't want another drink I just want that last one again ooh that's pretty good that's profound usually our openings are stupid how to drink whiskey all right we're back again with the vice Chancellor and the co-founder of the whiskey marketing school at the Wizard Academy Daniel witon thank you very much sir this is my pleasure sir it's our pleasure are you kidding we're we one's drinking this is great all right we've learned the basics of making whiskey we've learned how to order whiskey but I don't know how to drink whiskey and get the most out of it okay well this is a glass that's this is whiskey whiskey goes inass and it goes in the M couple of steps for got to take the top off damn it I missed a step rookie maneuver okay bad news is what we're about to do is going to make you look like snobs the good news is you're about to start your journey of becoming a true whiskey expert I'm I'm in in sign me up boss we're only going to do two whiskey I know I spoiled you with dozens of whiskies previously we're going to do two we're going to do an Irish whiskey a green spot and we're going to do long m 16 this is a Scottish single malt from space head s SP y s d e now remember we said subjective reality with the shrimp cocktails yeah coil and what's your favorite food I like shrimp cocktail okay if I've had a shrimp cocktail you're wrun that's a cheap way to feel Superior to someone else yes exactly so there's two things about drinking whiskey and uh the first is glasswear and it really does matter it makes a difference now it doesn't matter as in it's more important but it makes a difference we're all talking about chemistry and physiology so a big wide open glass lets all the alcohol Vapors Escape out past you and right this is why wine glasses matter now I like these Glen carons but any glass that has a vague tulip shape is helpful now what this does is it captures the whiskey down here and you have a high- proof beverage right and so you're going to have a lot more evaporation than you would in a wine so the moment you pour it out it starts evaporating and starts within if you leave a glass of neat whiskey out in a room for 30 minutes it'll taste watered down now okay I am going to tell you I snuck in one of my all-time favorite single malt scotches there's a reason for it and you'll you'll recognize it when you try it but I stumbled onto this whiskey there's a reason the bottle is mostly empty I know right it has a flavor profile that I have found completely unique in Scottish whiskey and I'll describe it to you and then let you experience it but first let's talk about smelling whiskey so first of all this is a scotch because it's made in Scotland single Mal means one Distillery malt means barley barley okay so this is a 16-year-old which means not necessarily all of it is 16 years old it means that the youngest Barrel is these guys have been paying attention they have one of the best motos of any whiskey distillery in Scotland long M I like it long no more okay so when you do this with wine why do you do that you do it to look like an you remember my snob Factor common in the earlier I'm just saying no no but but in all seriousness like it gets aromatics right like you agitate it a little bit so you get now when you do that with wine which is 12 15% alcohol you're evaporating alcohol along with some of the chemicals of the wine you're centering it in the glass and then you're smelling it and try don't do that yet careful when you do that with a 45% alcohol beverage you evaporate pure alcohol into the glass okay right and then if you then shove your nose into the glass and take a huge smell you're get first probably pass out yeah right at the very least you'll either start watering or start coughing cuz you just inhaled pure alcohol Vapors through the nose responsible science Li birs and at minimum you'll live a life of regret all right and you don't want that already already do that yeah so how close do you smell whiskey close enough that's the answer to that question and it has everything to do with experience and tolerance levels so if you never drink hard liquor then don't go shoving your nose in the glass you'll take a big smell you'll pass out right if you uh are used to drinking hard liquor on a regular basis neat you can get right up in the glass you'll see professional whiskey uh drinkers get right in there and they'll move it around now here's what they're doing now they're not going to swirl it around because you're just evaporating all Al two things one you keep your mouth open MH now do this first you bring your nose the glass to your nose and take short smells the moment it smells sharp instead of pleasant that's when you need to stop and if you can get right in there then that means you're good at drinking hard liquor which is maybe a it really does make a difference to have the mouth open I I didn't expect that now here's why you ever driving a car down the road on a highway and one person rolls down a back window like an inch and the whole car goes okay so same thing with your nose if you have your mouth Clos closed and then you inhale Vapors they just build up in your sinus