What the hell do your ratings mean?

I’m sure this will surprise no one (1) that I have a consistent meanings for my ratings for whisk(e)y and cigars. I figured it would be helpful to actually share that so we can all be on the same page.

Star Ratings

No stars: Even spite or malice towards this cigar or whiskey couldn’t bring me to finish it.

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆: I finished, potentially out of spite, or I was too lazy to care enough about its badness. I wouldn’t argue of someone gave e my money back, especially if it was a Gurkha (2).

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆: It was fine. It had something that was vaguely interesting about it but I wouldn’t recommend it unless I knew that was, like, your thing.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆: Entirely reasonable. It had a few good things going on for it that I appreciated. I’d probably buy it again and would be happy with it.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆: This was marvelous. It has a memorable character, lots of good things going for it, some complexity or just does one things stupidly well. This makes me want to find other stuff by the group that made it.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★: Holy fuck balls, can I main-line this? Like, I’d probably be ok watching my life waste away into vice, only to be found in a gutter with nary a broken bottle to rest my head upon as I gaze with regret upon all the blog posts I would not make because this things was so good my life had to be given to it.

Et voila, we have our system.

1. Except you…. Rob. ↩︎

2. (Oh snap.) Actually, one of my earliest, tastiest cigars was a Gurkha but I didn’t pay for it myself. So that may have helped what with their markups. ↩︎

Dram and Drag: Teeling Small Batch

Friday I found myself with a few friends at the Malt House on the East Side. If you’re not familiar (1) it would behoove you to visit, even on a Friday night when it gets loud. It’s the only place I’ve been in Wisconsin that captures the Irish pub feel. Small, jovial, with warm and inviting bones with a little bit of bar hard edge. The delightful irony that I was drinking whiskey sitting in a reclaimed church pew was not lost.

I am very clearly an Irish whiskey (2) guy. Nearly all of my top whiskeys are Irish or start with an Irish whiskey character - malt and caramel, light body. I was pleased to see something very new on their menu: Teeling Small Batch whiskey. It was new in two sense: new to the menu and new to distribution. Teeling has (sorta) just started.

The family itself has been distilling whiskey around for 230 years only a few years under current naming The Teeling family sold their original distillery to Jameson around the beginning of the 20th century and this incarnation was spun off after Jim Beam bought the second incarnation in 2011.

The interweaving of old world distilling knowledge and modern sensibility is apparent in the Small Batch I drank last night. It is, at its core, a light (3) and malty Irish whiskey. Where it forks from expectation is in the intensity of the malt flavors. Each taste itself is smooth and caramel tinged so that I am left with the over all impression of a wildly malty drink is curious.

The secret, I think, is in the body. Irish whiskies evaporate more quickly on the tongue. This one, because of it, insinuates malt and caramel over your entire mouth thus allowing those flavors to build over time. Further, the spice you get on the middle and end, which is created by finishing in rum barrels (4), is draped in that same sweetness making that less intense sip to sip. But it similarly builds over the entire drink.

Teeling Small Batch is a clever whiskey and I am, for lack of a better word, intrigued to find the rest of their line.

Check out their intro video below.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

1. Shame on you. You need to go if you like any of the following:

   1. Whiskey, especially American because if the size of their selection.
   2. Trappist beer.
   3. Freedom ↩︎

2. With an “e”. ↩︎

3. It’s that lighter body which makes Irish whiskies so drinkable. They do not weigh on the palette. It is also why Irish whiskies are mediocre mixers. ↩︎

4. I’ve not seen other spirits aged in rum barrels. It is interesting and encapsulates Teeling’s old world sensibilities with modern affectation. ↩︎

Version 4

Yet more changes.

1. The obviously iconographic bug bugged me (ha?) so I went a little more literal. And it looks less like a coffee bean now.
2. All the principles had the first half bold except the third which looked silly. So either, I needed to phrase it differently or just ditch it.
3. Change line lengths for the text block.

I did try to justify the text into a square but the program I’m using decided to be finicky and I am far too lazy to do it manually.

Still not sure I call this done yet. Something about the text block is irking me.

See that… I didn’t say “bugging” me.

Wait…

Three Months Down, My Whole Life To Go

I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.

It’s been a little over three months since I started this Wrestling with Franklin project with the above quote from Franklin’s autobiography. I am not sure what I expected to happen or to be after working through his 13 virtues but I know I wasn’t so foolish to believe that even working through them once was going to grant me some Great Insight into myself. On the contrary, I think I expected it to be the start of some longer revelation and I’d have the seed of something start to germinate, like the end of a long winter.

At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing, here’s what I said back in January:

“I am, however, not striving for moral perfection. I don’t know if I even fathom what that would look like given my beliefs and place in the world. But it is no matter: the process of watching myself, having a focus, should help reveal it.”

