They’ve finally done it. They’ve bundled my whiskey-loving ass away and into a home. People have said it was going to happen for ages now, and my only astonishment was, “What took y’all so long?” But instead of a Ford Econoline and padded walls, I’m deposited in front of a curiously ornate cardboard box with raised decorations, bearing the inscription, “Hotel Flaviar.”
The box is dressed up like an old steamer trunk of the type Agatha Christie may have dragged onto an ocean liner a hundred years ago. And inside, more tempting than any piece of actual luggage I’ve ever unpacked, are 24 sample bottles of 24 of the best whiskeys from around the world, enough to fill up a standard 750ml whiskey bottle and 2/3 of a second one. Yowza, and Merry Christmas.
Hotel Flaviar Whiskey Advent Calendar
So that’s an advent calendar, eh?
What is an advent calendar, you ask? It’s, you know, the standard, stodgy Christmas tchotchke (for old folks) that’d be put out along with the tinsel and garlands. Beginning December 1, in the 24-day run up to Christmas, you’d open one door each day and receive a surprise hidden within each of the 24 little compartments.
In my Catholic family growing up in the ’90s, my mother had a wooden advent calendar shaped like the side of a house that we’d pull out each year and place on the mantle. Every day, one of us would pry open another tiny door matching the day of the month to unveil… an itty bitty cardboard portrait of a saint. But pictures of long-dead old dudes weren’t that interesting for a kid who had a Sega Genesis and a basketball hoop. If you were cool, like my grandmother, you had an advent calendar with a chocolate inside every door.
Alas, once the stodgy old people started aging out, advent calendars slowly disappeared from the window displays and department stores at the mall (which themselves started disappearing). We might wax nostalgic for them, but they were never cool, even when they were in.
So why are they everywhere these past few years?
Perhaps the Millennials and Gen Xers who grew up with chocolate-filled advent calendars at Grandma’s have gotten teary-eyed at the memories. Or is it the Gen Zers, continuing the age-old tradition of mining the recent past for fashions and fun novelties, that are driving a resurgence?
Or is it just that we live in a (very) capitalist society, damnit, and we want stuff!? Dildos, beers, dog toys, and the finest of all—whiskey. (Some things don’t change, though, and that’s our collective aversion to tiny cardboard pictures of old dudes.)
checking in?
Famously, Flaviar’s whiskey advent calendar sells out every year. Orders start shipping in North America, well, now. European customers don’t have a long wait; they start shipping in October. You might think that’s plenty of time to make a decision, but you’d better preorder it for yourself (or that special someone) well in advance, or else there’ll be no vacancy for you. The designs change from year to year, too, as does the whiskey selection. This year the theme is Hotel Flaviar.
Hotel Flaviar Whiskey Advent Calendar
Unboxing Hotel Flaviar is an experience. My normal skepticism regarding product unboxing melted in the face of the care that adorned this advent calendar. It’s lovingly made. On the front, there’s an old-fashioned, vaguely Central European hotel nestled at the foot of jagged, snow-capped peaks. Opening the front flap unveils a full-length painting of the inside of the hotel, as if you’re sitting amongst the leather chairs of the lobby.
In front of you, an enormous multi-paned window looks out over snow-covered mountains. Sunset spills bounces off the mountain peaks and spills through the glass onto the rug and tables. There’s a long bar against the glass running the length of the window. The eye is drawn to it after the mountains, but look closer. All those bottles lined up? They’re the actual bottles of the whiskeys you’re about to sample over the next 24 days.
It’d have been way too easy for them to draw generic whiskey bottles, but every label is authentically replicated in miniature. It’s details like that that make Hotel Flaviar stand out. A tiny detail easy to miss, but look for it. The entire presentation is designed to draw you into the fantasy that you’re at grand, old hotel in the Alps, somewhere in an indistinct but not-too-distant past, warming yourself with a fine glass, safe away from the cold. It’s one hell of an image.
