Friday, November 11, 2011

What do all of the different flavor categories mean with Johnnie Walker?

On the web site there are nine catagories that show the different flavors. Some are easy to understand like vinilla or honey but what do they mean when they say floral or smoky?|||There are no flowers put in the whisky for infusing or any other reason.





"Floral" flavors taste like flowers smell. Sugars come from the grains used to make whisky (for JW it's mostly malted barley) and from the wood used to age it. The grain sugars shift toward fruit flavors and floral flavors, the wood sugars (picked during the aging process) tend toward vanilla, caramel, toffee or honey.





Grassy flavors (hay, grass, moss) come from the grains and the process used to dry the grains.





Smoke: To "malt" barley you start the germination process then stop it by drying the barley. If you use peat smoke you get very peaty flavors (Islay whiskies like Lagavulin or Ardbeg), other types of smoke will produce other flavors, all of which shows up in the top and end of the taste of the whisky. JW Black is known to be very smoky thanks to the wood smoke used in the Highland scotches it's blended with.





Wine flavors come from the oak, since wine is also aged in oak. You'll taste things similar to chardonnay or even reisling. Other wine flavors come from the combination of fruity flavors (sugar) and alcohol.





Some of the other grain flavors come from the fact that JW is a blend, meaning it uses neutral grain spirits (whisky spirits from non-barley sources) in the mix. Whiskies like Glenlivet use only malted barley, and are known as "Single Malt" whiskies.|||Smokey means that has a natural wood smoke flavour, and floral is a flower, usually left in the alcohol to infuse its flavour

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