Once upon a time I was stuck in a sort of Twilight Zone in London, stranded there because of some kind of scheduling snafu, and they put me up in a hotel in Kensington that was everything you'd want in a small but posh English hotel—it had been there for over 300 years, and it had stayed in the same family all that time and they owned the building, so it was a well-established place, very set in its ways. It was apparently famous in whiskey-drinking circles because it had a bar, a tiny little bar, capacity maybe ten people, with a beat to shit upright piano, bu it had this enormous, ancient collection of Irish whiskeys—like over a thousand, some as old as the bar, probably. 200 year-old Macallan, that kind of thing. Anyway, the bar was usually empty, so I'd hang out down there and shoot the shite with the elderly bartender and play the piano and drink Irish coffees and eat these intense pastries while discussing world events with him. One week this armada of Irishmen came to stay, and the bar got more crowded—they were about 10 guys, from around 25 to 85, and they were ready for action. One of them said, "you know about the whiskey collection, right?" I confessed that I knew next to nothing about Scotch or Irish whiskey and it quickly became an ambition of theirs to educate me in the fine distinctions between various whiskey-related things all of which I've forgotten—stuff with peat, and casking, god knows what. So seeing as we were at ground zero for exotic whiskeys and they seemed to have limitless funds they offered to take me on a tour through the hotel's whiskey collection, explaining the niceties all the while. I knew from an unfortunate earlier experience that some of the shots of whiskey were like 300 dollars or more, so I'd said, "ah, I really can't afford..." but they insisted on buying, as though it was nothing. One of the guys was definitely a professional whiskey distiller, he was very well-informed and everybody deferred to him.This turned into three solid nights and days of drinking, glass after glass, an absolute blur, one of those surreal revolving parties where people appear and disappear, only to be joined by new people. You go to bed and take a shower and come down and there are new people. Finally at the end I asked, "what are you guys doing in London?" and they said "we're with the Irish Parliament. We're speaking tomorrow, for the farmers."
An Irish Whiskey Story
Once upon a time I was stuck in a sort of Twilight Zone in London, stranded there because of some kind of scheduling snafu, and they put me up in a hotel in Kensington that was everything you'd want in a small but posh English hotel—it had been there for over 300 years, and it had stayed in the same family all that time and they owned the building, so it was a well-established place, very set in its ways. It was apparently famous in whiskey-drinking circles because it had a bar, a tiny little bar, capacity maybe ten people, with a beat to shit upright piano, bu it had this enormous, ancient collection of Irish whiskeys—like over a thousand, some as old as the bar, probably. 200 year-old Macallan, that kind of thing. Anyway, the bar was usually empty, so I'd hang out down there and shoot the shite with the elderly bartender and play the piano and drink Irish coffees and eat these intense pastries while discussing world events with him. One week this armada of Irishmen came to stay, and the bar got more crowded—they were about 10 guys, from around 25 to 85, and they were ready for action. One of them said, "you know about the whiskey collection, right?" I confessed that I knew next to nothing about Scotch or Irish whiskey and it quickly became an ambition of theirs to educate me in the fine distinctions between various whiskey-related things all of which I've forgotten—stuff with peat, and casking, god knows what. So seeing as we were at ground zero for exotic whiskeys and they seemed to have limitless funds they offered to take me on a tour through the hotel's whiskey collection, explaining the niceties all the while. I knew from an unfortunate earlier experience that some of the shots of whiskey were like 300 dollars or more, so I'd said, "ah, I really can't afford..." but they insisted on buying, as though it was nothing. One of the guys was definitely a professional whiskey distiller, he was very well-informed and everybody deferred to him.This turned into three solid nights and days of drinking, glass after glass, an absolute blur, one of those surreal revolving parties where people appear and disappear, only to be joined by new people. You go to bed and take a shower and come down and there are new people. Finally at the end I asked, "what are you guys doing in London?" and they said "we're with the Irish Parliament. We're speaking tomorrow, for the farmers."
