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A Visit to Bowmore on Islay in Scotland

Hello from Islay! I'm in Scotland on a trip with Bowmore.

 

After a first night of bar exploration and jetlag adaptation in Glasgow, I was ready for the press trip to begin. I spent the morning blogging about the previous night, then had a day to explore Glasgow. I can't say I learned a ton about the city, except that I love the look of Glasgow University and had a great time exploring the Kelvingrove museum. 

By the next morning I'd met up with the rest of the group and we flew together to Islay. To get there by car/bus and ferry apparently takes almost nine hours, but the flight was just 45 minutes from the Glasgow airport.  

Over the course of the day, the weather changed from the Islay/Scotland weather you see all the time- mildly raining with low visibility- to sunny and bright in the later afternoon/early evening. Islay always looked to me like it is built for dreary weather, with all white buildings as the one color that looks good in the fog, but when it's sunny it takes on a happy little seaside town feel. 

 

I should mention that we're in the town of Bowmore, the capital city of Islay, but are driving to various spots on the island to sample other restaurants and attractions.

But first, the distillery tour. As you probably know, Islay single malt scotch whiskies are known for a smoky/peaty flavor profile, often with seaside flavors like seaweed and salt. Bowmore has less of the seaweed/iodine flavors so present in Laphroaig, but to my palate is still dominated by a smoky charred flavor with a lurking sherry cask flavor present in different amounts depending on the bottling's expression. I didn't realize that there is actually a lot less phenol content- the amount of smokiness/peatedness in scotch- than other brands. Bowmore comes in at about 25 parts per million, whereas I believe Laphroaig comes in at 40 and Ardbeg at 60.

 

At Bowmore, like at Laphroaig and The Balvenie, they malt some of their own barley. This involves purchasing barley, soaking it in three cycles over a 24 hour period, spreading it out on a malting floor, and turning the malt over again and again until the grain germinates and sends out a little shoot about one-quarter the length of the grain. 

 

Germination is then stopped by drying the barley with a combination of hot air and peat smoke to the desired level of smokiness. I actually got to harvest peat from a bog, turn and rake some barley, and even step into the kiln after it had recently stopped blowing the peated air through it. 

 

At this point  the malted barley is ready to be fermented and distilled. Allowing the grain to germinate starts an enzymatic process that will convert starches in the grain to sugars when hot water is added again. The malted barley is ground to separate the floury innards from the husk, then this is washed with hot water in three cycles to release the sugar.

The grain is then discarded (sold to farmers as cattle feed) and the sugar water is fermented and then distilled. The new make spirit is then aged in ex-bourbon and/or ex-sherry casks for the different expressions. We took a look into Vault No. 1, where the barrels of Bowmore Gold were housed, some beneath sea level adjacent to the salt-crusted warehouse sea wall. 

 

More posts from Bowmore to follow!

Glasgow Bars: The Blue Dog

The Blue Dog, as three different people told me, is "the place where everyone ends up," as it's open until three in the morning. I got there a little before 1AM on Saturday night and it was jammed. 

 

The long bar had five or six bartenders working at the same time. The cocktail menu didn't look terribly appealing to me with the exception of a couple drinks.

After a short and understandable wait, I ordered a Spruce Moose, which calls for Rittenhouse rye, calvados, maple syrup, and orange bitters. Despite the crowd, the bartender took his time and made it with care, which I greatly appreciated. The drink came out well-balanced and pretty darn tasty. Huge points for that. 

The crowd was a complete mix of everyone from 20 to 50-plus year olds. It had the look of a place that really gets crazy the later it gets. It's just up from my hotel, so I might give it another visit in a fews days.

 

Glasgow Bars: The Blind Pig

The Blind Pig is a speakeasy-themed bar in Glasgow that I visited on a recent Saturday night while in town for a Bowmore/Auchentoshan press trip. 

 

The venue is split into a restaurant and bar area. The bar was absolutely packed but I managed to squeeze my way up close to watch the action. The shakers were all metal (Alessi, I think) and they use those brushed aluminum jiggers to measure. The bartender had the old-time (white shirt and suspenders) look of American bars, but without the ironic mustache. 

The cocktail menu that doesn't appear to be online consists of mostly floral drinks, so I was having trouble finding something I wanted to order. Naturally, my first choice they were out of- the Holland House made with Bols Genever, maraschino, lemon, and vermouth. (I was amazed not only at how many bars in Glasgow carry Bols Genever, but also how many of them have it in drinks on the menu.)

I opted for the Moonshine Martini instead, made with gin, dry vermouth, maraschino, and absinthe. It was pretty good, except for the garnish of bright red maraschino cherries sitting in the bottom of the glass.   

This bar is open for brunch on Sundays and at happy hour has a special of martinis for two people at a discount, served in tea cups and coming with a tea pot for refills. 

This was just one of the ways this bar has a strong Hendrick's Gin influence on it- you could see it named in the recipes, the floral drink style, and a few product placements around the bar. 

(I like the glass lighting that doesn't look as nice in the picture as in real life- glassware hung over the bar with small lights shining on it to spray the light through the crystal designs.)

Glasgow Bars: The Booly Mardy's

On a trip to Glasgow on the way to the Bowmore distillery, I took a bar tour through Glasgow and stopped in to several places. 

Booly Mardy's was originally going to be named Bloody Mary's but someone else beat them to the punch. It's a small bar with plenty of table seating, though on the Saturday night I visited all of the tables were occupied and it was standing-room-only. Of the places I visited in Glasgow, this one had the least hip crowd of what looked to be after-work types (this makes no sense as it was a Saturday at midnight) mostly in their forties. Perhaps a birthday party had been held in the place earlier. No problem, I was there for the drinks.

