For a span of several months last year, Jim Murray, a whisky writer and reviewer, was unable to walk, stand, and even sit comfortably because of a simple and very telling mistake: for upward of twenty years, he’d spent full days spitting whisky out of his mouth into a spittoon that sat on his right-hand side. His whisky-spitting motion had become so one-sided that he’d shriveled a muscle in his back and thrown his spine out of alignment.
Murray is a principled whisky taster. He achieved some notoriety a few years ago for admitting during an interview that he does not kiss anyone during the writing of his annual whiskey tome, Jim Murray’s Whiskey Bible. He says the germs run the risk of making him sick, which would trash his tasting schedule of up to 30 whiskeys a day. When I watched him give a tasting on Texas bourbons recently, he nearly inspired an uprising among a cadre of Southerners by barring any swallowing at all for nearly two hours, and also stringently enforcing a “no talking” rule. “Listen to the whiskey,” he said. Eventually, most of the Texans came to heel, and later began self-policing in so zealous a manner that it was obvious they’d become disciples.
Read More
The form of Murray’s tasting method has been built over his thirty-some years of writing professionally about whiskey. He proudly proclaims himself the world’s first-ever whiskey writer, and his Whiskey Bible is filled with some of the most entertaining, creative, and occasionally crass tasting notes around. (“The alcohol by volume of one of the sexiest whiskies on the planet is 69 … and it goes down a treat. Much harder to spit than swallow.”) You’d expect Murray to have a seriously stringent, coherent and comprehensive set of rules around his tasting. He does. He calls it The Murray Method, and whether you choose to follow it is entirely a question of your own whiskey-drinking principles. Several other notable tasters have at least minimal rules and guidelines for tasting, but Murray’s are especially rigorous; where many tasters bake in some level of personalization, Murray follows strictures.
There are eighteen rules in Murray’s method, chief among them: drink black coffee to cleanse your palate; find a tasting room without distractions and free of excessive smells; drink the whiskey out of a tulip-shaped glass with a stem, at body temperature, and never (never!) add water or ice; nose the liquid naturally, sip it twice, the second one for flavor, balance, shape, mouthfeel, and finish; always taste it a third and fourth time to confirm your suspicions; spit to avoid becoming drunk; and be honest in your assessment. Notably, one of Murray’s final rules is that you should hold your own review higher than anyone else’s, including his. (For the full list of rules, check out his Whiskey Bible.)
There’s a comfort in having a very clear ruleset for tasting whiskey. And Murray’s insistence on being true to yourself, and not being swayed by anyone else’s thoughts (hence: no talking, Texans!) gives his rules a certain “of the people” quality. Whether you agree with Murray’s method or not is an interesting question. Answering means that you’ve tried it, and that you’ve pondered whiskey and the way you drink it thoroughly. “If your old tried and trusted technique suits you best, that’s fine by me,” he writes in the intro to every bible, before listing his rules. “But I do ask you try out the instructions below at least once to see if you find your whisky is talking to you with a far broader vocabulary and clearer voice than it once did.”