cavity okay pure alcohol you were dropping science on if you open your mouth it's like rolling down another window in the car now you get across through right and you don't get the buffeting in your ears right what you're allowing alcohol Vapors to pass through so now you'll smell the whiskey instead of just pure alcohol can we get an episode of one of your series of whiskey Vault of how to do this and not look like an idiot like yeah I think there's no getting around that part right you know just don't be obnoxious you sit at a bar and you're like and you're you're like looking around making eye contact with random patrons you see yeah you're like hey smell so okay no no no no you sit quietly you sit calmly at the bar like it does go in your nose you death tosser that's right it's like a normal human being one nostril will be better than the other depending on the day wow only because of air flow nothing to do with snot snot Okay so looking at it right uh one of the things we learned with the beerists is that is that there's the look of it right like wine it has legs yeah that's sugar just like wine that's sugar content okay any you f beverage it's it's sugar and oil and when you say legs that's the attachment to the side of the the dripping down of the yeah and all whiskey is going to be a much higher sugar content I mean get any wine that's a dessert wine higher proof immediately you get higher sugars you're not going to be able to tell a lot from the legs other than that they're there so there's no visual cues between a good one a bad one it's attractive it makes you feel good on the inside and so we're going to smell but we haven't noticed we haven't we haven't had any whiskey yet no we haven't the whole so far so we're about to all right now when you drink a whiskey remember exactly so when you drink a whiskey remember that it took 12 years to make this or in this case 16 we don't there's no Jello involved in this we're not throwing it down and woo there's no woohoo in this room against the rules no promises yeah yeah top is off he's swinging his sh around now this is something we've just and I will always say this we're about to cross him from science into personal preference I prefer to take my first sip of whiskey as just a nice Sip and don't think about it too much just take a drink because I think that is the just instant that's how whiskey should be enjoyed just drink the damn thing quit being so nerdy about it just drink some damn whiskey so my first tip of any whiskey is just going to be let's just take a drink fair enough yeah after smell fair enough now don't let it sit around don't do anything with it just take a drink I have that habit to actually take a sip and then let it sit in my that's a good habit but I would say do that next cuz once you've done that there's no going back I like it cuz it makes my tongue tingling yeah so you're at the bar you want to get the most out of your drink you take the first sip just to set as a pallet like stabilizer right like like let's just set the bar and then how do you enjoy the second okay now whiskey doesn't change as you drink it people will talk about how it has this in the beginning and and then this mouth feel and then it opens up and then it does this after you swallow okay well what happens when people describe all these different things that a whiskey does is not that a whiskey is changing in the sense that it wasn't that to begin with and all of a sudden it becomes that later on what's Happening is you're creating reaction remember this is chemistry sence guiding your own experience remember when we added water to that whiskey and it completely changed yeah and when you pour this whiskey in your mouth you're about to create another reaction with saliva and you just heated it up to 98° in seconds and then after you've swallowed you're going to have alcohol EV evaporation lingering oil all of those combine into a certain thing and now the smells that are hitting your nose are not just coming from the glass they're also coming from your throat and your mouth and so you're going to notice completely different things in the smell you're going to notice different things in the taste and it's not that they weren't there before it's that it you changed how you're experiencing it all of a sudden so I'm going to show you something to look for in this whiskey ready this is long morning than 16 if you can get your hands on some good luck it took me 8 years to track down one what if you got like a chunk of like burrito back there or something it's like yeah that'll help Phil or Savage on if it's a good burrito Taco Bell episode was your idea what I love about this one and this is where I'm not going to give you how to get there I'm just going to tell you what you where you arrive at when it first hits your mouth there's these notes of butterscotch that are sort of rounded and smooth and friendly as soon as it crosses your tongue and the oils start to separate there's this Spike of black pepper that by the time you swallow is gone and and vanishes under the remaining sugary aftertaste right so you're going to notice round kind of butterscotch