First things first: this is not the book to read if you’re looking for misty-colored anecdotes about the Sixteen Men of Tain chasing each other across endless fields of heather whilst their kilts flap slo-mo in the breeze as they celebrate the ancient rites that magically infuse their particular distillations, all to the sound of imaginary bagpipes. Nor is it appropriate for anyone wanting long-winded tales of how clever poteen distillers outsmarted revenue men, square-jawed myths of square-jawed Mounties swigging rye out of roughly square canteens, or rough-hewn pioneers hacking bourbon distilleries out of the wilderness of the Kaintuck. In short, if you’re looking for the mythology of whiskey (or whisky), this isn’t the book for you. Indeed, if that’s your take, this book is liable to prove a most unsatisfying read, and even a quick skim is liable to produce a surfeit of punctured preconceptions of what whiskey is, where it comes from, and how it’s made.
By the same token, anyone looking to this book as a guide to tasting, touring, or otherwise exhibiting snobbery over whiskey is going to be out of luck as well. This is not a book that encourages a whiskey lover to read it and congratulate themselves on their fine taste, nor is it a guide to individual distillations or distilleries.
It is, as the cover suggests, a history, and a singularly unromantic one at that. That’s quite all right, however. The sheer amount of factual material the author squeezes into his rather slender volume is impressive. Much of it is pure history, going back to the earliest possible examples of whiskey distillation in the historical record and then scrolling forward to the present day. Mixed in with that are digressions on how exactly various whiskeys are made, the broad differences between a few major types (scotch, irish, bourbon, rye, etc.), and the role whiskey has placed socio-politically through the ages. The latter is a mixed bag, as the author sees fit to drop a few editorial comments about the proper role of government in regulating and taxing whiskey production, and your mileage may vary as to whether that detracts from the overall whiskey-sodden reading experience.
The other place the book potentially disappoints is in the supplementary materials. The appendices are painfully short and brief, and the content – recommendations and recipes, mainly – tend toward the banal. Or, to put it another way, there’s not a lot of depth for the end user.
Still, if you’re looking for history, not myth, this book is both highly informative and quite useful. The explanations of distilling techniques are among the clearest and most concise I’ve run across, and the author does a fine job of breaking down what could be obscure jargon for the average reader. For those who don’t expect the book to be something it’s not, there’s a great deal of useful, well-written material. For those who can’t tear their appreciation of whiskey away from the myth long enough to learn about it’s equally fascinating real history, well, there’s other books you’ll probably enjoy much more.
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