All whiskey follows the same basic process involving the ingredients of grain, water, and yeast. Then expertly-crafted wooden barrels are filled with the spirit and left to the element of time for its transformation into something wonderful. Whiskey has an unbreakable bond with time. It takes time to mature, sure, but whiskey did not start there. Every bottle of whiskey began with a farmer taking his time to raise his crop with nearly the same care as a parent raising their child. At the end of the growing season, the grain is handed off to the distiller to invest even more time in the process, and so on it goes until the barrels are filled.
I never thought much about time until I moved south many decades ago. I didn’t expect that living in North Carolina in the 1980’s was going to be all that much different than in my home state of Minnesota, except for the weather. I was a teenager then, and I was so mistaken. A Midwesterner transplanted to the heart of the sunny south—I had no idea just how different the culture and pace of life would be.
Here, it’s a pop or a Coke, not a soda. Yes, there was sweet tea and actual southern biscuits here (thank God), and it was impossible to miss the different language of the southern drawl where a word with one syllable gets stretched into three or four. But there was something else that permeated all throughout the culture here— the different cadence at which life happened.
In Minnesota, everything happens fast all the time everywhere you go. People even talk faster there. I think that my dad and I have deduced that because it is so cold for so long every year there, that people became accustomed to moving quickly all the time to simply avoid freezing to death. I suppose it’s some sort of Darwinian evolutionary thing so those that don’t freeze to death can survive to reproduce. Every year you see that story in the news there where some poor guy who sat waiting for a city bus and froze solid in twenty minutes. That won’t happen here in North Carolina. So we came to believe that our theory must be close to accurate in the absence of any other plausible notions.
Life happened a bit slower in Charlotte where we lived. I know, for instance, that we would typically wait an hour for the “30-minute” oil change. It was not “fast food,” but more like “bad food eaten quickly.” One time I waited so long for a burger I volunteered to go and help in the kitchen so I could finally get to eat. I once had lunch at a diner in some tiny crossroad town outside Asheboro and the entire town shut down for lunch except the diner.
Today, it seems nearly everywhere we want to look life just moves at a faster pace than it once did, and we are expected to handle it. We just don’t seem to have the time like we once had. While all of this rushing around might make for better productivity, I would argue it has done so at the expense of our cultural fabric.
I learned to slow down a bit growing up in the South, and now I see where that has its merits. Today’s whiskey expressions are the broadest variety and of the highest quality in the history of the industry. Distilleries around the world have certainly taken their time to craft, age, and produce the incredible variety of expressions that we have today. You don’t have to be an educated whiskey connoisseur in order to find an expression that suits your palate. The message that all whiskey conveys to us is simple: take your time. Time is forever connected with whiskey, intertwined with its very creation. These expressions are made for the purpose of bringing people together, something we desperately need in today’s America and elsewhere. Even George Washington remarked in a letter to John Hancock, “The benefits arising from the moderate use of strong Liquor have been experienced in All Armies, and are not to be disputed.” Who are we to dispute the Father of our Country?
Each year we have a scheduled time on the calendar for everyone to slow down. The holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day is our annual opportunity to visit, to share, and give some of our time to others. Here is a challenge that I like; in November pick up a bottle each of your three favorite whiskey expressions, or even a new one that you intend to try. Then between November and January make occasions to share these three expressions with different people in your sphere of influence. Those others could well include family, friends, and even co-workers who we see every day. This is a gift of time from you, and while it will cost you little it will go a long way for those with whom you share it. We cannot change the pace of our culture, but we can decide to take the opportunity of our holiday season to pump the brakes and focus on the things in front of us that are both valuable and important, and whiskey can help us do just that.
