These are my notes from the PDXWhisky tasting I attended last Friday.  A friend of mine has been attending these meetings for several years now and I finally had the opportunity to go.

Unlike other tastings I’ve attended, this event wasn’t tied into any particular bar or brand.  Instead, a friendly gentleman named Ian invites whisky lovers to his home for dinner, drinks and some intensive tasting.

Since I know next-to-nothing about whisky, the event really opened my eyes.  Not only does Ian possess ninety-something different bottles in his liquor cabinet, but also most of the folks attending the tastings know their hooch; I was very impressed by a stocky, bearded union fellow with an arm full of tattoos and a head full of cornrows.  His look said Coors Light but the man was a walking (and drinking) encyclopedia of scotch knowledge.

Besides drinking a whisky that was older than me—a 24-year Inchgower scotch provided by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society of America, it smelled like a Port wine and tasted like a sour ale—I was able to toy around with a box containing twenty-four vials of scents.  Each vial (think perfuming testing) came with a strip of litmus paper that allowed the user to aromatically sample different common whisky scents; everything from peat to smoke to decay was provided.  Let me say this: until you take a big whiff of a bottle labeled decay you don’t know what it is for your nose to cry.

Despite my malodorous mishap, I now know the difference between Whisky (Scotland) and Whiskey (everywhere else).