On the Rocks?

Do you prefer to take your favourite Malt whisky with ice or without? Here are a few suggestions to help you get the best from your dram.

Caveats
This is intended to serve as a guide – everyone has their own preferences as far as drinking styles are concerned. But, if you want to look like a sophisticated whisky drinker, take note of the following tips.

Neat vs. with Water
Some purists say that adding water to your whisky spoils the taste. But in reality, most whisky aficionados take water with their whisky. Here we like a little mineral water served at room temperature with ours. Depending upon where you live, tap water is often not recommended because of the way the chlorine affects the taste of the whisky. But a good spring water helps bring out some of the hidden depths of a good malt, and it can also prevent the strength of the whisky numbing your senses and reducing your enjoyment of the whisky. This is particularly true of cask strength samples. We like to add the same measure again of water to a cask strength whisky, and maybe a quarter to regular strength drams. We still like to drink the odd drop neat, but water is really the best way to enjoy your malt, and you will stay sober a little longer if you do so.

On the Rocks
It’s a real trend to have ice with your whisky. Personally, we aren’t big fans of this habit. Ice chills the whisky and dulls many of the aromas and senses you get from a great malt. We prefer our dram warmer rather than cooler, but in the summertime it is sometimes nice to add some chill to a light malt, then let it melt before drinking.

Mixing It
As a fellow bar tender in the Malt Shovel in Edinburgh, a hostelry offering 100+ malts, used to say loudly when a customer requested something other than water or ice in his whisky: “if you want to pay good money to ruin one of the best things to come out of Scotland, that’s your choice, but I would heartily advise against it.” Whether it be ginger ale, coke or some other fizzy concoction, adding it to a malt whisky is just not the done thing – all you are doing is masking the reason why most people drink whisky in the first place – to savour the taste.