For the longest time, I’ve shied away from having my fancier whiskies with food. Would I have a glass of Larceny Small Batch at dinner occasionally? Rarely but sure. Would I have a glass of Old Tub with dessert? Occasionally, yeah. But generally I was suspicious that pairing one of my complex, special bottles with food would be a case of diminished returns.

But the Lovely Assistant’s world famous, famed-in-story caramel brownies are no mere food. They merit something equal to the task of a pairing. I then remembered Daniel Whittington of @thewhiskeytribe talking about pairing food to booze in a Vault episode, and he commented one of the most sure-fire techniques is to match like-to-like or complimentary flavors.

As this Carteret County ABC Makers Private Selection is a gigantic butterscotch and baking spice warhead, I thought this might be the ticket. And I was right.

For science, I had several sips before I had any brownie, then the rest of my pour after I started eating. And man if the brownies didn’t tease out a boatload of caramel from the butterscotch core of this bourbon. It wasn’t so much a change of color as it was a shift in hue. Extremely similar, but different enough to be noticed.

The moral of all this is, I might I have to revisit my previous dogma of not pairing my whiskies to foods. Obviously not new-to-me pours, and probably not my glass of solace at the end of a work week. But it might be fun to see what some desserts do to some of my old standby pours.

Do you have a favorite combination of food + whisk(e)y? I’d love some suggestions.

Image courtesy of Jon who also writes on Low Class & High Proof.

Low Class & High Proof

I learned how to make cocktails watching Danger 5