this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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Aren't scotch and whiskey two different things? In a rectangle/square sense
Scotch is whisky from Scotland (shockingly).
That's not an Americanism really; people call it Scotch in British English too. It's just that because 99% of the whisky in the UK is Scotch anyway you don't really need to specify. Whereas because most whisky consumed in the US is bourbon, they tend to specify when they mean Scotch.
The same is presumably true in reverse, i.e. Brits using "bourbon" more than Americans because of the need to specify.
Personally I'm not bothered by the whisky/whiskey distinction. Whisky was traditionally Scottish and whiskey Irish, with the Americans going the Irish way and other countries (like Japan) going the Scottish way. But it's a bit of a meme to nitpick at this point; they're indisputably just two spellings of the same thing.
That's more along the lines of what I was thinking. I could never tell the difference between the taste of any distinctions
Once you've got your eye in, scotch and bourbon are quite different. Many (although not all) scotch whiskies have peat in their flavour profile (a kind of smoky, salty, earthy flavour which is very distinctive), while bourbons never do. Bourbon is almost always quite a lot sweeter than scotch.
They're also made quite differently. Bourbon is mostly corn, and often has lots of rye and wheat in the mix, whereas scotch is mostly made of barley. Bourbon is always aged in new oak barrels, whereas scotch is mostly aged in second-fill barrels (which might previously have been used for bourbon, wine, sherry, port, cider etc.).
Whisky and whiskey are two different things.
"Scotch" is American for whisky but not for whiskey.
Guess I'm even more ignorant to booze culture than I thought