Tag: Scotland

• Vat 69

  

  A few of my colleagues have recently formed a book club. The club is constituted of a pretty mixed bunch of more and less serious readers, with some romance-only types and a strong “audiobooks are reading too” contingent. Having started with a pretty basic book club staple, we planned then to embark on a season […]

  mjhorn

  April 25, 2022

  Gravity’s Rainbow, Whisk(e)y

  Banana, Osbie Feel, Scotland

• The Macallan

  

  I first cracked open Tom Pynchon’s Liquor Cabinet and got stuck into the Chivas Regal four years ago today. That seems like a good excuse for more whisky. The Macallan graces the same top shelf Bleeding Edge Silicon Alley party bar where we found Stolichnaya Elit and Tanqueray No. 10. Those were both very pleasant, but if I were at […]

  mjhorn

  May 13, 2018

  Against The Day, Bleeding Edge, Whisk(e)y

  Grand Cohen, Lew Basnight, Maxine, Renfrew and Werfner, Scotland

• Spruce Beer

  

  Long time no post! I’ve well and truly finished Against the Day (gaze upon the list and tremble), but this one’s actually from Mason & Dixon. It’s just been sitting in my fridge too long. Spruce beer is a not-always-alcoholic beverage brewed with buds or needles from spruce trees. Wikipedia reckons it was first drank by Indigenous groups […]

  mjhorn

  July 18, 2015

  Beer, Mason & Dixon

  Alba, Cherrycoke, Scotland

• Boilermaker

  Whiskey and Alement hides its vast whisky stores and careful beer selection behind a curtained door in a dead pocket of the Melbourne CBD. It’s a Pynchonesque place, in its way. Hardly lit, full of insiders to its secret and outsiders to the surrounding world. Stocked with mysteriously titled–or just numbered–bottles (“Sing along with Julie Andrews”, “Glamping […]

  mjhorn

  June 14, 2014

  Beer, Inherent Vice, V, Whisk(e)y

  Bars/Places, boilermaker, Brooklyn Brewery, Bunnahabhain, Doc Sportello, Pynchon, Roony, Sauncho, Scotland, USA

• Chivas Regal

  We’re in the second section of Chapter five (in which Stencil goes west with an alligator) of V., and Winsome’s sitting on his “grotesque” espresso machine smoking something referred to as “string.”  The string was from Bloomingdale’s, fine quality: procured by Charisma several months before on one of his sporadic work binges; he’d been a shipping clerk that time. […]

  mjhorn

  May 13, 2014

  V, Vineland, Whisk(e)y

  Chivas Regal, Pynchon, Scotland, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tobacco