** Click here for Episode 184 **
We’ll take this question from Jim on the rocks with a twist:
I host a whisky podcast and whisky is one of my main interests – it is something I know a bit about and so I am embarrassed to ask this question.
Whisky is made from distilling fermented grain and then maturing it in oak casks. So how can the French Eddu be a single MALT whisky when it is made from buckwheat – which I believe is a pseudo grain not an actual grain?
I cannot pretend to have greater whisky knowledge than Jim, but I’ve done some pretty heavy-duty detective-work (ie gone to a page on the Eddu website) and found the answer. Or, at least, Eddu’s own-brand balm for Jim’s aggravation:
Whisky is by definition a cereal brandy. Barley, wheat, maize belong to the botanical family of graminae. Buckwheat or sarrasin, for its part, belongs to the polygonacae family, like sorrel or rhubarb.
A cereal is a plant which yields flour for human consumption.
The notion of cereal thus regroups graminae and one polygonaceae: buckwheat!
That seems like a risky argument to me, along the lines of, ‘I once ate a giant Toblerone for breakfast. Ergo, Toblerone is a breakfast food!’ (Obviously I wish it was, but take it from me, Toblerone really doesn’t set you up for the day.)
But perhaps one of you readers is a buckwheat expert, a graminae expert (!), or possibly even more of a whisky expert than Jim. Take to the comments to reconcile what Jim finds so irreconcilable; or perhaps his original explanation of what constitutes a whisky is the source of the problem, for by his logic, Eddu is not even a whisky at all if it’s made not of grain but of a rhubarb cousin.
Subscribe with iTunes • Book • Question Archive • Episodes • Merch
• iPhone App • Android App • Facebook • Twitter • YouTube • FAQ
Tags: booze
Answer Me This! Podcast 
July 31, 2011 at 10:26 pm |
Yes they do – Ihave a bottle and it says single malt whisky. Malt whisky only comes from barley and the term Whisky – even without qualifiers is a protected term. Some Indian whisky is boosted by molasses which is why the EEC does not recognise it as whisky. In fact the EEC has a definition of malt whisky in which Buckwheat is not mentioned – although they do allow a grain spirit to be made from buckwheat that does not mean they are right to do so.
July 28, 2011 at 4:15 pm |
Whisky is one of my main interests also, and I don’t need a podcast as a front, either, damn it.
I can’t see them anywhere claiming that it is a MALT whisky, although perhaps I missed it. However, apparently, you _can_ malt buckwheat anyway, so that wouldn’t necessarily be a problem.
Anyway, it is true that buckwheat isn’t a grain. And nor is it a cereal, what with those terms being synonymous n’ all.
However, ‘whisky’, without qualifiers (Scotch, bourbon, single malt, etc) doesn’t seem to be a protected term. So, theoretically, one could sell rum as ‘sugarcane whisky’, although there wouldn’t be much point.
(Wikipedia reckons that much Indian whisky is made with molasses)
My thought is that the Eddu people feel it is appropriate to use the term because they are using a Scotch méthode (as they’d say…), and turning out something that tastes like whisky, so calling it buckwheat brandy or whatever would be confusing for everyone. I figure the fact that they use the buckwheat as if it were grain (probs toasting it, maybe even malting it) makes the use of the word ‘whisky’ more appropriate than anything else.
Now, for heaven’s sake, buy a bottle, and make your own mind up.
July 29, 2011 at 8:47 am |
Oh Kimon, never change.