Very often the grains are malted before fermentation, just to mess with their heads. When they think they're going to promulgate, they get roasted along with their hopes and dreams.
A great many whiskys come from a single plant in Indiana. This may be disheartening to craft whisky fans, but it's very heartening to those of us looking to buy whisky by the barrel.
Whisky in general
Whiskey -- or whisky if you're nasty -- means "water of life" in Irish ("uisce beatha"), which says a whole lot about the micks and even more about the quality of their well water. Corrupted through years of Anglican misuse (much like the Irish themselves), the phrase came to be known as simply whiskey, which you're clever enough to recognize as "Water." How are you going to mature and flourish without water? You'd be dead in a week. Therefore whiskey is life.
In America and Ireland the e spelling is used. Everywhere else is wrong. Interestingly, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms disagrees. But what do they know? They can't even break up a hippie commune correctly.
Scotch
Scotch refers specifically to whisky from Scotland made under these conditions. Scotch is a word so old it doesn't even describe Scottish things anymore, because whisky is so great it displaced an entire country from its own descriptor. This language isn't big enough for both the Scottish people and all the drinking they intend to do.
Scotch is usually a smooth drink and one that has fond associations for me of when the English sent my Scottish ancestors to Ireland to breed out the Irish.
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