Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
There are perks to my job beyond just being able to say I’m living a 15-year-old’s dream by writing about football and beer each week. A rash of PR emails hits my inbox each day, and while most aren’t anything worth covering here there’s occasionally a gem in that minefield. An offer to sample some great beers. A month’s supply of caffeine in a single UPS box of energy drinks.
And, as happened this summer, a bottle of scotch older than I am.
Benriach reached out with the opportunity to try a whisky I could otherwise never afford. The Scottish distiller’s mailer consisted of a 100 milliliter package of 40-year-old scotch, roughly the size of a shampoo bottle you’d find waiting at a nicer hotel. With a suggested retail price of $4,500 for a fifth, that put the estimated price of this mini-bottle at $600.
And they sent it to me, the guy who compares every drink he reviews to Hamm’s.
I’m not a scotch expert, but it is one of my favorite spirits. I tend to steer toward the peaty, salty Islay malts — one of my rare trips overseas involved a trip to that lovely island and what felt like 400 drams in a three-day period — but for the most part there’s no such thing as a bad scotch. Like pizza or sex, even when it’s awful it’s still better than most things.
This stands as my introduction to Benriach’s offerings and, damn, what a way to start. Well, it’s time for me to go drink a car payment’s worth of whisky. Let’s see how it is.
Benriach The Forty whisky: A
The first sip is wonderful. Warm and inviting, smooth with no burn to speak of. The vanilla oak is front and center, balanced off with a little malt and lots of fruity, earthy currents swirling underneath. The tail end is a bit of caramel but mostly fruit. While it’s made with peated malt, those smoky flavors have all been lost to the ages, so you won’t mistake it for an Islay whisky.
There’s a lingering sweetness that sticks with you. It’s not overpowering, but unique to the spirit. I’ve never had a scotch like this and, in deference to the $4,500 price tag, I doubt I will again. I could drink this all night. I won’t, because I only have 100 milliliters of it and even that has a retail price of $600. But hot damn, this is one of the best things I’ve ever drank.
Would I drink it instead of a Hamm's?
This a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Benriach The Forty over a cold can of Hamm’s?
Of course I would; that’s not really the question. Instead it’s a matter of whether or not this whisky and its absurd price tag are worth anything more than being a status symbol atop your wall of malts.
For me, nah. You can get plenty of good 14 to 18-year scotches for under $100, so ponying up 50 times more for a dram that’s probably 30 percent better doesn’t make much sense. If you’re asking me whether I’d prefer one bottle of The Forty or 65 bottles of Oban 14 or Caol Ila 12 then guess what? The Forty’s gonna lose that battle every time.
But I’m not the target audience for this. I lucked into it because I have a column a few people read and like whisk(e)y. Dropping $70 on a bottle of good stuff feels excessive to me, because it is. Dropping multiple months of mortgage payments on a bottle of great stuff, no matter how smooth and flavorful it is, feels stupid. Because it is.
So this is for the drinker out there who’s making 65 times what I am annually and to whom $4,500 feels like $70. And at that stage, hell yeah, enjoy. I’m gonna stick to the occasional splurge on Bunnahabhain and Dalwhinnie and maybe a little Kilchoman, too. However, if someone offers me another shot at The Forty, I’ll sure as hell take it.
