Craigmillar Castle Pt. 1 - Take a Hike

Justin and I went out to Craigmillar Castle last weekend, thus proving that it's worth buying the multipass (in this case, a Historic Scotland membership) because then you'll be darned if you don't get your money's worth out of it. Justin told me we could walk out to the castle. It was close, he said. It'd be a nice day for a stroll, he said. It was one and a half hours, he didn't say.

Perhaps this is why he chose to dress in camouflage for the occasion:

In all fairness, the first forty-five minutes was a lovely, level walk around Arthur's Seat. Scotland may not be full of bright tropical colors, but there is a surprising diversity of earth tones. Count how many shades of green and brown you find in that picture. There's something quite beautiful about it, in a subtle and rugged way.

The path we followed used to be the old Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway, nicknamed the "Innocent Railway" because... well, depends on who you ask. The Gazetteer for Scotland says it's because of the railway's excellent safety record. The sign on site says it's because it still used horses (also an alternative explanation given by the Gazetteer). Yes, that's right, a horse-drawn train. I suppose the coal-shovelers had slightly different duties here.

The original function of the railway was to bring coal into Edinburgh for urban consumption, but passenger soon latched onto it as a good deal. With the horse-drawn pace, there was no need for formal stations. Passengers could choose to disembark anywhere along the route. The railway also offers a contender for the position of oldest railway tunnel in Britain, but not in the part we walked.

Some sections are still in use, adapted and incorporated into other railway lines, but the section on the way to Craigmillar was decommissioned in 1968 and turned into the present walking/bicycling path.

With, of course, the odd train (and the emphasis here is on "odd"):

Chooga chooga chooga chooga chooga chooga chooga chooga...

Choo-choooooo!


What do you mean, I'm not five years old anymore?

The Vernal Equinox

Today is the vernal equinox, which means that everywhere in the world will get roughly the same amount of daylight today.

Since the autumnal equinox back in September, every day in Edinburgh has been shorter than we're used to, having spent most of the last 25 years between 35 and 45 degrees north. In December, the days were really short--full dark by 4:30 most days. From now, however, every day will be longer than we're used to--not by much at first, but by June it won't actually ever get fully dark.

Just another reminder of how far north we are here in Scotland: if you drew a line across the globe straight West from here, it would pass through Labrador in Canada and through the very southern part of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.

EUSA Beer Festival: an Intro to Real Ale

Last week, the Edinburgh University Students' Association (EUSA) hosted a charity beer festival. The festival featured a selection of cask-conditioned or "real" ales from a handful of Scottish breweries.

British-style real ale is probably a bit different from what you're used to. It's brewed with a limited set of natural ingredients, and no extra carbonation is added, so it is generally much flatter than the typical brew. It's also traditionally served at room temperature. If the idea of warm, flat beer doesn't sound appetizing, don't worry, it actually works--all the flavors, especially the bitterness from the hops, are rounded out a bit by serving it in such a way, and the result is subtler than most cold, bubbly beers.

If you're interested in learning more about real ale, the drink actually has a political advocacy group (only in the UK!), the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).

Many of the beers on tap at the EUSA festival are also widely available in bottles in specialty shops or on tap in certain pubs, which is itself a testament to the quality of Scottish beer culture. At the festival, we focused on the stuff we'd never seen before, such as the Houston brewery's Tartan Terror, a malty dark ale, and Harviestoun's Haggis Hunter, which is super hoppy. (You'll notice we also have a soft spot for campy Scottish branding.) Here's Nana taking on the Tartan Terror.

I have to say, the beer was good, but there was nothing that could hold a candle to anything put out by my favorite Scottish brewery to date: Edinburgh's own Innis and Gunn, who age their beer in oak whiskey barrels, rum casks, and sherry casks.

You might recognize it as "That beer Justin and Nana brought home for Christmas."

On a related note: The EUSA Charity Beer Festival was sponsored by Teach First, the UK equivalent of Teach for America. Anyone else have trouble imagining an American beer festival sponsored by anyone having anything at all to do with education?

Just a reminder that, while UK alcohol laws are pretty similar to those in most of the US, UK drinking culture most decidedly is not.

Globalization

For all that McDonald's, along with Starbucks, is considered the stick against which all other aspirations to homogenize the planet can be measured, McDonald's does have its localized menu quirks. I get a big kick out of finding out what they are and giving them a try. I'm not the only one who does this - there are some other global McDonald's observers out there:

From Food Network Humor:

- Turkey's McTurco ("2 burger patties covered in cayenne pepper sauce, and vegetables, and served on a fried pita")
- Mexico's McMolletes (refried beans, cheese, and pico de gallo served on an English muffin)
- Hong Kong's Shogun Burger ("a pork patty with Teriyaki sauce and cabbage.")

Among many others.

In Korea, I tried the Bulgogi Burger, a nod to Bulgogi sauce, a local sweet/salty brown marinade. It was awful. Here in Britain, the adaptation incorporates one of the most popular local cuisines: Indian food. You have NO IDEA how strongly the British feel about Indian food. Curry is a national dish. The supermarket has half an aisle dedicated to bottled Korma sauces, canned Chana Masala, and bags of naan and pappadums. And McDonald's has, as a variant on the American Snack Wrap, the Chicken Tikka Snack Wrap.



Verdict: Not bad. Tangy and actually quite spicy. But you could safely say that no actual Indian seasonings were harmed in the making of this Snack Wrap. In the U.S., you could sell the exact same flavor and title it "Zesty Southwestern Ranch," and people would go for it. In fact, now that I've looked at the U.S. menu, I'm starting to wonder if "Chipotle BBQ" might not be the exact same sauce....

