This is the first article on the press trip to Brown-Forman distilleries in the United States. This time, Jack Daniel’s. Or rather, something very specific, almost a detail, within the enormous set that is the mythical Jack Daniels. It’s just that I’m not exactly me, in distilleries. It’s like that AppleTV series, Severance. When I go through the gates of a distillery, I forget who I am, and my innie becomes a curious and unpleasant being, who pokes the equipment, sticks his face in the washback and takes photos next to the stills. During the visit, my partners – much…

I try to access the control panel of The Bottled Dog, but I cannot manage to remember the password. I try a random one – which does not work. I try another, also without success. On the third attempt, the browser takes longer to give a negative answer, and my heart fills with hope. We need to confirm you are human – select all the pictures that have stairs. I panic. I don’t know if it’s an attention thing or just pure tension. But the challenge already makes me uneasy. Oh but wait. That thing in the photo is a…

Portugal and Japan have a much deeper connection than you might think. The Portuguese were the first western culture to have contact and trade with the Japanese. And like any contact, there were curious influences on both sides. The Portuguese inherited some words from the Japanese vocabulary, such as “catana” and “biombo”. The Japanese started to use a series of words of Portuguese origin, adapted to the sound of their language. For example, pan, koppu, tabako and arkoru – that their etymological deduction power must have already indicated that they are respectively bread, glass, tobacco and alcohol. In fact, a…

Monday, eleven o’clock at night. My daughter sneaks into the dark room in her socks, where she surprises me putting the finishing touches on a bucket of whiskey and Angostura that I dared to call an Old Fashioned. Daddy, I can’t sleep.” I think, quickly “like me” – i think. But that this problem would be solved as soon as I finished the glass in my hand. Why sugar? I ask, in a tone that is both affectionate and uncomfortable. What follows was a dialogue that I tried to reproduce as truthfully as possible below. Because there is a monster…

This is the first part of a two-part post about myths and legends in the world of whiskey. Get ready, dear readers. Time to get nervous. Boitatá, curupira, headless mule. Satyr, faun, centaur. Werewolf, vampire. Every culture has their mythical creatures. They were born from the need to explain what was previously inexplicable. Or simply ensuring that people behaved correctly and didn’t do anything barbaric. After all, it’s easier to explain that a winged demon will suck your blood at night than to rationally explain why you shouldn’t satisfy your lust with your best friend’s partner. The world of whiskey,…

Tiredness really is a surreal condition, I thought, as I pulled the cork and poured a generous dose into a low glass. Two-twelve in the morning. The last couple and a half hours have slipped by me totally unnoticed. And now, frozen at the exact moment that the first drop fell from the mouth of the bottle, I reflected on how I had arrived at that moment. I have a few flashes of recent memory. After going to bed at two and waking up at five the day before, I decided that a morning jog would be a good idea.…

I’m going to tell you a bit of a disconcerting thing, which I’m not sure how it happened. My dog ​​ate my earphones. It took me a while to figure it out. I missed it on Sunday, but I thought I had left it in some improbable place, and that I would soon find it. But over the next few days, I began to find clues to his real whereabouts – my pet’s digestive system. First, one of those little balls that gets in your ear. Then a piece of black cable. And the definitive and incriminating evidence – a…

Apologies. Once again, I will talk about cinema. And I know sometimes it feels like this is a movie blog rather than whisky. But the analogy is too good to be wasted on the allegation of exhaustion. I fear, by the way, that the apologies should be doubled – because the relationship is also so direct that it is even obvious. The movie Angel’s Share, by Ken Loach. Angel’s Share tells the story of a group of marginalized young people, who discover the pleasure of tasting the water of life. And from there, due to a series of coincidences, they…

When I was five years old, I remember a visit I made to the pediatrician. He measured my foot, then the circumference of my head. With the smile of a child who has just discovered a confidence, he said resolutely that I would be six feet tall and strong as a pit bull. And then, thirty years later, I remembered this story, from the top of my disproportionate head, fixed on a body that is more like a dachshund, four feet off the ground. But I wasn’t the only one to be lulled into prophecies of gigantism by pediatricians. It’s…

I once read an article about how automakers choose the names of their cars. It’s very interesting. and also complicated. What seems natural is actually a complex creative process. First, companies consult their marketing departments to determine words that reflect the vehicle’s profile. Literally hundreds of ideas are conceived. Then, specialists from different areas choose the names based on the most different criteria. For example, it cannot be a registered trademark of another company. It can’t be slang, it can’t be a curse word in another language and it has to sound good. This all means that behind every Ford…