Another Christmas in the Canada

So the missus and I have been on our travels again. Yeh, this time it was back to Canada for Christmas with the in-laws. I won’t be doing a play-by-play (at least that’s not the intention), but we do have a lot to get through, so let’s knuckle down, shall we?

Canada, home of the moose. Where, judging by the clothes, people are an unusual shape – I was once given a Canadian hoody as a gift (that said “Salty” on the front in big letters) which had extra-long arms and hand holes that were too small for my hands, but then bloused over the biceps. The head hole was similarly too tight, but there was definite blousing over the chest. It all suggested this particular cut was for an effete superhero, someone big of chest and bicep, but small of head and hands – Captain Salty, presumably. That’s not to mention all the shirts my brother-in-law gets for me that are – get this – slim fit, and of the correct neck measurement, but for some reason are MASSIVE. MASSIVE! And I’m 6 foot 3.

I tried to wear one of the shirts to work recently, with just a jumper. Looking in the mirror, I turned to Mrs Cake and asked, “is the collar on this shirt humourously large?”  I looked like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, only with shit hair, stubble and dark circles under my eyes.

Anyway! I was very much looking forward to going back to Calgary, and to getting away from work for an extended period. Sure, I knew there were going to be awkward moments, even dull ones, but that would be offset by the fun times and by the alcohol. Yes. It was a chance to delve a little deeper into the world of Canadian whisky. I had planned to delve a little into American bourbon too, but that didn’t happen. So, Canadian whisky.

Too much just isn’t an option this time

Better too much than not enough, I am known to say. I even abbreviate it to BTMTNE. Repeat that to yourself a few times, get used to it. It takes a bit of practice.

Sadly, there is such a thing as too much when you’re talking about just the right amount of booze booze to drink for the duration of your holiday. You don’t want to be leaving some behind, or trying to stretch your meagre weight/space allowance to covering half empty (I mean, half full) bottles you weren’t able to finish. Or just chugging it down to get it out of the way… unless you’re a Neanderthal. You’re not a Neanderthal, are you? No, this blog is about enjoying alcohol in a relaxed, sophisticated way (most of the time. Sometimes. Well, it’s supposed to be…)

So, two and a half weeks. That would be spent at various people’s houses, in various places, beer would tend to be available… one bottle of whisky should suffice, right? One?

Mrs Cake and I took a stroll through the snow to the Liquor Depot in Woodbine, Calgary that same day we arrived. We had a few hours to kill before we could permit ourselves to go to bed (in an attempt to defeat jetlag), and a small mission was just the job.

The moustachioed assistant was very enthusiastic in recommending Lot 40, a single pot still rye that he said was good enough to fool the casual scotch drinker (we’ll see about that), but at 50 dollars it wasn’t in my plans just yet. I wanted something cheap, since I was going to be drinking it all in a short space of time – relative to how quickly I normally drink my spirits, which is around 3 months, but then I always have several bottles on the go at once…

 

My choice was Alberta Springs 10 (40% ABV), which I’d read some good things about in my pre-trip research. It was something around 25 Canadian dollars for 75cl, and I worked it out at the time to be equivalent to £16.19, so that’s pretty cheap. Sometime later I found that I could have gotten it even cheaper from another liquor store, but the Liquor Depot was the only one available to me at that time. And it doesn’t seem to matter as much when you’re dealing in currencies that aren’t as valuable as your own.

To my immense surprise, it didn’t take me very long to drink this at all. Seriously, I really thought it might last the whole holiday. I didn’t even open it on the first night, opting instead to polish off a few beers that had been in the mother-in-law’s fridge since my last visit two years ago, and then try the Finlandia vodka that was part of the welcoming committee she pulled out of the cupboard and instructed me to help dispose of.

Nevertheless it lasted about a week. The killer was the third evening at Mrs Cake’s dad’s where I brought it out on our return from an ice hockey match. He usually brings the booze out, but I don’t like to take liberties, so rather than wait I just put the Alberta Springs on the table and Mrs Cake and her dad both joined me in indulging and then refilling. He even liked it, which surprised me a little as he only seems to like Glenmorangie – and he always drinks it with ice.

On our arrival, two days previously he had brought out all the bottles he wanted me to help him dispose of – you see, people seem to keep bringing him peaty stuff, and he doesn’t like it. I got to finish off bottles of Bruichladdich Peat and Highland Park 12 – as well as try a sampler bottle of Glenmorangie Nectar D’Or, which he had a few of (it seems you got them free with the Original over there).

