Try a Buffalo Trace antique collection and you'll see why bourbon is a respected spirit among connoisseurs.
The problem is, making real bourbon is very difficult because you have to let so much evaporate off that producers lose a lot of product. E.g. 84% of the Buffalo Trace 2015 George T. Stagg evaporated off. That's a lot of lost product -- so they're opening these 53 gallon barrels and pulling out about 8 gallons of product. Producers don't like those numbers, but that's how you make real bourbon. So it leaves most people thinking they dislike Bourbon before ever having drank a real classic bourbon.
By comparison, Scotch is a very simple, cloying beverage. Scotch's complexity all comes from the peat, it's all show. If you pour enough peat in any whiskey it will taste roughly like Lagavulin. Bourbon is a more honest beverage, you're not covering anything up, which means a bad Bourbon is very bad and a good Bourbon is very, very good.
Scotch is the IPA of whiskey. It's criminal if you ask me.
Scotch's complexity all comes from the peat, it's all show
This isn't even close to true; the entire Speyside region (which produces more Scotch, and more popular Scotch, than any other region) refutes it --- most Speysides have little if any peat.
The Speysides are artificially evaporated because the North Scottish climate doesn't allow the barrels to adequately breathe -- it kills the whiskey. By comparison, the heavy temperature swings in Kentucky open and close the barrels every season, so you see a much larger angel's share, and thus a much more complex whiskey.
Drinking an 18 year Bourbon is like drinking a 40 year barrel-aged Speyside. Sure, if you can get your hands on a 40 year old barrel-aged Speyside Scotch, I misspoke. But that's rather outside the budget of even the most die-hard Whiskey fans.
As a result, most Speysides fall roughly into that same category as the shite bourbons. Once you stop covering up their failings, you're left with a boring, watery, lifeless whiskey.
It's like if we were talking beer and I said "Americans just cover up their beer with flavorants so you don't realize they're watery garbage. German and Belgian beers are superior." and you fired back "That's not true! Coors Lite doesn't do that!" No, you're right, Coors Lite doesn't do that.
I am having trouble with the idea that a bourbon-casked Glenrothes, with no peat and practically no other flavors other than the malt, has been "covered up" with flavoring, while a "serious" Scotch like Laphroiag, which has so much peat it tastes like unsweetened cough medicine filtered through a swamp bog, is standing on the true quality of the whiskey itself.
Is there more crappy Speyside than crappy Islay? Yes, of course: there is more Speyside period, the world's most popular Scotch whiskey comes from Speyside, and most blended Scotch is built from Speyside distilleries.
What any of this has to do with the idea that Scotch is all about peat is past me. Once again: the most popular Scotch in the world has minimal peat, and lots of Speysides have no peat at all. Ergo: it cannot be the case that Scotch is simply peat-flavored whiskey.
People who talk enthusiastically about American beer don't generally think about Coors Lite, let alone talk about it.
The age comment you made about bourbon and Scotch is also weird, since most bourbon is aged less than 12 years to begin with. At 18 years, you're asking me to compare a cask-strength Pappy or Buffalo antique --- bourbons that were built to be aged past the point where most bourbon would suffer for it --- to Scotch. That's a pretty apples/oranges comparison.
To pick up a 40 year barrel-aged Glenrothes you're looking at paying about €4500 a bottle, and that gets you about 90% evaporation. That's only 6% more angel-share than a $70 dollar bottle of BT Antique Collection.
If you can afford that, more power to you, but that's not really in the realm of what I'm talking about. The Scottish climate is just inappropriate for the making of proper whiskey in a timely and cost-effective fashion.
You said, "At 18 years, you're asking me to compare a cask-strength Pappy or Buffalo antique --- bourbons that were built to be aged past the point where most bourbon would suffer for it --- to Scotch."
I've been talking about BT/Pappy, etc. the whole time. Did you read my first comment?
"The problem is, making real bourbon is very difficult because you have to let so much evaporate off that producers lose a lot of product. E.g. 84% of the Buffalo Trace 2015 George T. Stagg evaporated off. That's a lot of lost product -- so they're opening these 53 gallon barrels and pulling out about 8 gallons of product. Producers don't like those numbers, but that's how you make real bourbon. So it leaves most people thinking they dislike bourbon before ever having drank a real classic bourbon."
First: it's weird to me that you qualify bourbon by how much evaporates off.
Second: if you're going to talk about "how you make real bourbon", you're probably better off not bringing a Veblen NDP like Pappy into the discussion.
Third: there is plenty of amazing bourbon to be had that isn't a Buffalo antique at $120 a bottle, so I object to the "real bourbon" notion you're putting forward. 84% of Weller didn't evaporate, it's not aged 18 years, costs $30, and it's the same juice as Pappy, just handled more competently so it doesn't taste like grass clippings.