black pepper and then leftover mild kind of friendly herbal kind of notes there's a poetry to the way you phrase all that stuff is is there like different phases of the drinking that we should be attuned to think about what pops into your mind as you go through yeah and I'm going to hit that in just a second but let's try that and see all right I love it it's always like butterscotch and black pepper it's never like you're going to get a hint of Big Mac first and then probably gordita gordita Twizzlers is going to pop up out of nowhere more of Red Vines than Twizzlers yeah there there's a subtle difference all right gentlemen all right is there anything I should be doing in terms of manuvering my tongue to get the maximum experience so some guys will swish it around like wine I find that way too aggressive with 45% alcohol now did you notice that kind of progression yeah absolutely let's do it again we're going to this time what you're going to do is keep it in your mouth and make a chewing motion but don't move your tongue around huh you're going to feel like an idiot this is one you maybe don't do at the bar okay all right with my mouth open or closed all the way to 10 you already drank the whiskey it's still in there all right and now you're done wow notice how much more dramatic that got that was now what did we just do we created a reaction but in your mouth instead of in the glass or after you've swallowed see I like that better because it's got that bite really oh it was unpleasant it was like it was like I was in a face off and and it's like um so now which one of you was wrong well I mean obviously me Co the shrimp cocktail G no see that's that's how I usually drink whiskey is that I'll take a drink and then I'll let it sit and you really feel the bite of it right before all of the flavor is gone then swallow you know but it's now I will tell you there's no bad way to drink whiskey there's a lot of whiskey in a glass so give your chance to experience all the different things right so if you just take a sip first you can still go back to the let it sit but if you let it sit and you sort of remember alcohol activates the pain receptors in your tongue that's what it does that's why when someone who's never had alcohol can taste even cooked alcohol in the dish right because your tongue is trying to tell you hey that thing's trying to kill you you idiot right and you're like no like that's poison I quit any time right that's all it is you shut up tongue exactly to drink more whisky you're just eventually getting your brain to shut up but if you let it sit in there and evaporate pure alcohol in your mouth there's nothing you can do it just fry it's just everything comes alive and after that there's no subtlety I definitely noticed like after holding on to it in the mouth long enough the the pain goes up and it becomes vaguely unpleasant for me but then it hits this point where it's like I I just feel nothing like the numbness hits and then it's like I'm not getting any taste or anything in there now that we've let that sort of numb overwhelming finish this one off okay because science when I tilt one back I always lift my tongue to let it wash underneath my tongue is that just me or do you guys I've never done that before well try it both ways the answer is science under try that's the thing to remember when you go through this is there's no right or wrong way what you're doing is you're gauging your own EXP experience and you're trying to figure out which is the most Pleasant way for you to experience this whiskey and how does it and that might vary from whiskey to Whiskey yes I was going to say and it's and depending on the whiskey okay now we're going to talk about brain Theory this is where we get super nerdy okay I'm in four of your five senses communicate directly with your left brain first and the left brain is the one responsible for practical application language reality real things getting stuff done action right so you canou something and jerk back and then realize oh that was hot and this is a whole other thing I'm not going to go deep into this but the language of those senses are all objective relatively speaking now if I said hey go in that room and find the guy with a red shirt as long as I spoke your language everyone could go do that for me even if there's a lot of science that proves you and I see a different red which is true right right we could still objectively find the one red shirt within a spectrum unless you're color blind or yeah yeah so we're talking about fat into the bell curve right so smell is the only sense that has no objective language you can smell something and suddenly you're back in seventh grade you you haven't thought about this thought in a million years yeah the reason is because your sensors in your nose they bypass critical thinking and they go to your right brain to the part of your brain responsible for memory and emotion first then they reroute to critical thinking and so you can walk through a room and smell a perfume and look for someone and then before it occurs to you that person isn't here or they're maybe they're not even alive