Recently the Oregonian Sunday featured an article on Stuart Ramsay in the Ultimate Magazine.

Let an expert introduce you to the subleties of single malt at a private tasting party

Oregonian, December 9th, 2006
STORY JOHN FOYSTON / PHOTOS JAMIE FRANCIS

Sure you could have a scotch tasting without inviting an expert such as Stuart MacLean Ramsay, but you might miss out on those things they just don't teach in books.

"Now this," said Ramsay, as he held a thistle glass of The Balvenie Doublewood up to the light, "this is a classic golfing whiskey. It's perfect -- smooth and mellow. You don't want too complex a whiskey when you're trying to golf."

Earlier, he'd regaled we lucky few at the private tasting in a Southeast Portland studio with the concept of breakfast whiskey -- his unreconstructed Scot's burr rendered it as "braykfust hoosky." He talked about the convoys of highlanders and ponies who once lugged illegal whiskey to the lowlands; and about the French grape blight that crippled brandy production and impelled Victorian London clubmen to make scotch-and-soda their preferred tipple.

He advised how to best remove a fruit fly from your scotch -- grab it by the throat and shake while yelling, "Spit it out, ya wee bugger, spit it out!"

It was a lesson that a great scotch tasting is only partly about great scotch. It also wants good food, good friends, congenial surroundings and time -- lots of time. The best whiskey comes from a lazy still, Ramsay told us, and so does a good tasting. If it began on a schedule, that's soon abandoned in a series of detours, addenda, codicils, snacks, asides, toasts, jokes and occasional bursts of song.

"Now this is a lovely whiskey," Ramsay said as he sipped another of the six on sample, "I could drink this any time of day."

"What do you mean," growled host Ed Gordon, a fine woodworker and expatriate Scot. "You HAVE drunk it at any time of day."

This crew, many of whom have known Ramsay since he ran the BridgePort brewpub back in the mid-1980s, wasn't about to let him rhapsodize unchecked. But we were impressed by how he's developed his scotch tastings over the years and what he brings to the party.

Though he didn't bring his piper son, Alistair. "If I do a private Scotch tasting or a fundraiser tasting for our schools," said Ramsay in a later e-mail, "I'll have Alistair welcome guests with pipe tunes and then play a regional tune to match each whisky. My daughter, Isabella, 11, plays the snare drum and accompanied Alistair at our last tasting -- I sound like the bloody von Trapp family."

Ramsay did bring his kilted self -- Buchanan tartan, from his mother's side of the family -- maps of Scotland, coolers, reference books (including Michael Jackson's "Whiskey, The Definitive World Guide," some of whose chapters Ramsay wrote), and one of those voluminous cases in which pilots store charts and checklists.

He laid out pints of whiskey before and after aging; small squares of oak sawn from bourbon and sherry barrels; a chunk of prehistoric-looking peat and a small bit that smoldered in a brass burner for atmospherics.

There was a brass model of a long-necked Glenmorangie pot still, various arcane tools for distilling whiskey, and one for filching it: something called a copper dog that a retired distillery worker gave him, a WWII shell casing sealed with a penny soldered into the primer hole. It was lowered into the cask on string, filled and then stashed in a trouser leg.

"That was in use for 40 years," he said, "He got about two-thirds of a bottle every time."

That's substantially more than you have to worry about metabolizing at a scotch tasting -- although respect for strong drink is never misplaced. We tasted several strong whiskeys, including The Glenlivet Nadurra and 115-proof and 105-proof Ardbeg Uigeadail, in the course of the evening. But we sipped sensibly, had water always at hand and discussed each dram at some length, for Ramsay wasn't the only storyteller or scotch expert in the room.

(A couple of years ago, host Ed Gordon and friend Gary Schartz tracked down -- by tasting -- which of the nearly 50 Speyside distilleries supplied Portland Brewing with the whiskey they sold as The MacTarnahan -- well, nobody would give them a straight answer ...)

We weren't drinking on empty stomachs, either. Cheese and crackers served to cleanse palates between scotches, and more substantial fare: rare roast beef, baked potatoes, smoked salmon, chewy soda bread made by one of our tasters, rich Scottish shortbread and plutonium-dense chocolate cake.

The night meandered along as pleasantly as any in recent memory. Cold rain spatted impotently on the workshop skylights while we glowed with the internal warmth of our own peat-stoked fires. We chuckled at jokes and offered our own. We toasted John Barleycorn and absorbed whiskey lore and facts from Ramsay's abundant store.

"Now this," he said, holding aloft a glass of 18-year-old Chivas, "this would be a wonderful fly-fishing whiskey."