Side-By-Side Whiskey Glass Comparison: Norlan vs. Glencairn vs. Snifter By Richard Thomas Part of the world craze for all things whisk(e)y is a parallel boom in stuff, including stones, ice molds, and especially glassware. Twenty years ago, the classic snifter was good enough for enthusiasts, but it was supplanted after 2001 to a large extent by the Glencairn, and now ...

By Father John Rayls Have you ever read an advertisement about a whiskey or a cigar and wondered if the marketers had ever even bothered to try the product they were pushing?  Sometimes the claimed flavors and aromas are the stuff of pure Hollywood fiction, with no connection to reality. Knowing how this can be the case, I tend to ...

By Richard Thomas Twenty years ago, if you were a genuinely devoted fan of a particular type of whiskey—Scotch, Irish, bourbon, what have you—you could acquaint yourself with most offerings in your field of choice in just a few years. One of the points of evidence that so undermines the shortage claims is how much this has changed: there are ...

By Richard Thomas Perhaps because I can date my first interest in good spirits back to a time when double and triple malts might have become a fad and Blanton’s was a new and novel product, I’m of two minds about whiskey glassware. Mindful that in the days of my youth, Kentucky’s master distillers would often call on each other ...

By Richard Thomas Given that one of Corsair Distillery’s principal claims to fame is its Triple Smoke Whiskey, it’s not surprising that one of co-founder Darek Bell’s books on craft whiskey-making would be about smoking it up. In Fire Water, Bell has penned a guide on the methods and materials of smoking grain for making whiskey, and in essence recounts ...