I’ve made a few particular insights each week and I feel like I have a better sense of what the virtues mean to me after having studied them from Franklin’s writing. For one so ambitious as Franklin, who says himself he’s seeking perfection, he didn’t really write that much about virtue. He was probably too busy inventing the post office, the public library, or a country, I suppose.

So I feel like I have a sense of what these virtues had to mean for Franklin given his time and place in society. And I see how the virtues would work or not work for me then and now. But I don’t think I can quite articulate that today.

Which is entirely fine. Franklin’s intention for his Moral Perfection project was an ever-spinning cycle of focus for each virtue. After 13 weeks, one simply starts anew with focus on Temperance again. He offered no process for evaluating progress or suggestions for righting wrong behavior. I don’t even think he kept a record of his own weekly progress - he says himself that he erased each week’s grid marks when he started again:

To avoid the trouble of renewing now and then my little book, which, by scraping out the marks on the paper of old faults to make room for new ones in a new course, became full of holes, I transferr’d my tables and precepts to the ivory leaves of a memorandum book, on which the lines were drawn with red ink, that made a durable stain, and on those lines I mark’d my faults with a black-lead pencil, which marks I could easily wipe out with a wet sponge.

From all of this, there seems to be no record or writing on how Franklin progressed, if he got better over time. Which is fine, I suppose, since his “better” is not necessarily my better. As I see it, virtues change over time. Things once valued may no longer be centuries or decades or even months later. Society fluctuates. What I value and what modern society values and, what both would deem “Virtuous” is going to be different necessarily.

So after spending 3 months trying to understand what this all meant to Franklin, I have to start figuring out what this means to me. Starting tis coming Sunday, it;s back to the top with Temperance but I shall endeavor to outline what the virtue meant to Franklin, briefly, and then outline what the virtue means to me today. The delta between these two is interesting because maybe we can see how society has changed since Franklin started his own exploration over 200 hundred years ago.

Let us begin chapter 2, eh?

Connemara, the Pretty Irish Lass

Irish whiskeys are pretty unassuming characters, subtle, calm in temperament. This whiskey has a light touch with caramel and oak flavors on the front. This gives way to the peat and smoke.

The smoke rolls in rather abruptly and wipes clean any lingering sweetness and ushers in an acrid feeling as it evaporates off your tongue.

It’s neither pleasant or unpleasant, it just calls for attention in a way you wish it would not. But not for the rapid transition, I think it would be easy to miss the peat flavors that bridge these two distinct tasting portions.

There’s a moment where it becomes this lush, green flavor, like what one would expect the Irish countryside to taste like if you could distill a few square miles. It’s unexpected but draws you from the simplicity of the fore-flavors to the smoke and fire and warmth you find in heavier Scotch. It takes the whiskey from unassuming, to knowing; which makes the whiskey a pleasant dram with a little secret that the two of you share.

Irish or Irish-styled whiskeys are fast becoming my favorites. And I especially like finding a lightly smoked drink perfect as the weather in Wisconsin shifts from Spring to Summer. It will keep you warm and happy and fuzzy like a good Irish stereotype.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
3 to 3.5 stars. Drink it straight after you let it aerate. Straight from a fresh bottle and the sweeter notes are dull but the smoke is not and it will rampage over your palate.

I could see this pairing well with a light wrapper cigar or one of the interesting barberpole cigars I;ve seen lately; I especially liked the one from Camacho which included a green wrapper that would enhance the vegetative, peaty notes on the transition.

Connemara, the Pretty Irish Lass

Irish whiskeys are pretty unassuming characters, subtle, calm in temperament. This whiskey has a light touch with caramel and oak flavors on the front. This gives way to the peat and smoke.

The smoke rolls in rather abruptly and wipes clean any lingering sweetness and ushers in an acrid feeling as it evaporates off your tongue.

It’s neither pleasant or unpleasant, it just calls for attention in a way you wish it would not. But not for the rapid transition, I think it would be easy to miss the peat flavors that bridge these two distinct tasting portions.

There’s a moment where it becomes this lush, green flavor, like what one would expect the Irish countryside to taste like if you could distill a few square miles. It’s unexpected but draws you from the simplicity of the fore-flavors to the smoke and fire and warmth you find in heavier Scotch. It takes the whiskey from unassuming, to knowing; which makes the whiskey a pleasant dram with a little secret that the two of you share.

Irish or Irish-styled whiskeys are fast becoming my favorites. And I especially like finding a lightly smoked drink perfect as the weather in Wisconsin shifts from Spring to Summer. It will keep you warm and happy and fuzzy like a good Irish stereotype.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
3 to 3.5 stars. Drink it straight after you let it aerate. Straight from a fresh bottle and the sweeter notes are dull but the smoke is not and it will rampage over your palate.

I could see this pairing well with a light wrapper cigar or one of the interesting barberpole cigars I;ve seen lately; I especially liked the one from Camacho which included a green wrapper that would enhance the vegetative, peaty notes on the transition.