Josh’s is 
After dining out on sugar-rubbed ribs, I finished celebrating on my back patio. Unlike others’ cigars, I had a churchwarden filled with Amphora tobacco, accompanied by a nice glass of smooooth single-malt Scotch. The Macallan 18-year-old, of course.
Amphora was my grandfather’s brand. The distinctive aroma triggers vivid memories of holiday dinners and late-night card games at Grandma & Grandpa’s house. They don’t sell it in the U.S. anymore. I had to bring it back from London in my carry-on.
The end result, for me, was an epiphany, which I wrote about in Battle Cry: Eureka!
Of course, none of these can compare with Joe’s Heller-bration, even though it involved a lowly Miller High Life.
OK, you opened this door, and I’m walking through it, fully armed.
I wish I could identify all those Single Malt Drinkers who have been drinking it 50 years, as I have, or even 20 years. I bet if I could count them, they would number less than 20 percent of the Scotch Whisky market. Yet, we now see “flavored” Single Malts like the one pictured in this post. “Fine Oak”, indeed. Just how do these yuppies think that their whisky palate is any better than mine? I can’t tell if the Whisky I’m drinking is from “Fine Oak” casks or “Highland Oak” or “My Ass is Oak” casks, and if a blind taste test was involved, I doubt if most of the yups could either.
What they HAVE done, by insisting on these flavored Single Malts, is drive up the price of good “unflavored” Whisky. There’s only so much single malt to be sold (less as it gets more aged), and when a goodly amount of that is removed from the supply chain to send off to some chemistry lab to be experimented with, then adulterated with flavorings, it makes it harder for ME to find unadulterated Single Malt Whisky.
First these yups did it to better vodka (although we have to thank them for insisting on the importation of better vodka stock), and now they’ve done it to good Whisky.
Is nothing sacred? Next thing, they will claim they are joining us in the nitrocellulose fraternity, but insist on flavoring the damn guncotton so the gunsmoke smells like chocolate chip cookies.
Bah! We may be wasting our time trying to prepare and save these folks so that they can have some benefit of our Constitution after we pass. Maybe what we should be doing NOW is starting up distilleries and the next Whisky Rebellion.
The above rant notwithstanding, I DO approve of your tobacco choice. When I first started to smoke, at 14 or so, I thought it was WAAAAAAY cool to smoke a pipe. I tried various pipe tobaccos, and quickly settled on Amphora. If I couldn’t find Amphora, most any other Cavendish was a decent substitute. I continued pipe smoking through college, as did a lot of other lads, but as I got into the military, I found that military smoke breaks did not allow for the time to stoke and fire a pipe, let alone would the uniform have had a place for all the accoutrements, so I went to cigarettes. Stopped them in ’73.
Amphora was the best of that experience, however, except for the fact that it may have attracted my first wife to me….
They can make gunsmoke smell like chocolate chip cookies? Why hasn’t anyone told me this before?
I want peanut butter scent. Oooh, and pine tree scent for when I’m in the woods. And New Car Scent for when I have to shoot carjackers. Could they make one that smells like cat piss so that the shooting positions on either side of me stay clear when I’m at the range?
Beats me about the flavoring; I don’t even notice it so far as I can tell. I just appreciate how much smoother the aged single-malts are compared to everything younger.
My wife likes Grand Marnier. I can’t stand the stuff. For my birthday this year, we went to a steakhouse that happened to have 100-year-old Grand Marnier. Surprised that such a thing existed, we tried a shot. I actually liked it. It was incredibly smooth. No bite at all.
A couple months ago we were in a bar and they had The Macallan 12-year-old. I was astonished how much more bite it had than the 18.