Have you ever been so angry that you felt the urge to… well… do something you probably shouldn’t? If so, let me give you a little bit of advice.

Disregard attempting to calm yourself by controlling your breathing or counting to ten. Doing these contemplative things will only add to the premeditation aspect of the prosecution’s case when you’re eventually put on trial for doing what you intend to do. They’ll say you thought it through. Instead, let it be an unhindered crime of crazed passion. This will put you closer to an insanity plea, and with that, no chance at the electric chair and the probability of a prison release date minus a few years.

Yes, I just advised you to think through not thinking things through. It’s paradoxical, I know. But many things in life are paradoxical. Regarding engagement in the world around me, I live by the principle that to risk nothing is to risk everything. That’s a paradoxical statement, which, by the way, is different than an oxymoron. As a rhetorical device, a paradox usually appears contradictory but is really something used to make the reader dig deeper to find something that actually does make sense—something that’s worth remembering. An oxymoron involves broken logic. An original copy cannot be a prototype. An only choice does not present opportunities for decision-making. An exact estimate is still nothing more than a best guess.

Some whiskies are paradoxes. Others are oxymorons. Scoresby Scotch is an oxymoron. It calls itself Scotch, but certain production rules must be followed to be labeled as such. Mixing tarry black substances squeezed from the devil’s veins into finishing barrels is not one. On the other hand, the Wicklow Rare from Barr an Uisce is a paradox. It appears to understand that less is more.

Familiar to the nose, palate, and finish is the sense of warmed fruit. Some imbibers might want more from each of these three components, and I suppose if they try really hard, they’ll discover hints of other morsels here and there. A sense of honied almonds is one that the palate might reveal. But overall, the nose begins with stove-steamed fruits. The palate takes them from the stove to the oven. The finish is a medium-length savor of the fruits’ crisper edges. In short, warmed fruits are the primary investment in this dram. And this is a good thing. The richness is undistracted and consistent, resulting in a surprising fullness rare to most other Irish whiskies.

With the Wicklow Rare, indeed, less is more. Although, this paradox comes undone when you realize that less is not more in relation to quantity. Less of this delightful concoction is not a bounty but poverty—or as Mark Twain so famously noted, “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”