The World of Whisky: Dewar's Aberfeldy Distillery

No drink says "Scotland" like whisky. A couple weeks ago Nana and I took a day trip up to Aberfeldy to tour the distillery there. Over the years, we'd both been on numerous brewery tours (after a while, they all kind of blur together), but we didn't know much at all about making whisky, though we've developed a taste for the stuff over here.

Anyway, the Aberfeldy distillery is one of the main suppliers for Dewar's, one of the world's best-selling brands of blended whisky, and is also home to the Dewar's World of Whisky museum, which explores both the history of the company and the history of the drink. At only GBP 6.50 for the museum, the distillery tour, and a complimentary dram of the good stuff, the place is an absolute steal.

So how is whisky made, you ask? Well, it starts out a lot like beer. You start with some kind of grain, usually malted barley, sometimes dried over a peat fire.

Then you grind the malt and mix it with hot water (aka, "mash" it) to break down the starches in the malt. This produces wort, which is mostly sugar. It's also one of two places in Scotland that's actually warm.

The next step is to cool the wort down and add yeast, so that the sugars in the wort can be turned into alcohol through fermentation. This happens in a magical happy place called the "tun room," where the fermenting wort is stored in giant wooden vats.

The fermentation process produces a lot of carbon dioxide, so if you spend a couple minutes in the tun room, you get a little tipsy from lack of oxygen.

The fermentation process also smells amazing. Kind of like a strong Belgian beer or a really nice barley wine, which is essentially what the wort is at this point.

(Note from Nana: Why is Justin smelling his hand? Actually, he's not. The gas produced by the fermentation process is heavier than air, meaning that you can scoop up a handful of it and carry it out of the tun and to your nose. Imagine scooping up water in your palm to wash your face, and you know what he's doing here. It's just that what he's scooping is invisible, so he looks a bit kooky doing it)

Now here's where the brewing process and the distilling process diverge. After fermentation, the wort is moved into giant copper stills, where the alcohol is boiled off and then condensed in multiple stages.

This is the other part of Scotland that's warm.

During the distillation process, all the partially-distilled spirits are kept under lock and key because of the strict duty controls imposed on distilling by the taxman.

If you look closely, you may notice that the stuff flowing through this final spirit safe is clear. All whisky is clear to begin with--it gets its color from the maturation process, during which the whisky is stored in oak barrels for anywhere from six years to several decades.

The type of barrel used has a major impact on the flavor of the whisky. Most Scottish distilleries mature their spirits in used American bourbon casks, which is one reason why the oak flavor is so much stronger in American whiskies.

Sometimes, sherry casks are also used.

(Note from Nana: Being patriotic, we of course enquired about the causes of the popularity of American barrels. Sadly, it's entirely economic. Used American bourbon barrels are much cheaper than the sherry barrels, which come from Spain - I don't recall the exact numbers, but it's something like a fourth or less of the cost. Bourbon barrels are plentiful because under bourbon distilling regulations, they can only be used once. Whisky gets another 2-3 uses out of the same barrel. Due to different brewing volumes, they do have to disassemble and reconstruct the barrels for whisky).

At the end of this maturation process, what you have is a single-malt whisky. That means all the whisky in the barrel was made in the same batch in the same distillery using malted barley and no other grains. Such whiskies are normally simply branded by distillery: Aberfeldy, in this case; or Glenfiddich, Balvenie, Glenmorangie, and Macallan, just to name a few of our favorites. (It turns out that, except for Glenmorangie, all of those are from the Speyside region.)

But single-malt whiskies can also be used to make blended whisky, which, like Dewar's, are usually branded under a separate name.

Single-malt whiskies are kind of like microbrewed beers in that the flavor can vary from batch to batch. Blended whiskies try to achieve the same flavor in every batch by mixing a base of grain whisky (which substitutes cheaper grain for some of the barley used in malt whisky) and a variety of malt whiskies.

The replica blender's workshop is like a wunderkammer of booze, containing samples of multiple batches and products from nearly every available provider.

(Note from Nana: Or at least it would have been, if there were anything in the bottles. Alas, they were merely tinted glass.)

The blender has to have a great nose for whisky, and the Dewar's exhibit gives visitors a chance to try their nostrils at the task.

The final product is branded with (surprise!) a Highland soldier. The only other options, I think, would have been a thistle, Walter Scott, or Robert Burns.

So at the end of the tour, you get to try some of the stuff. And if you're really nice, really curious, and really indecisive, you might even get an extra taste, like we did!

Below, from left to right, are an Aberfeldy single-malt, a Dewar's 12-year blended, and the classic Dewar's white label, which is the company's top seller. The black jug in the back is water: the preferred method of serving whisky in Scotland is either neat, or with a few drops. It seems they only offer you ice if you order your drinks with an American accent.

As Nana demonstrates here, the real flavor of whisky is actually in the smell--the vanilla-like smell from the oak casks, leather, peat, smoke, flowers.

So that's Scotch whisky, in a nutshell.

BONUS LESSON: Why "whisky"? I always thought it was "whiskey," then I learned that "whiskey" was adopted as the spelling outside of Scotland in the late-18th, early-19th century because Scottish whisky was so infamously unpalatable.

Yep, that's right: Scotch whisky as we know it, like a lot of other products that trade on antique nostalgia, was a Victorian invention. Doesn't make it any less delicious, though!