Do you drink the whisky you like?

@antihero Oops. Meant 'one bottle open'.

I only drink whisky I like.

By this I mean I tend to not waste my time owning or opening a bottle I won't enjoy a lot, because I don't have enough time or opportunity to waste on a sub par experience.

Now my eagerness to buy new things outpaced my experience in the early days, so I now have a lot of open bottles that sit on the shelf for a long time... But I've been a lot more careful in the last year or so, and I'm divesting myself of those bottles I don't plan to open.

I only buy stuff I'm fairly sure I'll like. Most often I do. I have multiple bottles open and of course some get neglected but once in a while when I get company it's good fun to let friends and family choose from a wide array of whiskies and not ''this is what's open today, ignore the other 30 bottles''

Thanks for bumping this thread @Nozinan. Interesting read.

I'm in the midst of a concerted effort to pare down my collection. For a long time there I had over a dozen opened bottles, and because I kept reaching for old favourites or opening new acquisitions, that number never shrank. I don't like clutter in my life in general, and while that does also extend to my whisky cabinet, I haven't really been behaving in a manner that reduces that whisky clutter. So for the past long while I've not allowed myself to open any new bottles or replacing old favourites as I run out.

So to answer the question in the topic... No, at the moment I'm not really drinking the whisky I like. Or, perhaps more accurately, I'm not drinking the whisky I like best. If I truly dislike something, I'll get rid of it instead of letting it occupy space in my cabinet.

This is a question I grapple with frequently. I feel most of my cabinet bottles are great, but I treat them as perhaps too sacred, even feeling guilty for pouring one if I feel I can't really appreciate it that day. I'm not sure how to deal with that. In contrast, I have usually tried to select drams to pour that will pare down those 20% of my bottles I least look forward to (take Bunnahabhain 12 as an example). I don't want to waste them (they're mostly not "bad" anyway), but they're not what I would most prefer to drink, and I'm always cognizant of the better ones I'm not pouring. I guess I get some pleasure from the idea that someday I will be left with only fantastic bottles. But then again, I know that as long as I purchase bottles there will always be a fraction of relative letdowns in the cabinet. Moreover, I wonder if I will get to the point of feeling okay to more casually pour any of my scarce and pricey ones: HP18, or HP21 or Signet or Sonnalta or Springtide or GlenDronach single cask or Taketsuru 17 or Redbreast 21 or.... I consider these and most of my collection to be great ones (which make up most of my cabinet), but so far I have enjoyed them only if it's been with family.

Great discussion. How come I didn't see that 3 years ago? I liked the very first reply most. I too am on a "limit stock effort", and soon I'm going to create an "inner circle" of 5 to 6 whiskies that I truly like and replenish them as I go. And with experience comes customization of taste and preference.

@two_bitcowboy 3 years delayed acknowledgement: You're spot on!!!

In reaction to what I just wrote, I poured myself some precious Kilchoman Port Cask Matured. Now this is living...!

Good going @VanPelt!

Personally I do not have anything I would consider as too expensive or rare to drink so I just have what I feel like when I want it.

Much of my current cabinet is made up of reliable easy to obtain (at the moment) bottlings with the odd pricier bottle thrown in. I do wait for the right time to have something I regard as special just to give it the right amount of attention but would not be reluctant to let a guest sample anything they want to try.

My difficulty at the moment is I just seem to always reach for peat in one form or another and only occasionally get one of the other bottles out the exception being heavily sherried bottles maybe I will drift back to bourbon and lighter flavours in the summer.

Ah, the constant struggle of owning and simply enjoying your whisky collection or it owning you; the same can be said for any "possession." I find myself struggling with this as well from time to time. Mostly, I struggle with the point of owning too many bottles as I tend to not like clutter in any aspect of my life. So my collection tends to cyclically go from a few bottles to a whole bunch then back down again. However, I open all of them and enjoy them because I could die tomorrow and the mere fact that that is what the juice is meant for. I do notice that I tend to want to hold onto the more cherished bottles though for fear of not being able to enjoy another dram again (like my bottle of Springbank 14 Fino and Longrow CV for example of which the former is my personal favorite of all time).