I was pleased to be able to finish the Highland Park, but you may remember from a pre-Christmas post (though that was an extraordinarily long time ago now) that I had advised Mrs Cake to buy him a bottle of that for Christmas. Fail. We ended up going to the liquor store later (before the planned Christmas with her father – Christmas is complicated with broken families) and getting his favourite, while I would be taking the Highland Park we had bought back home with me – every cloud, indeed.

As for the Bruichladdich; well, I like Bruichladdich, but I wasn’t all that impressed with this expression. Shame. It’s possible it had been sitting in his booze cupboard (already open) for a couple of years.

With Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with the brother-in-law (Brian) and family approaching, and then a couple of nights in the mountains, I knew I was going to get a chance to try another cheap brand. We went to the budget Liquor Superstore where there was a brand at nearly 45% ABV for only 18 dollars. Well, you know me; I was tempted because I like to try the cheap shit – especially if it is particularly strong (which it never is), but instead I went for the Canadian ’83, which I’ve seen attributed to Seagram’s, though nowhere is that name mentioned on the label – or indeed anywhere on the funky, dimpled bottle. It is a standard 40% ABV, and this time the 75cl cost around 20 Canadian dollars, which I worked out to be £12.38.

It stood by my side as Brian and I constructed a Barbie dream house for two hours on Christmas Eve. It fuelled me through the obligatory all-day Christmas session, where at the end, I still felt sober enough to drive (though I didn’t drive, incidentally). It accompanied us to Canmore, where we were based for my first ever skiing trip, and lasted all the way to New Year’s Eve - our last night, that we spent with friends playing Cards Against Humanity. 

I suppose you must be wondering what the verdict is on these two products. Were they any good? Which is best? Well, first let me apologise for failing to get any tasting notes down – I didn’t manage to get anything specific, but I can tell you, for the minimal outlay, they are very good. Of the two, I did prefer the Alberta Springs. It elicited the most consistent response from my tastebuds with its reliably sweet complexity.

By contrast I’m not sure what was going on with the ’83. On some occasions it was flat and uninteresting, while on others a pleasant sweetness emerged that I could enjoy almost as much as its predecessor.

Even so, the Alberta Springs wasn’t able to break into my top 3 of Canadian whiskies (in ranking order; Crown Royal Black, Crown Royal, Windsor Canadian), all of which are encouragingly affordable, though Crown Royal Black pushes the envelope slightly. I was able to bring a couple of Canadian whiskies back with me, as we’ll see in the next section, so maybe one of those will.

That’s all from me for this week. I’m off to Spain this weekend to hopefully replenish my stocks of brandy, orujo and absinthe, as well as pick up a Duty Free only Highland Park… and spend time with my family, of course! So I might be back posting next weekend, when we’ll look at Part 2…

Booze Tourism Part 3 - Canada

Popular Canadian souvenirs - maple syrup, mountie stuff, smoked salmon.

Being Canadian but living in the UK, my fiancée Brenda has to alternate her Christmases - spending one with me and my family, and the next back in Canada with hers, so this year it was time to go back to Canada, and I had promised to go with her. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been to Canada, but it would be my first Canadian Christmas, and my first visit since becoming a booze tourist.

On my first visit I’d made sure to bring back a bottle of Wild Turkey, because I wanted to feel like Hunter S. Thompson (some say he drank Chivas Regal, but from reading his books, I remember a lot of Wild Turkey…), but as I said; I wasn’t a booze tourist then.

Canada is a good place to be a booze tourist. They have lots of different varieties of beer, and they are well situated geographically to take advantage of imports of bourbon and Tennessee whiskies from the USA as well as tequila from Mexico and rum from the Caribbean. I like all of those varieties of liquor, but they wouldn’t be on my shopping list this time. I had already decided that I’d be sourcing some Canadian whisky, and I made sure I was fully prepared with some pre-trip internet research.