Opposite the inner painting are the doors that hide the whiskey samples. Although cardboard, like practically any single-use advent calendar, they’re decorated as if they’re an aged oak board. Open up the big door first, and a few goodies jump out. Nestled deep into the thick foam are two Glencairn glasses, out of which you can drink your whiskey. These aren’t knock-offs, either. These are two genuine glasses from Glencairn Crystal. I held them up to the non-branded Glencairns I already owned, and they even have the same inscription frosted into the base of the glass, visible when you’ve drained your whiskey and look down into the bowl: The Glencairn Glass.
That one big cardboard door, though; there’s an issue. When I opened it (carefully, I swear!) it tore very slightly at the two corners of the hinged side, which marred an otherwise perfect presentation. There’s no way to tell until after it happens (or unless a reviewer warns you first), but you can’t open the door up completely without ripping the corners.
Looking at photographs other customers had posted in years past, it seems to be a universal problem. It doesn’t destroy the integrity of the box, but if you like to keep nice things—and this box is a nice thing—then you’ll want to open the big door as gently as if you’re changing the diaper on a baby bunny. The rest of the tiny doors don’t have this problem.
There’s also a tasting guide book that’s gorgeous illustrated. Keeping entirely on theme, it’s labeled the Guest Tasting Itinerary. Everything about the presentation of his advent calendar drips with obvious care, attention, and enthusiasm from all the folks who put it together.
Written in the style of a guestbook of an old-fashioned inn, the booklet offers tasting tips and narrative passages for every whiskey sample found in the calendar. For each day, you get a page spread of prose describing what you’re about to taste. Remember the highly descriptive, second-person passages in the J. Peterman catalogs that Elaine wrote in Seinfeld? They’re written like that: “On the sixth day, you surround yourself with the clinking of chips and the whisper of cards in the hotel’s executive casino….” And then a few more words working in mention of the whiskey of the day against a background of visuals.
The next page spread includes flavor notes, showing the various flavors you may recognize in what you’re tasting and in what intensity. Are you drinking a caramel bomb with minor notes of white pepper, tobacco, and orange peel? Or perhaps a sweet, toasted butterscotch? Whiskey tasting is a skill that has to be worked and practiced, and this entertaining guidebook goes a long way toward sharpening that skill. Newcomers and casual whiskey fans will enjoy it for the instruction and discovery, and whiskey veterans will enjoy the game of comparison, taking down a mental note of what they sense and seeing how it matches up to the booklet. There’s even a ribbon for marking your page, like an old hardcover unearthed at the library, and one of those privacy doorknob hangers you find a hotel that says “Do not disturb, tasting in progress.”
There’s also a one-year membership to Flaviar’s subscription, Flaviar Black, that comes in the guise of an electronic room key. For every sample in the calendar, you get a discount on full-sized bottles as a member of Flaviar Black. Just use your smartphone or tablet to scan the QR code in the booklet to take you to the product page. You also get priority access to rare and vintage bottles, free shipping on certain bottles, early access to limited releases, and priority customer support.
the best hotel in town
It has 24 doors and therefore 24 whiskey samples. That’s the correct number for an advent calendar, since advent ends on December 24th. Still, I always feel it’s a bit anticlimactic to wake up on Christmas Day without one last treat. I know I’m getting greedy, and Santa doesn’t like greedy children in their 30s, but I’d have loved to see an extra-special bottle for the 25th day. Ah, well.
Some competing whiskey advent calendars only provide 12 samples, which sucks and is just plain Grinchy. Others provide tiny samples, which feels more like a tease and less like a treat. Each of the samples in Hotel Flaviar comes in a 50ml bottle. That works out to 1.69 fluid ounces. If you remember your mathematics (liquor mathematics, the most important kind), you’ll know that one serving of whiskey equals 1.5 fluid ounces, so each of Flaviar’s samples is a full serving of whiskey, plus a few drops. That’s another leg-up it has over competing whiskey advent calendars, many of which give you only one fluid ounce or so.
