Heaven on Earth
My present state of mind had its birth several years ago during a whiskey tasting party at my sister’s house. The proud father was none other than John Sweeney.
John has been a friend of the family for longer than I can remember. He is also a serious whiskey drinker - you know the type - the kind that doesn’t even ask the price of the bottle when he’s in the market for the drink. He can tell the difference between scotches, bourbons, single malts, and all the others that I barely know exist. This is a knowledgeable man on a life-long mission with what the Irish call “uisce batha” (ish-kah bah-ha) or “the water of life.”
I like whiskey too and pour myself a jigger every now and then – in my special glass with a few cubes of ice. That’s it. At this stage in my life, I figure I must have some standards, so I drink only Irish whiskey aged twelve years in the wood.
When the opportunity came up, I, of course, jumped at the chance to spend a few hours at my sister’s on that Friday evening sampling the many obscenely priced whiskeys John would be serving us.
We started off light. A delicate single malt here, a blended whiskey there. The glasses lined up and quickly emptied. John went on and on about where and how each one was made, and how the geography around the distillery affects the taste. He even spoke about how distillers stack the barrels of whiskey so that they age properly. More glasses were poured. We drank and laughed and experienced. In a short time, my tongue was starting to go numb as well as my senses. Then John brought out what he considered the cream of the crop – some type of twenty-five-year-old something or other. I could not understand him. We were all starting to mumble.
He poured me a healthy amount while he described its “smoky peat” taste. By this time, and seeing the price on this bottle, I am expecting to take a sip of this stuff and immediately think I am in heaven. I lifted the glass to my mouth and heartily swallowed in half a jigger’s worth.
The wind was immediately knocked out of me. My body temperature went from normal to fever level in half a second. My eyes watered profusely. It was like gargling with kerosene mixed with campfire ash.
“John!” I screamed. “Why didn’t you just put a live grenade in my mouth and pull the pin?”
John chuckled in that low chuckle that he always does when he wins at anything (which is all the time) and told me I was a lightweight. “You’ve got to move beyond those entry-level whiskeys,” he advised. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.
There was nothing I could drink or eat the rest of that night to remove the taste of burnt peat from the skid marks left behind in my mouth.
The basic science behind making whiskey is simple. Barley is spread over the malting floor and allowed to germinate. In the process of sprouting, some of the starch in the seed is converted into simple sugars.
The malted barley is then dried over heat. For some whiskeys, this drying is done in a peat-fired kiln, which imparts the smoky flavor into the malt. The dried malted barley is ground up into grist and mixed with water to dissolve the sugars. Then the grist is removed.
Yeast is added to the sugar water and this “wort” is fermented. Alcohol is a by-product of yeast metabolism. Once fermentation is complete, the mixture is distilled to remove and collect the alcohol. Not all the impurities, however, are removed in the distillation process. These impurities are what gives each brand of whiskey their unique tastes.
The “new” whiskey is stored in wooden casks to age for a minimum of three years, often longer for top-shelf varieties.
This is basically how whiskey is made. In reality, like anything, making whiskey that sits at the top of the whiskey food chain can be mind-dizzyingly complicated.
The “cream of the crop” whiskey that John gave me that night was, beyond its complications, of the variety where the malted barley was dried in a peat-fired kiln. Like I mentioned before, it was basically kerosene mixed with campfire ash.
Not long after this life-changing experience (although I hadn’t known about the life-changing part at the time), I had run out of whiskey, so I made my way to a large local package store that carried a variety of Irish whiskeys. This time I was thinking of purchasing Red Breast, a fine aged single malt Irish whiskey that I’ve bought from time to time. To my disappointment and total unbelief, they didn’t have the Red Breast, but I did notice that they had some Connemara whiskey. At the time I was studying the Connemara Irish dialect that my paternal ancestors would have spoken, I was planning on going to Ireland at some time, and blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. I could not fight this impulse any more than I could fight the rising tide of the Irish Sea. I came, I saw, I bought. And it wasn’t cheap.
That night I put some traditional Irish music on the stereo, placed a few ice cubes in my special whiskey glass, opened the new bottle of Connemara whiskey and poured a healthy amount for meself. Ahhhh, I thought as I raised the glass to my lips.
First, the hooch burned my tongue, throat, and the lining of my stomach. Then the peat smoke vapors from the gaseous fireball I just swallowed rose up and burned all sense of smell from my nose. Tears freely flowed from my eyes.
I grabbed the bottle and read the label through my watery eyes. Connemara peated single malt revives the age-old tradition of creating Irish whiskey from malted barley kilned over peat fires. I drank the rest of the glass that night because I was too cheap to throw it out, but that was it. The bottle went untouched for months after that.
‘Twas a year later and I was walking around Lisdoonvarna, County Clare, the first night I was in Ireland for a packaged hiking tour. At this time of the year, Ireland, or at least this part, had drizzly weather. It was cool and damp almost all the time. I was okay with that, being from Massachusetts where it gets colder, but the locals thought it was cold enough to turn on the heat. Some must have started peat fires in their fireplaces. Every once in a while, I’d get that unmistakable whiff of that burning “turf.” It smells like a cross between wood fire smoke and the exhaust fumes from an oil burner that needs a tune-up.
Three days later my hiking group was climbing Sliabh Leic Aimhréidh (Mt. Lackavrea) in Connemara, one of the most beautiful places on earth. It was a cool day and the smell of a peat fire burning in a local cottage hearth often filled the air. I looked at the mountains surrounding me, the luscious green valley lying below me, and I thought for a moment I was in heaven, or at least as close as I will ever get to that holy place.
One of the first things I did when I got home from Ireland was to sit in the quiet of the night and open my orphaned bottle of Connemara whiskey. It really isn’t that bad, you know. Quite good, actually.
In my mind I don’t think I left Connemara. Ever. I hiked there that day and I am still there now. Connemara flows through my ancestral veins. It’s a place and a smell and a whiskey. It’s uisce batha. And it is heaven on earth. John tried to tell me that years ago at my sister’s although I am sure he wasn’t conscious about it. So, I poured myself another glass and toasted the prophet John. I toasted those crazy Irishmen of antiquity who married the secret formula of malted barley with the magic of peat. And I toasted Connemara, the birthplace of my soul.
