Erich - it's 02.30 here in a cold and blustery Scotland. My son has just staggered in, having celebrated his new job, and woken the household! I am wide awake now, and thought you might be amused to hear of my malt whisky odyssey.
I don't drink much malt now because once 'the seal is broken' it doesn't last long in my house - it is dangerously seductive! So now I am mostly a wine man, but I used to drink a lot of that nectar.
But it has never been cheap. My odyssey began with my first pay packet as an intern at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary. My friend Pete Grant (from Grantown-on-Spey lol!) and I decided that each ^cremation form" fee - ten guineas, then the same price of a good bottle of malt - we received would be spent on a bottle. I worked in an academic unit with a policy of routinely carrying out necropsies (where the pathologist got the crem fee - "Ash Cash"!!) and only got three in a year. Pete worked in a geriatric ward where there was no such policy and patients seemed to be dying like flies - he got over a hundred! He ended up getting a bottle of malt from every distillery then in operation, and started over again LOL!! He had to build a false ceiling in his apartment to accommodate them all, and on nights off duty his wife would test us out in 'blind tastings' Pretty soon I could distinguish the peaty West Coast and Island malts from the smooth Speysides. Getting any further was difficult but eventually I could pick out (and still can); The Macallan because it is 'darker in the glass than it tastes' on account of its routine ageing in old sherry casks; Lagavulin because it has a salty/briny note in addition to the heavy peat; Talisker because it has a 'medicinal' note in addition to heavy peat: the majestic Springbank on account of its heathery, flowery note: and Highland Park because of its unique marriage of east and west, smooth as the smoothest Speyside but with a perfectly judged hint of peat. And if anyone ever offers you a glass of malt they say is Islay, but you don't taste much peat, it is Bunnahabhain every time. Why this is the case I don't know. That's as far as my blind-tasting skills go!
My next anecdote concerns Pete getting a job as a family Practitioner in Grantown-on-Spey, the 'capital' of Speyside. His patients used to bring him gifts of salmon caught on the fly and, of course, malt whisky. There are dozens of distilleries in Speyside and one year the owner of one (which I will not name) who, for reasons you might guess, had become teetotal lol gave him a whole case. Pete, God bless the man, gave me two bottles, the labels on which said simply "The Manager's Dram". It is NEVER sold. It turned out that each year the managers of all the Scottish distilleries have a competition to vote blindly on the best malt available. That year I was told by mouth that it was "Oban"! I don't know how old it was or what type of cask it had been aged in but it was the best malt I have ever tasted!! BTW Pete wears nothing under his kilt and adds c. 10% room temp water to his dram!!!!
The last bit of my odyssey concerns "Malt Whisky Society" based in Edinburgh, of which I am still a member. I believe they now accept foreign members, so your dad might be interested? The Society is remarkable in that they used to buy their own casks and age different malts in them. The distilleries agreed to this, but only on condition that their malts were not named, rather they were given numbers, and were sold only to members. All were sold unadulterated (you'd be surprised how many retailed malts are artificially coloured!) at cask strength (high octane, and anyone not adding 20% water would have been considered deranged). So you see that it is possible to become as obsessed with malts as it is with pipes/tobaccos LOL! My most memorable experience of the MWS is when they offered "Number One, 32 Year-Old" (aka Glenfarclas - a Speyside) - exactly the same malt but from two different casks. One was an ex-bourbon cask, the other an ex-sherry cask. The difference was remarkable; the one from the bourbon cask looked like water - crystal clear - and tasted beautifully smooth with a sweet honey note (probably from the sugars coating the inside of the bourbon cask when they burn it out before pouring in the malt); the one from the sherry cask resembled over-stewed tea and tasted of Christmas Pudding!! Both were exquisite malts and I took a long time deciding that I couldn't decide which I liked better LOL!!
Anyway, enough of my odyssey for now, but if you want to watch a highly amusing movie based on malt whisky, I can highly recommend "The Angel's Share" (ie the volume that is lost in cask as a malt ages)