DOCTOR WHISKY
About 20 years ago, Canadian PhD student Sam Simmons started at the University of Edinburgh. Not knowing anyone in the northern capital, he amused himself by joining a hockey team (naturally) and, though not much interested in booze, the university’s whisky society. There, at his first meeting, he was wooed by a combination of the nuanced differences between the whiskies, the academic environment in which they were discussed (which appealed to his cerebral side), and the warm, fuzzy feeling he got from his four drams.
“I had a clarity of thought. I remember sort of floating home,” he recalls. “I wrote a bunch that night. It was an incredible revelation intellectually, I guess, and physiologically.” As it turned out, this was the whisky equivalent of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, “You’re a wizard, Harry”, when the worldweary reviewer tastes his favourite childhood dish: Sam had discovered his destiny.
