Sometimes you’re doing some light research for a story, and run across a section that makes you want to go write another story. Today’s one of those days. From Charles McGrath’s 2011 write-up of the newly discovered bottles of scotch left over from Shackleton’s expedition.
The word “whiskey” comes from a Gaelic word meaning “water of life,” and in its early stages, whiskey literally breathes — or exhales, anyway. If you visit a distillery and look carefully, you’ll see that some of the outside walls and even the nearby trees are covered with thick black mold, the result of whiskey vapor escaping from the casks — what distillers call the “angels’ share.”
I feel like there’s a whole lurking in that detail, just waiting to get out, but it’s not relevant to the story I’m currently trying to tell (or…well, it could be, but I suspect the story I can spin from that detail needs to be very different to the one I’m writing now).