Whiskey, the name seems to have originated from the effect of such drink on man. Try saying it couple of times, and it would seem as if you are beginning to lose co-ordination, repeating same thing as you would often do after having one and most likely sound gibberish. It sounds funny, right. Well, I guess there must be some better explanations on this subject.
I looked at couple of websites and here’s what “Answers” has to report on this subject
“An alcoholic liquor distilled from grain, such as corn, rye, or barley, and containing approximately 40 to 50 percent ethyl alcohol by volume.” This sounds so much exact, well lets read form Wikipedia to see, what they have to say on this “Whisky (Scottish Gaelic: uisge-beatha), or whiskey (Irish: uisce beatha or fuisce), refers to a broad category of alcoholic beverages that are distilled from fermented grain mash and aged in wooden casks (generally oak).”
In simple words, Whiskey is a kind of alcoholic beverage where alcohol part comes from fermented grain, unlike Rum where it comes from Molasses.
The second and more interesting part of this story is to understand the process by which usually Whisky is made. I would not go wide and deep and wont make it more complex by mentioning different kind of whiskies but would rather focus on the standard methods.
Constituents / Raw Material - Essentially water, yeast and grain. Water is very important as it gives that local flavor. You probably would have noticed that a same beer brand tastes pretty different in different cities depending upon the source of water. There are lot of things which are responsible for this viz. salt content in water, purity level, carbonated or not carbonated, iron and so on.