I’d just like to namecheck a couple of websites here that I found useful. The first is http://www.canadianwhisky.org/. It focuses exclusively on Canadian Whisky and is filled with in depth reviews utilising a simple 5 star scoring system. The second is http://therumhowlerblog.wordpress.com/. This site contains tons of reviews of different kinds of gin, rum, vodka, tequila and of course whisky, as well as having a list of cocktails, and serving suggestions for each spirit reviewed. I have no idea how this guy has had enough time to try all these drinks, but it’s quite a collection, and I can only assume he doesn’t have a wife telling him that he drinks too much. He has a much more complicated rating system than canadianwhisky.org, but it certainly proved very useful for me.

Both these sites are valuable resources if you’re researching purchases for your next trip to Canada, and you’ll probably find the information on them far more useful than anything you’ll find on my blog, so go and check them out once you’ve finished reading this post.

I had tried some Canadian whiskies before, including Highwood and a couple of varieties of Canadian Club (thanks, Brenda!), but this time I was determined to be a bit more choosey. Visiting a liquor store was pretty much the only thing on my to do list for the trip, and I actually visited three or four before we left Calgary. They tended to stock (pretty much) the same stuff, so it was just a matter of finding the most competitive prices.

So where should you be focusing your attention when making purchases during a booze tourism adventure? Set your own rules here (because remember; there are no rules), but I like to look for something local, authentic/traditional, and something I can’t get at home.

I did quite well with my purchases on all those scores, though neither of my choices were local to Alberta (which is where Brenda’s family lives, and where my booze shopping took place) they are specifically Canadian.

Crown Royal is one of the most popular Canadian whiskies, so I decided to go for the Crown Royal Black, with is 5% stronger and a few dollars more expensive (but significantly cheaper than at www.thewhiskyexchange.com) . It is darker in colour than the standard, and the flavour is similar, but a little richer – I know because the future mother-in-law bought me a bottle of the standard Crown Royal for Christmas. That’s a nice whisky too, and probably the pick of all the bottles I have available at the time of writing. Crown Royal also comes in a nifty cloth bag, that I suppose serves to protect your liquor from sunlight if you haven’t got a cupboard to keep it in.

I’d decided to buy a second bottle to bring home with me, and for that one I went with Gibson’s Finest 12 Year Old. Again, this is the next step up from the normal Gibson’s, and it’s only available in Canada – I read that they can’t produce enough of it to export for some reason – maybe the Canadians drink a lot of it. This one has a very mild flavour compared to the Crown Royal. It’s sweet and pleasant, but not full-flavoured enough to dilute with ice.

The Crown Royal comes in a weird crown-shaped bottle, while the Gibson’s comes in a portly one, not dissimilar to the Bailey’s Irish Cream bottle in shape, though it is transparent so you can see how much is left – unlike Bailey’s where you’re always asking, “have I got enough left to make this cocktail?”  

There is one drawback with the Gibson’s – it has a screwcap with such a smooth action that it is almost impossible to resist spinning it off at high velocity. This almost always results in a series of fumbled catches leading to a frenzied chase around the kitchen floor – and if you’re extremely unlucky a foray into the furry depths beneath the fridge, or even having to pull the fridge out. Be warned; go easy on that cap.

Now, you’re only allowed to bring one 1.14l bottle of hard liquor back from Canada – that’s a good deal larger than a standard bottle, but not as big as two bottles, so if you do want to stick to your limits and you want to bring more than one variety home with you, you’re going to need a friend. I bought 75cl bottles. Brenda kindly offered to carry one for me. That still left me with two, but I was able to polish off the Crown Royal Black by New Year’s Day, thanks to a late night cigar/whisky-share deal I was able to arrange with someone we met at the Toronto wedding we’d been invited to on New Year’s Eve – though he was calling it ‘scotch’ for some reason. It seemed inappropriate to correct him.

 I’d opened it a week or so before so that Brenda’s brother Brian could try it (he was familiar with the standard Crown Royal, but likes to mix it with coke – still, it’s nice to share… and have an excuse to open a new bottle) and then I was able to dip into it from time to time in the evenings.

So given that the remaining bottles were 75cl that left us a little under the limit, even with the little Bruichladdich Rocks bottle (20cl) that Brian gave me. So it was a most successful trip. Not that anyone ever checks at Customs, but maybe they will one day.

I finished the Bruichladdich Rocks a couple of months after returning home, having been hanging on to the last drop for a while. I didn’t want to fritter it away willy-nilly because, even though it’s a blend of young single malts (6-8 years old), it had a complex flavour, and was one of the most interesting whiskies I’ve tried so far. It did tend to cause a slight burn on my tongue though, which is something I don’t notice very often, and is supposed to be the reason that real whisky experts add a drop or two of water. I still haven’t tried that, but I have heard that you can tell how aged a whisky is by where on your tongue it burns – young ones at the front, older further to the back.