The Flaviar’s 50ml is enough for you to properly enjoy a whole serving, rather than being teased a crumb, or for you to use that second Glencairn glass and split it with a friend. Calendars with one-fluid-ounce samples are lousy for splitting; each of you would barely get a taste.
Because I made such a sacrifice testing out this calendar on an accelerated timespan, I went off-script and jumped out in my tastings. Closing my eyes, extending my forefinger, and jabbing it downward at random, the first door I punched open was day 12. It was Nova, from an Australian distillery called Starward. Oooh. I’d never had an Australian whiskey before, never even heard of Starward. This is the big appeal of a whiskey advent calendar: that you (or whoever you’re giving it to) will discover whiskeys they’d never come otherwise come across.
Jammy red berries from aging in red wine barrels (an unusual choice) exploded over my tongue as the Nova swished around my taste buds, and it went down a lot smoother than its two years of aging suggested. I’m glad I went into the first sample tasting blind before consulting the tasting book, because man, two years is young for aging a whiskey. Super young. As the book explains, though, the wild temperature swings in Melbourne, where Nova is aged, cause the wooden barrels to expand and contract significantly enough to speed up aging.
Makes sense. The importance of changing temperatures between seasons has long been known to be important to aging whiskey, and is one reason why Kentucky is so valued as a place to make whiskey: it has four real seasons that ritually expand and contract the wooden barrels and have much to do with the aging process that gives whiskey its complex flavor.
And then there were the crowd-pleasers Breckenridge, Heaven Hill, Templeton, and WhistlePig… I tasted my way through an awfully good selection of whiskeys. A lot of them I’d never seen in person, which is a welcome surprise for me, given that I spend a fair chunk of time on the hunt for new whiskeys. Most are attainable. Some near the $80 to 90 mark, but many fit into the $30 to 50 range.
Hotel Flaviar’s samples hop around the world. You can cheat at knowing which days are which whiskeys by looking through the tasting guide or consulting the back of the box, but I encourage you not to. Surprises are fun, especially when they taste like oak and caramel and vanilla. Most of the whiskeys this year are American, a nice mix of bourbon, rye, and catchall “American whiskeys” from various states. Along with the Australian whiskey, there’s also a German one. Both are unusual birthplaces for whiskey. Toss in one from Japan and two from Ireland for a short hop around the world. There are no Scotches, though, which is unusual for a world tour of whiskey.
Peated (smoky) Scotches tend to be love-it-or-hate-it, so perhaps Flaviar left them out for the sake of pleasing the widest-ranging crowd, but lots and lots of Scotches aren’t peated. Perhaps it was to keep costs down. Even though bourbons have risen in price quite a lot over the last decade, I’ve still seen Scotches as being generally pricier here. Either way, I’d have liked to have seen more whiskies from outside the U.S., especially from traditional whiskey strongholds such as Scotland, Ireland, and Japan, given that the pitch of Hotel Flaviar is that of a world-traveling whiskey run.
Hotel Flaviar Whiskey Advent Calendar
All the elements are here for a quality advent calendar, and the way Flaviar ties them together impressed me. It’d be too easy to slap 24 whiskeys into a box and shove it out the door. And I might still enjoy that, because if the whiskey is good, I’m content. But Hotel Flaviar kept pleasing me in the finer details, little moments of discovery stacked one after another.
The yearlong Flaviar Black membership, worth $40, and two Glencairn glasses, worth about $20, add to the enduring value of this advent calendar. The whiskey may be gone before December is over, but the gift remains by way of the tasting booklet and 11 more months of Flaviar Black. The only real downside is what to do with the box after all the whiskey is gone: recycle or keep it? Because even punched through with 25 holes and 25 now-empty doors, it’s still a thing of beauty.
The post A Christmas Miracle? Flaviar’s Hit Advent Calendar Gives You 24 Nights of Whiskey appeared first on VICE.
The post A Christmas Miracle? Flaviar’s Hit Advent Calendar Gives You 24 Nights of Whiskey appeared first on VICE.
