The first rule of Single Malt Club … is no sloppy drunks. Assuming you’re not the one with the car keys, or have a destructive tendency to become a bad drunk, the ideal—in line with drinking responsibly—is to “drink elegantly.” And this means setting yourself up to feel just right the next morning, with just enough of a cognitive fuzz to help you remember. It’s like the way pool players look several shots ahead of their current shot. It’s the balancing act of sinking the eight ball while simultaneously lining up the next nine-ball shot. When one knows there are a few more drinks to be had, it’s the smart taster who treats the more immediate drink as a stopover on the way to the coming drinks. It wouldn’t do to slam home the next couple of drinks and then stumble into your doorway.
This is the delicate dance of drinking that goes on at our semi-regular Single Malt Club gatherings, in which there are two or three bottles of scotch on hand and an unholy assortment of potluck fare. In case I have given the inaccurate impression of a dimly lit room full of evening dresses and sport coats, allow me to clarify: nothing could be further from reality. The food spread almost certainly includes an obligatory bucket of KFC with all the sides. There are some cans of beer in the fridge as well. Who would’ve thought that The Colonel’s spicy recipe goes so well with scotch? (The mashed “potatoes”? Not so much.) These gatherings are a learning experience in dexterous eating and drinking. Get the balance wrong, and the body has a way of being very clear about it the next day. If you feel up to the challenge, it’s worth the effort to do it right.
Single Malt Club began simply enough. It had taken a couple of months to find the correct convergence of schedules that would allow my childhood friend and me to get together for a drink. He and I had wagered a little alcohol on that summer’s Tour de France. While the event’s results ended up essentially as we had both predicted, he had picked some riders who had fared better than mine during the three-week race. The long and short of it was that I had to pony up a fifth bottle of single malt scotch—twelve-year-old McCallum (he chose the genre, but its expression—“make and model”—was left to me).
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