I tried the standard Bruichladdich 10 year old recently on a recent visit to the Lake District and, while it was nice, I actually prefer the Rocks so far. It can take a few more drinks to really know what to think about a whisky though, and I only had one double. I think I’ll be investing in a full bottle the next time I’m in the market for a single malt - it’s among the contenders, anyway.

Canadian whisky is in nature very different to scotch. In my layman’s terms I’d say it tends to be sweeter and less complex but still enjoyable and worth getting your hands on.

I had been tempted to pick up some ice wine before returning home, but it’s fairly expensive, and my budget was worryingly stretched by that point, so I didn’t even pick up anything else in Duty Free. We get paid early in December, and my November wages was all gone on gifts, so December’s had to last 6 weeks. I don’t usually have to fit a two week holiday (and the necessary booze tourism that comes with it) into that equation, so I had to forego the ice wine.

Ice wine is made by leaving the grapes on the vine until sometime after the first frost, so that they freeze. Then they are pressed, making a sweet, syrupy wine that is very pleasant for sipping. The bottles are only half the size of normal wine bottles, but I recommend you give it a try - they were doing a nice German one in Aldi at a reasonable price a while ago, so there’s no excuse for not seeking one out - unless you’re ashamed to be seen in Aldi.

In Canada they have a huge fondness for beer. I’ve found that people will offer you a beer the moment you arrive at their house – even if it’s 10 in the morning. It seems that the general rule is: if beer is available, then it is acceptable to drink it. Most times 10am is even a little early for me, but it certainly is encouraging – especially when it’s your future mother-in-law. She stocked up on some cans for our stay – some Coors Lite (which isn’t light in alcohol compared to most British lager) and a selection of beers from the local Big Rock brewery, which we’d actually toured during our last visit. That had been the first time I’d ever visited a brewery, and I have to say: I don’t find information about how beer is made very interesting. Just get me to the tasting part, and the part where you can choose any six varieties to take home.

In general your Canadian beer is like a cross between lager and ale, so it’s perfectly drinkable and comes in a staggering number of varieties. It was nice to have my own private stash that I was expected to polish off during my stay – and the quantity was sufficient, so there wasn’t any awkwardness about drinking too much - which is ideal, because I wasn’t drinking too much. Good.

Frankly, to give a full impression of the drinking culture in Canada, I’d probably have to write a PhD, so that ain’t happening. I can tell you we had a pretty terrific time – without going into too many details about what we did (stick to the booze, stick to the booze) and I hope I’ve given you at least a little useful information should you be planning a trip there. Be sure to check out those websites if you do. I’m sure they’ll help you make the most of your Canadian booze tourism experience.

I’ll see you next time for some more general ruminations on booze and booze related products.

Quick post: First impressions of Gibson's 12 Year Old

As usual, my interest in something (call it ‘obsession’ if you like) has led me to taking it too seriously, and has threatened to take all the fun that led to the interest in the first place… away.

Almost immediately after starting to write this blog I found myself – almost subconsciously – trying to analyse whatever I was drinking, rather than just enjoying it, as I used to a couple of days before. Goddammit! That wasn’t the point.

Anyway. I decided to crack open the Gibson’s 12 year old Canadian rye last night. And I decided to try it with ice. So far, it seems Canadian whiskies are best enjoyed with ice – though I did develop  a taste for the Crown Royal Black (which I drank a whole bottle of with only a little help) while in Canada over Christmas and New Year - with and without ice. Time will tell how the Gibson’s fares, though first impressions are that the flavour isn’t very strong. There’s a chance that this impression was down to the fact that my freezer door had been left partially open, and the ice was already beginning to melt, so perhaps they watered my drink down on entry. 

Nevertheless, in my experience it takes nearly a full bottle to make a judgement, so first impressions is what you get for now. Hopefully I’ll be able to make comparisons between the entry level Crown Royal, the slightly fancier Crown Royal Black and this Gibson’s 12 year old later on.

I actually neglected to take a fresh picture of it, but you can see it in the family booze porn (that sounds so wrong) from previous posts.