I don’t go to many concerts. Not for lack of love for music, but because my dream line-up is closer to a memorial than a festival. Almost all the bands I love – enought to be hours in a line, under rain or sun – no longer exist. I will never hear Johnny Cash or Audioslave live, for example. The exception is the Rolling Stones, who stubbornly keep defying biology. But, by the looks of it, that tour is also coming to an end. Or maybe not. As unlikely as it may seem, the world of whisky fills that void…

“This can’t be right,” said my wife, eyeing a narrow path squeezed between a cemetery and a railway line. It was five in the afternoon, and we had just stepped out of the North Acton tube station, in London’s Zone 3. Our goal was to reach Bimber, a British whisky distillery located nearby. “Look, the map says this is the way. We’re fine,” I replied. “Does the map also say there’s a goth-apocalyptic vibe on the way there?” You can take the Brazilian out of Brazil, but you can’t take Brazil out of the Brazilian, I thought. We carried on,…

There you have it. We are no longer on the Negroni Month – which couldn’t have made this article any more timely. It’s funny that last year it was just a week. Now it’s a whole month. Next year we’ll have the Negroni semester, I’m sure. It will run from August until New Year’s Eve. And it’ll be great, as well as super practical, because everything will already be red, so there won’t be any need to change the palette for Christmas. Negroni is an interesting drink. I saw a post the other day that gave some funny definitions of…

Today I’m going to invite you to do a different but very interesting exercise. Go to the image of the juices below and try to find at least one apple on each of the labels. Some are quite easy. Others are a true work of art in the form of marketing. The thing is, most of them contain apple, even though they are made from something completely different, like grapes and oranges. The apple acts as a natural sweetener and also reduces the cost of producing the drink. When this happens, producers must, by law in Brazil, include the image…

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” declared Franklin D. Roosevelt in his inaugural address as President of the United States in 1933. And for good reason. The country had been immersed in the worst economic crisis in its history for four years—the infamous Great Depression. Four years earlier, in 1929, the New York Stock Exchange had collapsed, taking the banking system and the jobs of thousands of Americans with it. And even though it was far from a priority at the time, not even drinking was an option, as Prohibition was in effect. In this devastated…

Sitting at the bar, one day, a friend of mine comes up with the following analogy. “Look, imagine that your life is a huge jar. And you have in front of you, two portions of marbles. One of them is all transparent. The other has marbles of various colors” – he took a sip of beer, before continuing, for dramatic purposes – “At the end of each day, you have to put a marble in the jar. If you did something cool, important, you put a colored one. But if you were just there, wandering around, slipping through your routine,…

For Relaxing Times, make it a Suntory Time. When I first watched Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, I wasn’t familiar with japanese whisky, but I thought the reference was funny. The film explored the feeling of estrangement, alienation and isolation between people. All those nunances in the human relationships highlighted by the feeling of cultural distance from Japan. And nothing better to enhance this estrangement than whisky. In 2003, Japanese whisky was far from the craze it is today. And a fictional decadent American actor starring in a commercial for a product that seemed as disconnected from that country as…

There is an axiom, said to Peter Parker by his uncle Ben, that has reached the status of an aphorism. “With great power comes great responsibility.” The concept is easy to absorb, to the point that it seems strange that no one has condensed it before. In fact, versions of the quote are much older than our beloved Marvel hero. Which, in no way, takes away his, or Stan Lee’s merit for the mention. For example, in 1817, the future prime minister of England, William Lamb, said in a speech to parliament that “the possession of great power necessarily implies…

Owning a whiskey website requires a certain amount of focus. Even if my liver is what we call “totalflex” around here, the ethanol world is very vast, and liver and financial resources are limited. I often find myself forced to choose battle fronts, and, naturally, my favorite combat zone is whiskey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other fields. I’m passionate about cocktails, I’ve always liked beer, and I have an ignorant fascination with rum and cachaça. In the field of wines, I assume I’m on the fortified team. Especially port. And sometimes, I don’t even have to choose.…

“Doors to automatic and cross-check”. I buckle my seat belt, cross my arms and take a deep breath. I’ve never been afraid of flying. In fact, on the contrary. I love airports. The only thing that remotely bothers me is having to sit on the plane for too long. There isn’t much to do, and, as they say here in Brazil, ahead with no thought is the devil’s workshop. I watch the flight attendant point out the emergency exits. Suddenly, my mind reduces the sound volume of the surroundings, and an intrusive thought appears. What if I run out and…