Whisky Fundamentals
Amburana Wood: a rising star or another whisky fad
Published 20/08/2025
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of Amburana wood for whisky maturation. Amburana (Amburana cearensis) is a South American hardwood long used for cachaça and regional spirits. Lately it’s appeared in whisky-mostly as a finish after primary maturation in oak. The big question: is it a flavour tool worth keeping, or a fast-fading novelty? For background on how wood shapes spirit, see Whisky maturation and the overview of wood types.
Amburana Wood: a rising star or another whisky fad
The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis: An Evolutionary Backstory for Our Taste for Alcohol
Published 19/08/2025
The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis: An Evolutionary Backstory for Our Taste for Alcohol Why did humans start drinking is a timeless question, as is the question of why we transitioned from hunter gatherers to sedentry farmers. For both most origin stories for drinking start in granaries and ovens. In the classic “brought indoors for bread” line, the storable calories of cereals-plus the kit to mill, mash, and bake-pulled people into permanent settlements.
The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis: An Evolutionary Backstory for Our Taste for Alcohol
A Short History of Beer
Published 19/08/2025
Before copper stills and dunnage warehouses, there was hot mash and cool fermentation. For much of urban history, beer wasn’t just a treat; it was infrastructure-a reliable daily drink when town water could be suspect. This is a historical sketch of how that came to be, and how IPA later extended beer’s keeping power for long journeys. 1) Ancient beginnings: bread you can drink In the grain cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt, beer sat on the bread-beer continuum.
A Short History of Beer
The Bread-Beer Continuum
Published 19/08/2025
The Bread-Beer Continuum Long before modern breweries, grain-eating cultures treated porridge, bread, and beer as points on a single spectrum rather than separate foods. Heat a mash a little longer, bake it, or ferment it-each choice traded texture for shelf life, flavour, and portability. This is the bread-beer continuum in a nutshell, and it sets the stage for the wider story in Beer: A History and the evolutionary angle of the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis.
The Bread-Beer Continuum
Quadruple distillation & Bruichladdich X4
Published 15/08/2025
New to the basics? Start with Whisky production, then the hardware primers on Pot stills, Condensors, and the Spirit safe. For context, compare with Double distillation, Triple distillation, and Mortlach’s selective “2.81 times” in The Wee Witchie. If you’re thinking about columns, see Continuous distillation and What is a Coffey still?. What is quadruple distillation? In batch (pot-still) whisky-making, quadruple distillation means the spirit is effectively run four times through copper.
Quadruple distillation & Bruichladdich X4