10 • MALT IMPOSTOR The Malt Impostor FEELING CRABBY
This issue, the Impostors don their pointy hats and go all alchemical on 128.3: Chestnut puree & new hiking boots
T
his dram recalls our most recent visit to the home of our favorite Welsh
alchemist, Afarwy Arthfael Creirdyddlydd (but he insists we call him ‘Charlotte’): We walk through the kitchen and are confronted with smells both sweet and herbal. We note the smell of lemon drops, Lemon Drops®, and dropped lemons. [‘For God’s sake, watch your step!’] Or perhaps it’s just a sachet of Herbes des not Provence: sage, mint, quince flesh, jasmine leaves, lavender, and aloe simmering in a fine honey syrup, with chalk dust suspended in it. [we interrupt this reverie
to note: This dram has very slow legs. They show more reluctance to return to the liquid than swimmers after a clap of thunder rattles the pool house.] But none of the kitchen complexities prepare us for the startlingly complex mouth. Imagine the diff erence between chewing a sage leaf
with one’s molars and with one’s incisors; such is the slight bitterness that appears. But this is just the piquancy that concentrates the flavour like the time Bill drank deeply from a chalice of slippery elm liquor to appease a suspicious warlock. The warlock was, Charlotte is quick to point out, no relation of his.
F THE SCOTCH MALT WHISKY SOCIETY
amed in his heyday for turning moss into algae, our friend now succeeds in turning a
veggie burger in a delicious, greasy, and completely cruelty-free beef burger (yes, these are the fl avors we get on the mouth). PETA made earlier inquiries, but he convinced their Naugahyde-jackbooted representatives that it was merely food for the ferrets that power his wife’s completely off-the-grid pottery wheel. (They bought it. The story and the existence of a carbon- neutral pottery wheel). On the finish, we get
Charlotte’s proprietary tellicherry black peppercorns popped in slippery elm oil and served in an early Dale Chihuly sculpture that no one dares to eat from because it’s art.
if not others, it is quite unlike Michael Jackson’s. There are also fruity and savory notes here along with a hint of brininess, like those one would find in Charlotte’s famous Caribbean mincemeat pie: baked apple, apple in a sauna, a crab apple stuff ed into a big red apple and then into a crab. Water improves the finish, too: long and more glowing,
W
ith water it’s the same nose, only less so, so in this respect,
a firefly turned on by the moon. We also noted a hint of astringency, like after shaking hands with the custodian who shaves nightly in the bowels of the mechanical room looking into a hand mirror held upside down by a straightened-out coat hanger wrapped around a pipe. While Charlotte toiled for days in a vain attempt to capture and replicate this last note, we just squirreled away an extra bottle of the 128.3. On the scale of celebrated
suspicious warlocks, the SMWS 128.3 is Monty Python’s Tim.
Flame-throwing, ram horn-
wearing, awesomeness summed up in one short, cognitive dissonance inducing moniker.
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