Like life, whisky shouldn't be rushed

I don’t know about you, but I’m still not sure what day of the week it is. Not because of any over-indulgence, but because this is the time of year when, though you may know the date, you haven’t a clue what the day might be.

This probably comes in part from most of us working on a schedule where our days of non-work are fixed. All of that goes oot the windae during the festive season.

As a result, time seems to stretch. The same effect is in play even if you have been pushed back into work mode while the rest of us have been luxuriating on the sofa, wondering whether or not to pop to the pub or fit in just one more slice of pork pie.

The misbehaving of time allows you to spend more time with friends and family, to read that book you always wanted to, to go for walks. In turn, that leads to resolutions that we will make time for those activities throughout the year.

This feeling of slowness (not lassitude or laziness) becomes increasingly important in an environment where speed dominates. Instant response has become the norm, communication has been cut down to a few keystrokes, reaction is more important than consideration.

Whatever you say has to make an immediate impact: so better make it punchy, controversial, offensive. It is the best way to make your voice heard, which these days means you have to be present and commenting constantly, whether you have anything to say or not. Knowing you exist is not enough; you have to prove that you do.

The lust for immediacy leads to an inability to analyse – why bother when everyone has moved on? – or to plan for the long term. It’s easier to send off a quick quip or run an instant check on Google than actually to research and think before saying something.

Every second counts: Why is speed so often valued more highly than quality?

Having information at our fingertips doesn’t make us more intelligent, it just means we have access to more snippets of it. I’m ever more attracted to the option taken by Bartleby, the Scrivener in Herman Melville’s story, where he responds to each request: ‘I would prefer not to.’

We see that within whisky. The need for a new story per day, the instant reaction to a new whisky, the (overly) speedy response to a perceived gap in the market. Even maturation has fallen foul to the lust for speed.

Maybe it’s not that new. At Christmas, The Scotsman reported on the release of documents from the National Archive revealing how, in 1951, Mr AJ Menzies, managing director of Fettercairn, had invented a process ‘for accelerating the maturing … of whisky which reduces the maturing time from about five to 10 years to a few hours’, which was kicked into touch by ‘Government scientists over fears it could undermine the industry by encouraging overseas imitation’.

It’s not stopped folk from trying to speed things up ever since, however. Much has been made of recent developments which claim that whisky or rum can be ‘matured’ in just a few days.

What I’m still baffled by is why we need to do this. Why does everything have to be fast? Is it not more important to concentrate on making things better, rather than quicker?

Is Smash better than home-made mashed potato? Instant coffee better than espresso? Pot Noodles better than noodles in slow-simmered dashi? Is… [Ok Dave, we get the message – Ed].

Perhaps whisky’s complexity and balance is something to do with slow integration and not extraction; maybe it is about letting trees grow for more than a century, or peat to amass itself over thousands of years.

Maybe whisky isn’t about rushing, but quietly listening and understanding the words and actions of the past, and developing them, moving them on, gently, slowly.

Appreciate time. Allow it to stretch. We don’t have a lot of it.