Last Night's Tipple

I had the last of my bottle of my Tullamore Dew 12 year old last night, and good riddance. There's really not a whole lot to like in it, at least for me. It has this dirty sweatsock character to it that I attribute to the unmalted barley in the mash, and I don't particularly like dirty sweatsocks. With some time in the glass, that particular aroma mellows a bit, and I'm left with some hits of vanilla and bits of spice that aren't unpleasant. However, I'd really just spend the extra $8 a fifth to get Redbreast, which is a lovely whiskey all the way around.

As I have written before, the "Dew" part of the Tullamore Dew name is supposedly an acronym for Daniel E. Williams, a general manager of the Tullamore Distillery in the 19th Century. That sounds just a little bit too pat to me, and I had originally thought that "dew" had to refer to whiskey. After all, American moonshine is sometimes called mountain dew, and more than one Scotch distillery has the Gaelic word "dhu" in the name (Dallas Dhu, Tamdhu, and possibly others). However, the Internet assures me that the Gaelic word "dhu" means black, and I can't think of a legitimate way to twist that into whiskey. So maybe the story about Daniel E. Williams is true after all.