BattleScotch! Dewar’s Double Aged Edition with Dan & Goran

You knew it was coming, because we told you it was coming and because there’s only so many things you can do with reviewing whisky: BattleScotch! Dewar’s Double Aged Edition! Let’s find out if time is worth anything other than money.

But something topical first: I went off on Twitter about the whisky bible guy this week. He got called out for sexist language in his reviews, so I went and read his stuff for the first time, because I want to read sexist material, I guess. And yeah, it’s sexist in the most puerile, declarative “i am a man definitely having frequent excellent sex with many human women” way. Very 15y kid on the internet shit talking.

In an interview I read he likens his whisky reviewing with his “international girlfriends”  translation work and mentions drinking 20 whiskies a day while preparing his bible.

Just stop for a second and think about naming something you created “bible”. fartface.gif

Anyway – 20 whiskies in a day. Alcohol is an anesthetic. And while there’s some debate if it directly affects tastebuds or not, you are numbing the instrument you’re using to review whiskies and “translate whisky into english” for fuck’s sake, he actually said that.

It’s like listening to Neil Young yelling about the sound quality of mp3s: Sir, you have deafened yourself and this is an Arby’s.

If there’s two constants at iScotch it’s these: tasting anything is subjective, and gendered shit is a stupid waste of time. We make fun of bad websites and dumb marketing, we give you our notes on what we tasted, and we tell you which one we liked more. And when we go back and try things again, the results are wholly inconsistent. As they should be. The universe is chaos, people, get right with that.

Our scores are subjective and unreplicable, our notes are subjective and poorly spelled, and we’re all self taught amateurs at making words out of tastes (I myself am still shit at it). If you don’t have a lot of lab equipment, then whisky tasting isn’t a scientific pursuit. (and if you do have a lot of lab equipment, that’s not tasting, that’s analysis). But we can maybe make it a little more scientific. Or at least, we can show scientifically that it’s all subjective and things like “objective” tasting notes and external hierarchies are stupid and dumb.

I’m going to set up some tests and we’ll post the results as we generate some data. thinkyface.emoji

In the meantime, you’ve scrolled past my ramblings and are looking for which of these exactly the same thing at different ages we liked best. Here’s what we thought:

nose
Dan – 18
Simon – 18
Goran – 18

neat
Dan – 15
Simon – 18
Goran – 18

finish
Dan – 12
Simon – 18
Goran – 18

splash
Dan – 18
Simon – 15
Goran – 18

overall
Dan – 18
Simon – 18
Goran – 18

BattleScotch! Dewar’s Double Aged Edition – the whisky age stereotype lives on as the 18 takes it in a massacre.