Review – Jura, Brooklyn, 16 Years Old (Inferred), 42%

My wife has been reading various volumes about “minimalism,” which, in short, is the practice of putting about 90% of what you own to the curb. It transforms a corner of each room in the house from this…

into this…

I don’t actually mind all that much. I’ve been a minimalist my whole life. I’ve always looked at life through the lens of “less is more.” My stuff is never laying around the house because, well, I don’t have anything to leave laying around. And I’ve been saying for quite a while that our kids have far too many toys; so many toys that they never even play with half of them because they’re buried below the other half and it’s much too laborious for the lazy squatters to dig that deeply. I think that’s one reason that I so dearly love the sound of Legos being sucked up into a vacuum. Really, I love it. I skip and dance while vacuuming, and all along the way, my heart sings. Clickety-clackety-shunkt-clack-vloomp… “Da dee dum…”

So, what happens when you already possess very little but you suddenly find yourself married to someone trying to downsize the entire household? You get a povertous man keeping a careful inventory of a handful of shirts, pants, toiletries, and a couple of cabinets full of whisky – a man circling his stuff like a hawk to make sure that none of it vanishes.

So far nothing has walked away, although I did get a little nervous the other day when I couldn’t find my new bottle of the Jura Brooklyn edition. It’s one of the shorter bottles among the vast array of whiskies and so in the usual shuffling of my collection, it ended up behind a towering Macallan. Not lost, just out of sight.

Speaking of minimalism, the Jura Brooklyn is just that. On the nose, this diminutively packaged spirit gives off a little bit of smoke, but it’s nothing coming from within the whisky’s boundary, but rather it’s more like a peat fire smoldering in the Bronx and being carried by a southerly wind through Queens and into the Brooklyn borough. Along the way, it picks up a slight trace of bitters from some of the storefront chocolatiers.

The palate brings in a faint hint of the borough’s southern seaside – a little bit of sea salted asparagus grilled over smoking cedar planks.

The finish is a medium toddy of overly buttered and burnt vegetables. And I’ll bet you’ll swear you tasted the grill soot.

As I noted, the whisky is somewhat of a minimalist, and unfortunately, apart from the nose, what it decides to retain among its possessions isn’t all that spectacular. More like it preferred the scrap drive-thru toys at the bottom of the toy box.

Still, it’s mine, so it had better stay right where it is. And I’ll be watching, dear.