“If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” Not true though, as there are plenty of good whiskies out there, and they’re all capable of giving you one of the worst hangovers you ever had. Let me hear you say uisge-beatha na h-Alba after you’ve had a few drams. That’s Scottish Gaelic for “Scotch whisky.”
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 1, 1495--
The first day of June 1495 was a great day. A great, great day. Although some would come to curse the name of John Cor, it was on that day the Tironensian monk stationed at Lindores Abbey in Fife had his name mentioned on the Exchequer Rolls of King James IV for making batches of what some say tastes like turpentine, and others are willing to spend stupid amounts of money on. To give you an idea of how seriously the Scottish took this new invention, on said Exchequer Rolls it was referred to as aqua vitae: water of life. Well, they’d been making whisky for a while before then, but that date is the first time someone finally crawled out of a drunken haze long enough to write shit down.
You know how all thumbs are fingers but not all fingers are thumbs? Same with Scotch. It’s all whisky, but not all whisky—or whiskey—is Scotch. Regarding spelling, Americans and Irish write it as “whiskey,” and most everyone else, including my fellow Canadians, term the liquid gold as “whisky.” For a long time, The New York Times took an ethnocentric approach and used the American/Irish spelling regardless of whose potent potable they referred to. But, after a raft of presumably drunken complaints, in 2009 they switched to the preferred spelling of the country of origin when discussing whisky. Or whiskey.
The stuff was originally made from malted barley, but then people got creative in coming up with new and interesting ways to kill brain cells. “Aye, Angus! Dinnae be puttin’ any o’ da corn shite in me Scotch or I’ll jam a caber up yer arse!”
The Scottish are pretty uptight about the definitions and labeling for Scotch.
Oh, and if Henry VIII wasn’t enough of an asswipe already, what with all the tyranny and wife murdering, after he defeated James IV of Scotland in battle, he dissolved the monasteries where it was made and proclaimed the making of Scotch illegal. Ye bastard! Yeah, that worked about as well as the Eighteenth Amendment—the not-drinking one—to the U.S. Constitution did. Later on, the English figured out they could tax the stuff, and all of a sudden the gubmint approved.
The Irish had been in the whiskey game for a while already, having beaten the Scots to it by about ninety years, but it’s still not Scotch. Scotch is from Scotland, obviously, but in the centuries since its creation the Scots have experimented with and refined their approach to making it. Americans often like putting corn in theirs and calling it bourbon whiskey. Canadians are known for their rye whisky. There are a small number of whisky distilleries in England, which I expect many Scots consider a crime against humanity.
Finns, Germans, Mexicans, Danes, and many others make the stuff now. If you ever get a chance to try Yamazaki whisky, do it. In Japan they sell it at 7-Eleven.
Those who cannot remember the past … need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of “On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down” at JamesFell.com/books.
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