I got a promotion

To celebrate my recent promotion -- and a raise -- I decided to treat myself a nice bottle of scotch. I Found a website called Malt Madness to help me choose a good one. it's run by a Dutch guy named Johannes van den Heuvel. This guy's insane. And likely a high-functioning alcoholic. The site is dizzyingly comprehensive, and the photos of Herr van den Heuvel's collection are humbling. This man has a lot of booze.

After a tour of the site, I found a list of good single malts. Since the guy's Hit List of fantastic scotch is composed of very specific bottlings of certain years of certain brands, I found the Bang-For-Your-Buck List more helpful.

I was interested to see that van den Heuvel had scored the famous Johnnie Walker Blue Label a 75 on a 100 point scale. Good, because $200 a bottle is way too much to spend on a mere promotion. Although I like to boast about my five-figure income, I was thinking of the $50-$75 range.

Then I noticed Glenfarclas 105 -- the expert gave it an 88, and I happened to have a bottle of it at home. During a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland some years ago, Glenfarclas was recommended to me at a whisky store near the castle. This particular variety is "cask strength," meaning it's 120 proof (60% alcohol), apparently undiluted from the cask it was aged in. As strong as it is, it's remarkably smooth. It nearly evaporates on your tongue, and not just because it's so strong. Van den Heuvel calls it "without a shadow of a doubt one of the best 'bang for your buck' malts on the planet - and it has been for at least a decade." So I bought myself another bottle.