She Wants Honey!

​The Balvenie Caribbean Cask 14-year Single Malt Scotch Whisky; The Balvenie Distillery Company; Scotland; $90/btl

I don’t know about you, but I love honey! All kinds of honey. Bee honey, other bee honey, some honey I found under the house that had been sitting there for ten years. And I love my honey, too! She’s pretty awesome. Sometimes she even says she loves me back, although that usually involves liquor, which is appropriate, don't you think?

I bet you didn’t know that the first time my honey tried Scotch she looked at me like death was coming, and then danced around like the bees were making a hive in her bra! Yeah, it went over that well. And boy did I enjoy it. Watching her dance around with that sour-apple look on her face and all the commotion and colorful language. It was fun. Like the kind of fun you have when you get your pickup stuck in three feet of thick mud out in the middle of the desert where there’s no cellphone coverage.

However, the next time she tried Scotch, it scared me even more. Wanna know why? I’ll tell you why: Because the next time she tried Scotch she dipped into my Aberlour … and she liked it! It was one of those conundrum things where you are both elated and saddened at the same time. Oh, I was elated, because my honey now liked Scotch. But, I was saddened because she liked the expensive stuff, and that meant sharing my good stash with her. In other words, I suddenly realized she was going to be drinking all of my 5-star hooch!

But, out of that came a certain … what shall I call it? … how about “an elevated sense of discovery”. I say that because it occurred to me that my honey had very good taste in Scotch, and was all of a sudden finding some delightful gems. Which is what this rant is all about. For some incredibly wonderful reason, she decided that she wanted to try the Balvenie’s 14-year old Caribbean Cask Single Malt. And boy, howdy!

There’s something wonderful in combining whiskies with the casks of other things. Like for instance, Westward’s use of stout beer casks from BridgePort Brewing (now closed; sad panda!), or Aberlour’s use of sherry casks for their delightful A’bunadh. In the same vein, the Balvenie has distilled and aged a true masterpiece with their 14-year Caribbean Cask from which this blog entry gets its name. And before you tell me, “Hey, that’s not in the title!” let me tell you that you’d be wrong, and that you ain’t paying no good attention!

I said she wants honey, and the Balvenie Caribbean Cask is absolutely loaded with it. Where it comes from, I have no idea — maybe they stuff some bees down in there at casking, I don’t know. I just know that honey is what jumps out at me when I pour the stuff down my throat. Right there on the backend as the alcohol dances about on that dangly thing at the back of the mouth — the uvula, or something like that — and just as it swirls down the old sinking drain, it kicks back with sweet, delicious honey!

Apparently that’s what caribbean casks do to Scotch. They honey it up!

And I’m okay with that, because it makes for some jim-dandy Scotch that I can easily recommend to anyone willing to shell out their life savings. Just kidding. It’s not that much. More like a month’s income. Still kidding. Seriously, some lawyers make enough in a given hour to snag a bottle. Thus, it’s a rare treat for me, and I treat it like one, only dabbling a bit in a glass whenever my honey isn’t looking.

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​The Balvenie Caribbean Cask 14-year Single Malt Scotch Whisky
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