Everybody gets a piece of the apple. It is the one moment in the meal where the whole table does the same thing at the same time, and nobody has to be talked into it. An hour or two later somebody opens a bottle of whisky, and more often than not it does not go well.
The whisky usually gets the blame. It rarely deserves it. A single malt at nearly fifty percent alcohol, poured onto a palate that has just had honey on it, has been handed a genuinely difficult job. Honey coats the tongue. Sweetness raises the bar for everything that follows, so the next thing you taste reads drier, hotter and thinner than it actually is. The whisky has not changed. The mouth it is arriving in has.
This is worth saying plainly, because a lot of people conclude they do not like whisky on the strength of one badly timed pour.
It is not the whisky being bad. It is the wrong whisky for that particular minute.
The sweetness has to come from fruit, not from oak
The useful question is not peated or unpeated, and it is not old or young. It is where a whisky’s sweetness comes from, because that is what decides whether it can follow honey without turning bitter.
Almost all of it comes from the cask. A refill hogshead that has held whisky twice already gives back very little: cereal, a bit of light vanilla, a dry finish. A first fill sherry butt gives dried fruit, nuts and a darker, heavier sweetness. A cask that has held wine, or been rebuilt to behave like one, gives fresh orchard and red fruit instead. We wrote about what each of those does in more detail in barrique, hogshead, butt.
After an apple and a spoon of honey, the dry, oak-driven end of that range is the wrong place to be. Vanilla and toasted oak, which taste sweet on their own, read as bitterness and heat when they land on a palate that has just been coated. What survives the apple is a whisky whose sweetness is fruit in the first place. It is not competing. It is continuing.
The bottle that happens to have been built for this
Of the three single casks we have open, one of them lines up with the apple almost embarrassingly well, and it is not the expensive one.
The Milk & Honey is an Israeli single malt from Tel Aviv, distilled in 2018 and matured in a single STR cask. STR stands for shaved, toasted and re-charred: a red wine cask taken back to bare wood, toasted again and given a fresh char, so it gives up bright fruit and soft spice rather than the tannin and grip a wine cask would otherwise hand over. In the heat of the Tel Aviv coast it works fast.
What comes out of it is red apple, vanilla, candied orange peel and almonds on the nose. On the palate, stewed apples and a little dark chocolate, with a warmth that builds slowly. The finish stays sweet rather than turning hot.
Red apple on the nose and stewed apples on the palate is not a piece of marketing written backwards from the holiday. It is what an STR cask does, and it is on the tasting notes in every month of the year. The distillery being called Milk & Honey is a coincidence. We are not going to pretend we are unhappy about it.
The name is a coincidence. We are happy to take the credit anyway.
It is bottled at forty-eight percent, non chill filtered and with no colouring added, from a cask that gave three hundred and one bottles. If you want the longer version of how a distillery in Tel Aviv ended up making whisky this good this quickly, that is its own piece.
The honey cake, and everything after it
The other two releases are not lesser bottles. They are later ones, and putting them next to the apple wastes them.
The Linkwood 12, finished in a single ruby port barrique, runs plums and cherries into dark chocolate and a whisper of cinnamon. That is the cake, not the apple. Honey cake is built on dark sugar, cinnamon and a little bitterness from the coffee or the cocoa that usually goes into it, and the Linkwood meets all three instead of arguing with them. Bring it out when the dessert does.
The Paul John, from Goa, matured in a sherry hogshead, is dried fruit, prunes and cherry syrup over a light earthiness, then sweet sherry and warm spice. That is the savoury end of the table and the dried fruit on it: the brisket, the dates, the pomegranate. It is also the one to still have in the glass an hour after the plates have gone, which is why it is the bottle we would take into a sukkah later in the month, when the evenings have cooled off and warm spice is doing something useful.
How to actually pour it
Four things, none of them fussy.
Wait. Do not pour immediately after the apple. Give it twenty minutes and a glass of water in between and the whisky arrives on a palate that can read it. This single change fixes most of the problem on its own.
Pour small. A first pour should be enough to cover the bottom of the glass. It is a long meal and there is usually a second night.
Add a drop of water. At forty-eight percent, a few drops will open the fruit and take the edge off the alcohol without thinning anything. This is not a compromise, it is what the whisky wants. We went into why in should you add water to whisky.
Do not chill it. Ice shuts down exactly the fruit you are pouring this for. Room temperature, in a glass that narrows at the top so the aromas have somewhere to gather.
If you are bringing it to somebody else’s table
Most of what gets carried into a host’s kitchen is chosen to be polite rather than remembered. Wine joins the pile by the door and gets opened in some other month. Flowers become the host’s problem at the exact moment they have the least time for one.
A bottle behaves differently. It gets opened later, once the table has thinned out and the conversation has got good, and it gets poured for whoever is still sitting there. The host does not really receive it so much as get to use it, in front of company, which is a better thing to hand someone than an object they have to find room for.
If you know the host drinks whisky, bring the one that suits the part of the meal you expect to be there for. If you do not know, bring the Milk & Honey. It is the most forgiving of the three, it does not need anybody to already like whisky, and it is the one that belongs next to the apple anyway.
The apple is the easy part. Everything after it is a choice.