 By Jeremy Azevedo
|
So the other day I get an email asking me if I want to learn how to blend Scottish whiskey with Johnnie Walker’s Master Blender, Andrew Ford, at Montage in Beverly Hills. |
For me, this is the equivalent of asking Charlie Sheen if he wants to learn how babies are made at the Bunny Ranch in Las Vegas or asking Lindsay Lohan if she’d be interested in a nasally ingested chemical buffet at MyHouse (the club, not my actual house) in Hollywood. So of course I accepted, and poured myself a glass of scotch to celebrate my good fortune! …Which everyone else in the office thought was weird because it was only 11am. F**king squares, man. Amirite?
The intern delievering my morning "coffee". (I suspect she's been sampling my stash.)
So I arrive a at the hotel later and there’s all these stuffy food critics and one or two other young boozehounds like myself standing around eating delicious appetizers and drinking Old Fashions. I was a little underdressed but made up for it by having a sweet beard, which, as we all know, let’s everyone know that you mean business. Which I totally did. Before long we were herded downstairs into some kind of weird library inexplicably located underneath the hotel restaurant, and seated before what looked like a chemistry set from the 1950s. Only instead of all the beakers being filled with vinegar and sulfuric acid and shit like that, they were each and every one of them filled with regional Scottish whiskies.
Johnnie Walker's Master Blender, Andrew Ford, hamburgling a vial of my secret recipe.
The reason for our being here, if I haven’t got to that already, is that Johnnie Walker Black Label was celebrating 100 years of getting people hammered. People with discerning taste in fine blended Scotch whiskey. 100 years! If you think about it, that means you’re getting schnockered on the same hooch that your granddad did back in WWII, or the ‘Nam if you’re a little younger, or Desert Storm if you’re even younger than that, to which I would say: “Dude, are you even old enough to drink?” Their master blender, Andrew Ford, had come all the way from Scotland for the first time ever, and would now go on to give us a little history about the brand and a little lesson about the crafting process.
