Whiskey

"Here's whiskey in a hundred words or less: Whiskey is water, grain, yeast and aging."

"Fair enough."

"Scotch whiskey, all the grain is barley. It may be dried over peat smoke - the malt."

"Okay."

"Bourbon whiskey is mostly corn. It has wheat and rye as adjunct grains and is aged in new oak barrels that have been charred. Canadian whiskey is predominately rye grain and is also aged in oak barrels that may or may not be charred - I'm not terribly knowledgeable on Canadian whiskey. Tennessee whiskey starts like bourbon, but before they put it in the barrel they force it through giant vats of maple sugar charcoal that filters out an amazing number of impurities and imparts a tremendous amount of flavor. Although, what makes whiskey whiskey is impurities. If not for the impurities it'd be vodka."

"Let's talk about hangovers."

"Impurities are a big culprit."

"So, a two- to three-shot martini versus a strong double bourbon..."

"Well, there's so many other factors that come into play..."

"I'm speaking in a vacuum."

"I believe ... I'm thinking that if your alcohol is pure versus ... and I can never pronounce the word correctly ..."

"The southern American wants the sweet, syrupy drink while the eastern European wants the vodka."

"It's cultural."

"It's all about sugar. The white gold exploited from Hawaii and Cuba."

"Potatoes are cheaper than sugar, no doubt about that."

"Sugar is white gold."

"No no no, I'll tell you. Now we go to history. The reason that scotch is made with barley in pot stills and aged the way it is-"

"What if you'd never heard of sugar before, if you were some sort of heathen, and you said, 'What is this white gold you speak of? Where can one find this stuff?"

"The southern man craves that sweetness like the conquistadors craved gold."

"Not white gold."

"No, regular gold. Yellow gold."

"What is white gold? Technically."

"Yellow gold plus nickel and/or palladium. White gold is basically the poor man's platinum, just like high fructose corn syrup is like the poor man's sugar."

"It's at the other end of the spectrum - the chemical dummy of sugar, is it not?"

"Any molecule that ends in ose is a sugar."

"I bet they've got vats of that stuff the size of buildings."

"Who?"

"I don't know, the people who make candy bars and stuff. If you're an ad man, though, the cardinal rule is never to use the word vats, especially in a headline. Unless - and there are exceptions - unless you're in Wichita, for example. A vat of chicken for example."

"Mechanically separated turkey chili?"

"Yes, now that's when they put the actual turkey carcass into a centrifuge and spin it super-super fast until every scrap of meat and even marrow from the very bone flies out."

"My understanding is that the turkey literally separates itself ... from itself. So you'll have all your turkeys on a warehouse floor and a horn sounds and the turkeys just begin to tear themselves limb from limb."

"Then the obvious question is, at what point the turkey has fully separated itself from itself."

"When the soul leaves the body."

"That's a whole new can of worms."

"A vat of worms, actually."