Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

Speaking to this friend made me realise the alcohol market is much less about product than marketing. What sells is the idea of the product, the brand. … You start with the target market. Who do you want to sell to? What's their budget? What does the research show. Then you make the product. It's almost a fucking afterthought, the product is driven by the margins they seek to sell to the person they target. It's so obvious but my mind was blown.

For the big brands, aye. For Diageo, definitely. Smaller ones can’t afford the research, design and marketing that takes. Smaller distilleries go to the wall when they try to compete in the same market sectors. They’re better off sticking to making niche products as well as possible.

cockbeard wrote:

I do recall a brand that sold their whiskey (I think but it might have been a whisky, I forget) and made point of the fact that it has sailed a certain amount of miles, maybe Japan and back, as the motion of the song agitates in the sherry barrels and imparts more flavour. Was quite amusing marketing wankspeak

That actually has a decent amount of history to back it up. It’s not bad as far as ‘brand stories’ go.

Maturing in sherry casks used to actually be a thing because sherry aged in casks as it was shipped slowly across the seas, then whisky distillers would buy those used casks to mature their whisky in, rather than have them shipped back empty.

Nowadays the whole process is contrived. Sherry isn’t aged during shipping, it’s aged on site where it’s made. And the casks are never sold, they’re re-used for more sherry. Sherry is decanted into metal casks for transport, or it’s bottled on site before sending out. So where do whisky makers get their ‘sherry casks’ from? They make ’em. They build fresh new casks from oak, and then they wash them out with cheap sherry. Shake ’em about a bit. Voila – sherry casks for ageing whisky or bourbon in.

It’s cynical as fuck.

I have summat from the horse's mouth now

Not all "Japanese" whisky is fully Japanese; they often import Scotch whisky as a component. However this would usually happen more in blends. In the case of a single malt, it should be the product of a single distillery, so a Japanese single malt should be 100% Japanese, unless there's some skullduggery going on.

It's very common in the whisky industry to exchange casks between distilleries though.

Hey this interaction has earned me a bottle of his latest whisky experiment so I win the thread anyway

poprock wrote:

I think Reg still wins this thread but well done on the free booze.

Haha, brilliant

I thought it was the same thing as the racism cannon

Minnesänger wrote:

Reg wins everything thread due to his unlocked Shade Throw ability.

Description: When Reg gives an opinion, said opinion will automatically be followed up by the implication that anyone who disagrees with him is right-wing / a brexiteer / racist / doesn’t care about the suffering of others.

I see you have played Forum Fighter before.

Hello from Kawagoe where one of the bits of local advice is "try daytime drinking!" So flora and I are sampling the local brew. Hers is a sweet potato amber.

End of days

No

Frosty wrote:

No

m

No update yesterday because we got drunk and did karaoke.

We went to Kawagoe which we thought would be a quiet not tourist town and turned out to be drinking central. That being said, there were still awesome shrines etc to see.




To purify yourself it was recommended to walk across this barefoot. It fucking hurt.





The main Street







Sweaty hi



the 540 disciples of Buddha.



Followed it up with a BBQ place we found.



Obligatory martini



Then emptied the room

"And if you tolerate this / Then your children / Will be next"

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

A bygone age, sadly. We're all quite seriously fucked. In 1995 we visited a farm, went to a BnB. My dad after that stopped buying lamb - organic wasn't really an option in the 90s in London even. The lamb's droppings looked like miniature soft human shits, almost diarrhoea. Not the neat little round balls. It was unnerving. What do they feed them ffs?

Was talking about this recently, around the lunch table, as you do...

I've been doing the vegetarian thing for a bit now (not vegan), and while I'm not dying from the experiment, I do miss meat. 

A friend of my partner was brought up in a rural area. She says her family weren't exactly picking up a fresh chicken every week, or what not, but you'd say, buy a lamb, or a cow, slaughter it, and that should provide fresh meat for at least 3 - 4 months.

You then either freeze or salt meat to preserve it.

Almost impossible to live that way in London, but I want to look into that...

...

Derailing... 

Sorry Reg... I'm a self conscious mofo, but if I manage to get out there again, I definitely want to try an Onsen at least once.

As for this... 



That's one fucking serious plate...

Hahaha