not scotch….

Growing up in Kentucky there’s only one type of whiskey, it has an E(unless your name is Maker’s Mark) and it has a legal definition because it’s Bourbon.

All Bourbon is whiskey but not all whiskey is bourbon. And that’s legally the truth now but it wasn’t always. Standards of identity in the United States insure that this particular appellation of whiskey is relatively similar no matter what you buy.

It also ensures that bad actors don’t come into play and color some pure grain alcohol, add some flavor and call it bourbon.

It would be nice to say that this is new concept that we developed here but that’s not really the case. Maybe we formalized it but the identity of spirits was more of a given than a regulation in the past.

Once I got older I learned about Rye, which is could be a sibling to the Bourbon appellation. Then there is Scotch. Scotch is the third cousin twice removed to early American whiskey concepts.

It similarly has standards of identity ensuring production methodologies that became formalized in the 80’s then revisited in the mid 2000’s.

There are a host of other whiskey versions, some regulated and some not regulated…..yet that are left out there for the rest of us to explore. Today’s episode is going to be an exercise in exploring some of these spirits.

Last week we talked about whiskey that wasn’t bourbon and we are going to do that again today.

Topics Discussed:

New World Whisky
Nikka
Kavalan
Starward