It’s Not Whisky
The first thing you have to know about Thai whisky is that it isn’t whisky. When I moved to Thailand and was offered the local brew by Thai friends, I declined—no offense, please— explaining that I’d quit drinking bourbon whisky years earlier because the older I got, its strength went one way and I went the other, so I found it wise to drink something else. Also, when it came to Scotch whisky—sorry, but I always thought it tasted like iodine smelled. I was, I said, a beer and wine person now.
My friends reassured me. They said Thai whisky is not like whisky in the West and, before I could say no, a tot was splashed into a glass over ice and soda water was added with a squeeze of fresh lime. Politely, I took a sip. Hey! It didn’t taste like whisky at all. It was mild and sweet and, I discovered as the meal progressed, it also was the perfect drink to accompany the fiery Thai cuisine.
So, if it isn’t whisky, what is it? The dictionary says whisky’s an alcoholic liquor distilled from the fermented mash of grain, barley for Scotch and in the making of bourbon, maize. Thai whisky—much of it, anyway—is made from sugar cane molasses and rice, or merely molasses, giving it the body and flavor of, well, rum. And those made only with molasses, without any grain at all, are rum. No Thai whisky, I learned, was made from rice or any other grain exclusively.
“I don’t think the Thais even have a word for ‘rum’,” said D. Kanchanalakshana, who followed his father into the Thai whisky business and now is the deputy director of production at the company that makes the Kingdom’s most popular brand, Mekhong. “Anything brown, they called it ‘whisky’. That was true a long time ago when the first western whiskys were imported, and it’s true now.”
I learned there were other differences, as well. Thai whisky can be aged—something that’s done in the West to true whiskys, bettering its value and, most insist, its taste—but it rarely is. Mekhong Superior, available in a limited number of locations, is aged five years, for instance, but the government requires only thirty days. The bottling date can be read on the backside of the label by looking through the glass. Ahhhh! March. That was a very good month!
Young, old… it matters not. Thai whisky is as much a part of Thai culture as sanuk and mai pen rai. Throughout the Kingdom, no matter what the occasion, and perhaps especially when there is no “occasion” at all, the tall, round and short, flat bottles are brought out, even at Buddhist ordination ceremonies and funerals.
Thanit Thamsukati, a former Bangkok Post reporter who now works for the company that makes Mekhong as well as two other “whiskys,” Hongthong and Saengsong, began to sing soon after we met. It was a popular Thai ditty about whisky, he said, where the drinker got so happy he fell into the well. A perfect Thai lyric theme, I thought. This was, after all the Land of Smiles. Where I came from, the United States, where whisky’s praises are also sung, I don’t think anyone ever fell into a well. Usually it was into a depression or a fight or divorce.
No one is certain when alcohol was first consumed in what is now Thailand, but likely it was, as in most places, for centuries a domestic activity. Even today in many villages illegal (untaxed) home brews are fermented and distilled from corn and rice, playing a considerable role in an individual’s or village’s social life. No northern Thai hill tribe “bride price” paid for the groom, for example, would not include some homegrown brew along with the silver and a hog or two.
Most Thai whisky now is sold under a system of concessions that dates back more than 150 years, when the kingdom created cash-producing monopolies not only in alcoholic spirits, but opium, gambling, and the lottery. (The lottery is still operated by the government.) The most recent concession—currently pumping more than US$440 million into government coffers annually—ended in 1999, and new companies entered the field when the bidding resumed for subsequent contracts, although the usual names prevailed. In recent years, the government’s willingness to open the market also saw several privately owned companies emerge. The Saengsong, Chao Praya, V.O., and Black Cat labels, for instance, captured about ten percent of the market.
One of them, Black Cat, initially was known as Maeo Dam, Thai for “black cat,” and it sold modestly, then two years ago it was oddly relaunched in its English translation in a television campaign directed at the Thai market. The award-winning commercial told a story—that no foreigner could hope to understand—about a village loan shark. The villager in debt was not making his payments and the godfather wondered how he could afford to drink whisky if he was as impoverished as he claimed. The answer, of course, was Black Cat. The whisky was that cheap!
Not all Thai whisky is drunk by Thais, just most of it. While there are longtime foreign residents living in Thailand who have developed a preference for the light, sweet taste, and a number of visitors give it a try in the same way they order Thai food and a local beer, almost all of the locally produced whisky is drunk by Thais.
The three-dollar-a-liter cost is the main reason. Before the economic bubble burst in 1997, Thailand was the largest market in the world for Johnny Walker black label whisky, one of the world’s most expensive and prestigious spirits—and that’s in volume, not per capita. But even those impressive sales were dwarfed by the local whiskys, seventy percent of it “white” (colorless) and sold in the rural areas, with caramel coloring added to the remaining thirty percent largely for urban sales.
(All producers boast that virtually all ingredients are locally sourced. Mekhong, for instance, adds a few Chinese herbs and spices to the mix for flavoring—thus qualifying the product for the name “liqueur”—but says that 99.9 percent of the blend is river water, sugar cane molasses and sticky rice. Broken rice is used by some producers because its cheaper and there’s more surface to which the mold can attach during fermentation, and sticky rice is used rather than another kind because of its high starch content, which means there’ll be more sugar in the finished product.)
There’s also more booze for the buck, said Mekhong’s Khun Thanit. The alcohol content was lower than in western whiskys, thirty five percent in the colored brew, twenty eight percent in the colorless, versus forty two percent in Scotch, “but if you have to choose between a bottle of Mekhong and four small beers that’ll cost about the same, you go for the whisky.” It’s more social, too. Traditionally, one person buys the whisky and shares it with friends, and a bottle can last all evening or afternooon. Four beers are bought individually, thus the bonding ritual is gone and so is the beer, in twenty minutes.
“Chok dee krup (or kaa)!” is the standard toast, meaning good luck. And the whisky is always sipped. Good whisky is never, ever gulped, even when it’s rum.
LIFE IS CHEAP, MAI PEN RAI
Piss in a Cup
My thirty-year-old son was visiting from the United States. It was Friday night and we planned to leave Bangkok in the morning by train to go to the rice-growing village near the Cambodian border where I was to be married on Monday. My son, Nick, is a Mormon, so he doesn’t drink, but I had some business to do with the owner of the Q Bar, one of the city’s most popular upscale nightclubs, so that was our evening destination.
Nick drank a Coke and I had a Heineken and it was about ten o’clock when we decided to leave. I opened the door and there, to my great surprise, stood a wall of Bangkok cops. I thought that there’d been a fight or perhaps even a shooting outside that we hadn’t heard. I excused myself politely and made to walk around the boys in brown and the officer nearest to me held up his hand in a manner that made it clear I wasn’t leaving. It was then that I noticed a table had been set up nearby and that on it were some paper cups.