 The cocktail menu lists about drinks with each base spirit- gin, vodka, tequila, whisky, etc. I opted for a tequila drink called The Rosieta but it was kind of a flop. The drink is supposed to be made with Jose Cuervo Tradicional, Campari, sweet and dry vermouth, and Angostura bitters.The bartender had to look up the recipe, stirred with the wrong end of the barspoon (not the end of the world), tasted the drink and tried to correct it by adding more tequila (a good thing), but ultimately the drink came out tasting like tequila and way too much Campari. I wonder if he forgot the sweet vermouth. 

Anyway, we'll chalk it up to an off night with a new bartender. I've heard good things about the bar so I won't write it off just yet. 

 

Glasgow Bars: The Ivy

While every bar I visited in Glasgow was packed on Saturday night, The Ivy looked like the place to be. The DJ was playing some excellent abstract dance music, the crowd was a mix of casual and clubby 20- and 30-somethings, and all seemed to be having a great time. 

I came for the cocktails, of course. The menu lists a selection of mostly rum drinks, so I went right for the "Not Rum" section of the menu (nothing against rum, it's just sometimes you find interesting stuff in the margins.) And I did! They were out of the ingredients to make my first choice drink, the Old Tom Carrot that is made with old tom gin, Lillet, lemon juice, blood orange, and carrot (juice, presumably). 

My second choice cocktail turned out to be a winner though. It was the Brandy Celery Fix, made with cognac, Merlet triple sec, Peychaud's bitters, lemon juice, gomme syrup, egg white, and muddled celery. What? Yeah, the celery was great in the drink and acted as a bittering agent. 

The drink was delicious and if I have time on the last night of the trip, I'll return here to try more of them.

 

 

Glasgow Bars: Lebowski's

Hi! I'm in Glasgow for a trip with Bowmore and Auchentoshan. I arrived a night early to see what this town was all about. 

My first stop was Lebowski's. You would expect a bar named for the movie The Big Lebowski to be tacky and over the top, but this just wasn't the case here beyond the cocktail menu. The small bar offers up a fair amount of seating, all of which was taken on the night I came in, and a little bit of room to stand at the bar. I didn't see any posters of The Dude or bowling themed-anything. It could have been there, but if so it was subtle compared to the room.

The aforementioned cocktail menu includes a tribute to the movie. Lebowski's offers up a menu of 19 versions of the White Russian, The Dude's favorite drink. Most of them are slight spin-offs of the original with different vodkas or chocolate/coffee liqueurs, but some stood out. I had The Smokey, made with Ardbeg 10 year old (smoky) scotch whisky, espresso liqueur, and cream, garnished with nutmeg. It was not bad- and actually reminded me of the cocktail that won a Laphroaig cocktail contest in San Francisco, also with smoky scotch and chocolate.

 

(Smokey White Russian at Lebowski's in Glasgow)

There are many other cocktails on the menus with some classics like the Sazerac and Mint Julep, a cigar-infused Manhattan, and some tackily-named drinks including the Royal Pu**y, Smashed Virgin, and Pu**y Juice. Other than that, the place was surprisingly not tacky. There were a few more interesting drinks and a good neighborhood bar vibe that would inspire me to come back here if given the chance.

 

Content and Social Media versus Traditional Media

Like most everybody, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the new role of social media and the decline of traditional media. But unlike a lot of people my livelihood depends on one or the other. I'm a freelance writer who blogs, hoping that if money stops flowing to one income stream it will flow into the other.

On the journalism end, companies are spending less on advertising. Since advertising pays for the journalism that surrounds it, there are less newspapers and magazines around, and those still around have reduced their size. Thus there is generally less journalism work around for those of us who freelance. (And a lot of unemployed staffers.)

Many companies who formerly advertised in traditional media are "shifting" to social media, but this shift helps create a content-free world. Here's how:

Because with social media companies/brands can now speak to consumers directly, they play in the social media space by "engaging" bloggers and others online. They may make games or have a blogger of their own. They send out recipes and often samples. They join in the conversation about their brand. This is all good.

But what I see as the problem is that conversations usually take place around content: the weather, a feature story, news of the day. Social media, including most blogging, is a conversational space but not a content generator. 

As brands shift their spending power toward social media, they are hiring bloggers and facebookers and twitterers to talk about their brands. This is internal spending; PR. But they're not so much buying ads in this space or doing much (so it seems) to generate content. It's more "Hey we're here. Talk about us!"

Though advertisements in traditional and social media are very static, boring things, they fund journalism and content creation for the content that goes around them.

Thus in the current model, No more ads = No more content. Imagine Facebook/Twitter if it was only internal. It would be all messages like "I had the best sandwich today!" and no sharing links to news stories or other outside content. Awful.

The internet has devalued ads (thanks, Google!) and also devalued content (thanks, copy-and-paste!), so that in the social media space there doesn't appear to be any reason to bother with content generation or advertising if you are a corporation. 

As someone who makes a living generating content, I'm worried about all of this. One one hand, journalists are being starved out of the industry. On the other hand, are corporations morally obligated to advertise to keep journalists employed? Unfortunately not.

I haven't thought of any workable solutions to this, and neither has anybody else that I know of. In the meantime I am hoping luxury brands who can afford it keep buying ads in traditional media and toss the occasional website sponsorship my way. Right now content isn't seen as a necessity because there is plenty of it still floating around for free. But in the not-too-distant future content may become a luxury item again.

Kobe Beef Cocktails at Ozumo in San Francisco

I wrote a piece on the new cocktail menu at Ozumo in San Francisco for Tasting Table. Bar manager Joshua Haney has one cocktail made with with candy cap mushrooms and another with Kobe beef and apple syrup.

(Mushroom in the glass and salted almond garnish.)

Read the story here.