@two_bitcowboy Where are you, brother? I miss your always interesting input to these discussions. I hope you are well. Come back and talk to us. Cheers

This is such an interesting philosophical and meditative discussion.

Deciding what to drink is not always a simple matter. For pleasure I usually drink what suits my particular mood or frame of mind. But drinking the familiar for pleasure is not the entire story. A second reason for me to drink is to expand my experience, both of new labels but also of new batches of familiar labels just to keep abreast of what's currently on the market. And for those of us with many bottles open, a third reason to drink is to keep track of the evolving taste and quality of our open bottles. That can itself be a demanding responsibility. For example if I am going to give a tasting for others using long opened bottles I will always feel the need to taste each of the whiskies to see if it is still representative of the label it carries.

I still have probably 100-125 open bottles, including decanted ones, in the house. I do hope to reduce that number some day to perhaps 20. That day is a long way off, because my wife and I are not big volume drinkers.

It might be worthwhile to turn this question around: "How do you set yourself up to drink the whisky you like?"

For some people, it's to give yourself a broad "war chest" of different open whiskies so you can always pick the one best suited to a given situation. Obviously, @Victor and @antihero fit this mold.

For others, it's to give yourself a smaller, more focused, set of open bottles—maybe just a bottle or two. That way, you can just pop the one (or few) you know you'll enjoy, and enjoy them without the guilt(?) or distraction(?) of other bottles.

There are other variants on all this too, of course. But that second one is for me. If I have too many open, I'll often drink from the "less special" ones more often, based on some sense of prudence. But if I just pop Special Bottle X with the intention of drinking it over the next few weeks, then there's no guilt when I do in fact drink it over the next few weeks. As a bonus, I think this strategy also gives you a better memory of that bottle's taste and it fixes it into a period of your life when you think back on it.

I'm nostalgic as all get-out, so that last point is a big one for me.

An aside to @KRB80 : It sounds like you have that Springbank 14 Fino on the go right now. And you'd put it in the "cherished" category? Do tell!

Is this the single-cask 14-year-old that was released in 2011, cask #265? If so, it's the same one I have in my stash—maybe the top bottle on my "looking forward to opening" mental list. I'd love see your thoughts on it for a bit of vicarious enjoyment & anticipation on my side. Being a single cask, there aren't a ton of online reviews to be found for it, but this one fella named @Rigmorole wrote one here on Connosr a few years back:

connosr.com/springbank-14-year-fino-cask-s…

There are a few reviews elsewhere too, like on My Annoying Opinions, Chemistry of the Cocktail, and Reddit, but I'd always like to see one more. A comment on a small-run whisky like that carries so much more weight than a review of something mass-market like Lagavulin 16. Let's hear it! :)

@MadSingleMalt Yep, that's the one. Cask 265, Distilled in 1996. I promise you that I will write out my thoughts at some point later in the week when I have time to dedicate my one-pointed concentration to it. :)

@MadSingleMalt As promised: connosr.com/springbank-14-year-fino-cask-s…

This is a very interesting conversation. At the risk of being gauche I'll start by pointing out that budget sets a limit on how often I drink what I really like. I'm not in a position to have Lagavulin 16, Ardbeg 10, Highland Park 18 and such open and on-hand at all times. That said, I tend to be loss-averse so I save my "good stuff" for when the mood really strikes me. This has had the unintended consequence of forcing me to familiarize myself with low to mid range priced whiskies.

And I have found some very good whiskies that are affordable. I don't feel at all guilty about drinking Bulleit, Forty Creek or Buffalo Trace on the rocks and not paying full attention to it.

@OdysseusUnbound I tend to drink the good stuff first!!! Why wait? Of course, highland park 18 is amongst my favourites. Too bad it's $200+

@nooch Why wait? Because every time I drink from my Talisker, Springbank or Lagavulin, there's that much less left in the bottle. So it's always bittersweet.