The long hot dry summer is over.
A night out with father, brother-in-law, and brother-in-law's father (visiting from Scotland) put paid to the mostly alcohol-free summer. We spent a night out having a good meal followed by the real treat of the evening, sampling a great many expensive offerings of Scotland's finest export in Vancouver's best gastropub - none of your Irish or American or Canadian inferior offerings for this party of four, if you please (the menu had a full page of single malts; there was about seven or eight Irish whiskeys on the back page, and a few North American and Japanese).
My favourite - we sampled about twenty, accompanied by a tasty cheese plate, some sausage and french fries - was a classic offering: a 16 year-old Lagavulin. But if you pressed me, I'd have cast a strong second-place vote for the 15 year-old Bruichladdich. Or my perennial favorite, Caol Ila (a real fire-starter, an 8 year-old with over 64% alcohol content), could have taken pride of place. Or there was this very good recommendation by the bar manager ...
I'm glad we thought ahead and booked a cab for the trip home.
