Toast Tuesday: Japanese Whisky

This week in The Year of Drinking Adventurously, I exercised some restraint and did not spend $100 on a bottle of Japanese Whisky.  My tiny kitchen runneth over with booze.

 

This week I found a small Japanese restaurant that stocked a Japanese whisky and went out to dinner.

The book tell us Japanese whisky has roots in Scotland, as such, has a smoky scotch-like quality about it. I won’t say that’s where the differences end, but Japanese whisky has taken a different path to their blends. Many of the distilleries have several stills to make different whiskies to blend for the final product.

One of my recon assistants shared this nugget with me:

I’ve read that for the most part, Japanese use them to make highballs. I remember when I was in Japan, coming out of a conference hall, there was a high school girl in a tight skirt right there to hand me a drink. From the looks of it, I expected some sort of an exotic fruit juice refresher, but it was actually a whisky highball.

 

This seems to be a popular way to consume this.  Not necessarily with the high school girl…  but based on this friend’s experience, and that the first recipe recommendation on Yamazaki’s website, is a highball. I sipped my Yamazaki neat so I could actually taste it.  I think next time I’ll try their highball.

 

The patrons who dined around us almost proved more interesting than the meal itself.  Afterward we dashed off to a movie.  I’m not big on sitting in a dark theatre, craning my neck to see something that I can watch from the comfort of my couch in a few months, but The Big Short is excellent.  You’ll laugh your ass off the first half of the movie, and sit in stunned silence the second half.  They explain what happened in the housing market crash in such a way that makes perfect sense, and you leave the theatre in a state of shock, just shaking your head.  Go see it now.

Alright, economy seminar is over.  Get on with your day.  Have a good one and the next time your are at your favorite Japanese restaurant, ask for a Yamazaki highball.  I don’t think you’ll be sorry.