Fourth: who the hell drinks 40 year old Glenrothes? I'm talking about the Glenrothes you buy at the liquor store.
Fifth: once again, what does any of this have to do with whether Scotch is defined by peat flavor? I'm pretty sure you were just wrong about that.
I'm talking evaporation because evaporation is first and foremost what matters in aging. Great whiskey is thick whiskey.
Why would you throw around NDP like that's a bad thing? NDPs are no better or worse. Pappy, if you're talking Stitzel-Weller Pappy, is one of the best Bourbons you can/could buy, period.
Yes, Weller 12 is great (like Pappy 12). It's not syrupy enough, but that aside, it's a quality Bourbon at a competitive price. Is it as good as a 23 year SW Pappy? You're kidding yourself -- they're in completely different leagues.
What's more, with a Weller 12 you're still looking at 42% angel-share. Considerably higher than anything you'll see out of Scotland.
I'm sorry my peat comment upset you. Maybe it's a regional thing, by and large when we say Scotch we mean Islay or High-land. Either way, it's a lot of watery garbage, peat or no.
Strong disagree on pretty much all of this. The idea that US whiskey is more viscous than Scotch sounded so batty to me that I just checked, with a Willett, a TH Saz, and a GlenDronach 18; the Dronach is the leggiest of the three. (The Dronach is obviously not the best of those three whiskies.)
I think I don't believe you that viscosity is a simple function of evaporation.
Think about it: in both US and Scottish whiskey, the spirit going into the barrel is much higher proof than what's in the bottle, or what you should reasonably drink it at if you've got a cask-strength bottle. If "good whiskey" is "thick whiskey", where "thickness" is the amount of water the distillate had lost relative to alcohol, then we'd all just be buying the highest proof spirit; you could treat the ABV like a point score for quality. Both US and Scottish whiskey is diluted to a place the distiller wants it to be at.
We also wouldn't need tasting notes describing the legs, because if it's just about evaporation, then it's purely a function of ABV, and that's printed on the bottle!
Certainly the idea that one should evaluate a whiskey based solely on its legginess finds support in zero whiskey sources I can find.
I don't just think Pappy is overpriced Veblen whiskey that people overpay for because it's the only brand they've heard of --- although people absolutely do that, and secondary market prices, which are the only place you can reliably buy the stuff, make it one of the major rip-offs in all of spirits. I also think Pappy is inferior to Weller. Maybe I've just been given flawed bottles; the 20 literally tastes like grass clippings, and I'd take a FR SB over any of the other Pappies any day.
At any rate: Scotch is not "all about the peat". You have to not drink a lot of Scotch to think that. Which is fine! Just moderate your stridency a bit. :)
You ought not compare a forcibly evaporated Scotch in an overly active cask, to a true SBM that is naturally viscous due to aging in a living breathing cask.
It's not just the water loss that matters, but the total evaporation that increases your protein ppm, and the length of time those proteins have had to break down in solution, that provides the complexity to a proper whiskey.
You don't detect that by legs, but by mouth-feel -- surface tension and viscosity are not the same thing.
I'm glad, I enjoyed having it. I would note that I was taking a very extreme position for hyperbole's sake, which Ptacek took quite literally, and I was in the mood to argue.
The guidelines don't prohibit that horrible pun, but I'm going to lobby to see that they do in the future, so none of us will have to suffer like this again.
Some folks advocate for a collapse-comments feature on HN.
I would like to advocate for a explode-to-frontpage comments feature ... so we could have a new front page item for "that great scotch vs. bourbon argument we had in the TPP comments".
Oh yes. I second that strongly. Some of the best things I ever saw on HN, and that I sometimes bookmark, are those random off-topic subthreads that spawn in the middle of another discussion. A way to cross-link comment threads like this would be really useful.
Well you could always just make a new submission linking to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512999 and see if it got upvoted enough - but maybe would be better if the new submission could incorporate the previous comments rather than just link to them
The problem is, making real bourbon is very difficult because you have to let so much evaporate off that producers lose a lot of product. E.g. 84% of the Buffalo Trace 2015 George T. Stagg evaporated off. That's a lot of lost product -- so they're opening these 53 gallon barrels and pulling out about 8 gallons of product. Producers don't like those numbers, but that's how you make real bourbon. So it leaves most people thinking they dislike Bourbon before ever having drank a real classic bourbon.
By comparison, Scotch is a very simple, cloying beverage. Scotch's complexity all comes from the peat, it's all show. If you pour enough peat in any whiskey it will taste roughly like Lagavulin. Bourbon is a more honest beverage, you're not covering anything up, which means a bad Bourbon is very bad and a good Bourbon is very, very good.
Scotch is the IPA of whiskey. It's criminal if you ask me.