but your brain their first reaction was to look for their face right before your conscious mind went wait that's ridiculous that's right brain when you're smelling and drinking things we are now entering the territory of right brain which means if you want to really experience a whiskey you have to be comfortable with your brain throwing up something in your mind as an answer to what you're smelling that makes absolutely no sense but that if you give it ground and try to understand why it said that you'll discover something you didn't know about whiskey there really is like a strange courtship with your own other half of the brain that happens you know where it's like like there's the conscious part of you is deciding how to experience this drink knowing that you're cting the unconscious part of the brain into experiencing something I had a guy who said he picked up a glass and said Grandma we took about 5 minutes to figure out why his brain said that and we discovered cinnamon he smelled cinnamon and his right brain connects the smell of cinnamon with Grandma's house are we about to do a little therapy here we're about to do this ready now I will tell you this is an Irish whiskey called Green Spot which is amazing it's an amazing whiskey for years I drank it and I smelled shortbread biscuit and caramel and a little bit of and uh and that was basically it a little bit of green apple so look for that real quick don't drink it but smell it look for shortbread biscuit and green apple by the way it's interesting because you can't just inhale if you inhale everything whips right past you got to do that kind of like puff inhale and just sort of feel and then step away don't take long smells take short smells and then pull it away the green apple is really prominent right okay so for two years I drank this and that's all I experienced Now set down for a second one day I picked this whiskey up and I was talking to somebody so I was distracted which is the perfect opportunity for your right brain to kick into action and I picked up the because my habit when I drink whiskey is because I'm a nerd is I'll we'll be sitting around talking and I'll just be doing this you know but not thinking about it and so we're talking and I pick up the glass and smell and instantly I'm standing on South Padre Island I'm 12 I'm holding one of those rubber rafts all of a sudden there were notes of salt coconut and what happened was for me South Padre was a combination of banana boat sunscreen that coconut flavor dried salt water on hot skin regret regret a life of regret and that was it and so for the first time I smelled coconut in this whiskey and then when I tasted it I tasted salt water that's your right brain talking now I can narrow those down to an actual thing but my right brain didn't say coconut and saltwater my right brain said 12 years old South Padre Island so I stuck my finger in some cookie dough and the moment it hit my mouth all of a sudden I thought Magic the Gathering because when I was a freshman in college I got obsessed we're not getting laid I got obsessed with eating raw cookie dough and and playing Magic the Gathering and it's amazing how that stuff links in a totally unconscious way yes now pick this back up smell it we're going to drink it now this time instead of green apple look for coconut and salt water cheers man this is a it's right there it's it's yeah right this is a fantastic example of priming like like when you prime your brain to look for a certain thing going into it definitely appears yeah that's the Lang anguage of tasting and smell and Science and right brain you ever watch a show and you see a an actor that you know you recognize and you know their name and you saw them in a movie last week but you can't remember who they are y you get a restraining order if you try to smell them yeah cuz it's this uncomfortable feeling of like I know who that is that uncomfortable gray foggy feeling that's your left brain trying to come to terms with your right brain that's the world you live in when you smell and taste things all right so if we're going to distill as it were all of this down a few fundamentals see what you did there if you want to get the most out of your whiskey what are the things you have to do take your time take your time don't be afraid of looking like an idiot yeah which means sniffing and and getting the nose in there yeah yeah try smelling it mouth open mouth closed both cuz you'll change it right move it around take your first sip relax take your next one let it hang out a little bit so first sip don't judge second sip is where you really s explore this thing a little bit and maybe add some water all right give us a proper toast May those who love us love us and may those who hate us may God turn their hearts and if he cannot turn their hearts may he turn their ankles so that we may know them by their limping I like that

Channel: The Modern Rogue

Views: 1,304,542

Keywords: the modern rogue, brian brushwood, jason murphy, daniel whittington, whiskey, whisky, drinking, alcohol, fundamentals

Id: 1cCZrlgNpak

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017