YOU can read about the history of Scotch whisky in lots of places, from sketchy little sidebars that pad out tasting guides to serious, detailed studies such as F. Paul Pacult's recent "A Double Scotch" (the narrowly focused tale of one single malt and one blended Scotch).
Charles MacLean's "Scotch Whisky: A Liquid History" (Cassell Illustrated, $24.95) falls in the serious, detailed category, complete with eight dense pages of footnotes, but on a large scale. It covers the vast world of Scotch, including its poorly documented medieval origins, the single malt revival and the recent trend of distilleries to open to the public, in the manner of Napa wineries. Fortunately, it's not only knowledgeable -- drenched in knowledge, almost -- but very readable.
It's primarily a history, but it finds room in its majestic narrative for a good amount of information about the technical side of Scotch. Not enough for you to make your own whisky, but certainly enough to understand the sorts of thing that Scotch geeks are likely to go on about, such as floor maltings (rooms where barley is raked over floors heated by peat fires to stop its sprouting).
More mechanized ways of malting barley have been invented in the last 200 years and many distilleries now buy their malt from malting companies, but Scotch geeks often romanticize producers that claim to adhere to the 18th century way. MacLean is more down to earth.
"By 1980," he characteristically points out, "only a handful of distilleries were malting their own barley, and most of these producing only about 20% of their requirement." Still, he names the floor-malting holdouts, so you can hold your own in conversation with Scotch geeks.
The later chapters tell how Scottish merchants invented blended Scotch in the 1870s, taming their rugged national drink so that it could become the most popular whisky in the world. This part gets to be something of a business story, full of the ins and outs of mergers and acquisitions and the ups and downs of Scotch on the world market. Of course, it's a story with its own drama, as suggested by two of MacLean's chapter titles: "A Scotsman on the Make" and "Great Pushfulness and Ability."
*
A whisky-sodden world
BUT it's in the first five chapters that MacLean's 20 years of writing on the subject show most forcefully.
