The Bushmills people got their distilling license 400 years ago, so they are celebrating with a premium blend called Bushmills 1608 which will be available only during the anniversary year of 2008. No, it doesn’t have any 400 year old whiskey in the blend, but they claim it was made with some kind of special crystal malt.
The master distiller kindly sent me an itty-bitty sample bottle, which I drank for breakfast a few mornings ago with a fried egg and toast. The whiskey is aged in sherry barrels, like Black Bush, so it has a sweet aftertaste that kind of reminds me of butterscotch. It’s bottled at a full 46 percent alcohol, so the flavor is intense. The aroma reminds me of an aged Cognac – and so does the price.
It’s a lovely breakfast beverage on the whole, but personally, I’d rather have five bottles of regular Bushmills, which has always been my favorite Irish whiskey anyway. – Robb Walsh
I'm starting to learn a little bit about the malting process but would love any information you may have on it respect to whiskey making. Maybe in a future blog?
This interest started on Saturday when I was at Komart, the Korean grocery store on Gessner. The Koreans use a lot of sweet syrups in their cooking. Komart is a good place for inexpensive corn syrup (not to be confused with high fructose corn syrup). I noticed that there were several of rice based syrups for sale. I hadn't heard of rice syrup before and so I picked up a malted rice syrup to try. It was delicious. It was reminiscent of cane sugar syrups and had a smoky taste and not as much of a bite. I've since learned that the Chinese would sprout barley and then dry it, the sprouting process released enzymes that were not affected by the drying afterward, enzymes that could then break down the starches in grains such as rice and convert them into sugars.
Is this malting process to produce sugars used by the Irish and Scots to make whiskey?
Posted at: March 17, 2008 3:33 PM