Hey y'all. Just dropped by for a bit, figured I'd say hi on this thread.
Favorite is MacAllan 12--what I would drink if it were my last. Someone gave me a bottle of 15 a while back, which was nice, but I wouldn't want to pay for it. I like the Highland single malts neat, but I'm not a fan of the Speyside (too peaty). Lagavulin 16 is excellent stuff, too.
I've been drinking Japanese whiskys a little of late (Costco sells them at reasonable prices). I tend to have one nice bottle and one affordable bottle at a time. Suntory on the affordable side, right now the nicer one is Kaiyu. Both are blended, both are good.
I tend to keep a 1.5l of Makers, Bulleit, or Woodford in my cabinet, and drink those on the rocks. JW Red on the rocks is fine for a daily drink (not actually daily, but when you don't feel like spending much on it). Currently I have a bottle of Dewar's White that someone gave me. It's about the same as JW Red. Fine.
A friend brought me a numbered bottle of Honey Hatch jalapeno whiskey from Colorado. It's awful. Just terrible. The friend claims to like it. It will sit in my cabinet for a long, long time.
Since the pandemic, I started drinking more old fashioneds, and I make them the Wisconsin way, so with a bit of orange and cherry muddled in, except with bourbon (generally Makers), not brandy, and I don't add water/juice/soda. Sometimes I make an old Manhattan/Man-fashioned? A cross between an old fashioned and a Manhattan--basically an old fashioned with Cointreau added, and orange bitters.
I've also taken to drinking a Irish cream as a dessert, on the rocks. The alcohol content is more like a dessert wine than a liquor, but it tastes way better than dessert wine.
Recently I picked up a 1.5 of Bombay Sapphire and have been enjoying G&Ts, which I've always liked. Never got into martinis, though.
As for frequency, for a long while starting last March, I was having an old fashioned to kick off the weekend...sometimes two. Including wine and beer, I probably have a drink or two three times a week (whether beer, wine, or cocktail). Sometimes more, sometimes less. Most Fridays. I rarely have more than three drinks in a sitting--more often one or two, except on special occasions. When I visit Wisconsin (which I haven't done since last March) that number tends to go up a *little.*
Vodka never did anything for me, and tequila was only ever for shots (a young man's game) or margaritas, which are good on occasion. Rum is mostly good with something else sweet, like soda, so I don't tend to drink it. I do have a bottle of Kraken rum that one of the parents of one of the kids I coached in soccer gave me (our team name was the Kraken). It's actually pretty good on the rocks, but it can hit like a ton of bricks. The instances of a vicious hangover despite only having one drink have been pretty high.
SFIrish doesn't drink cocktails, but she gets jealous every now and again when I have one because we're not in the mood to open a bottle of wine, and beer just isn't quite right for the moment. She still doesn't have one, but she says she wishes there were one she likes.
Mixing threads, SFIrish and I did go to a (virtual) beer tasting with Ricky Watters a few months ago. Yes, that Ricky Watters. And he interacted just like any other ND grad, which was pretty cool. If you're into pilsners, I recommend North Coast Brewery's Scrimshaw. Pretty sure it's distributed nationally.
Anyway, hope you are all doing well--and that we can all go to a college football games in the fall.
