Musings on whisky and the current movement of functional drinks

Open the fridge at any half-decent coffee shop or deli right now and you'll find a wall of 'functional' drinks - adaptogenic sodas, gut-health tonics, nootropic coffee, electrolyte-collagen everything.

Every one of them has its own definition of function, tailored to whatever it's trying to sell you. Personally I love treating myself to an XOXO prebiotic soda (make mine the watermelon one) or a trip CBD can. I've grabbed many of these mid-sprint between meetings - less as a considered health ritual and more as, well, just something tasty to drink.

So if we're all going to keep using the word 'functional' this loosely, I want to make a case for whisky's version of it. Not as a health drink - please don't come at me for that - and not as a cure for anything. But as part of a ritual that changes the pace of a day.

It should be said, I'm not talking about whisky in a shot glass here. If you're reading this and believe the only reason to drink whisky is to get drunk, that's a bigger conversation about stigma, units, drinking rituals, and the art of sipping and appreciating over shooting and downing.

Let's start with the maths

When you pour a whisky, you're not pouring a liquid that was made last week and bottled yesterday. You're pouring time. A spirit that, for the most part, has sat in a cask for three years or more before it reaches us. Years of maturation, of breathing and stillness, condensed into a 25ml pour. 

Looked at that way, 45 minutes over a dram is proportionate, not indulgent. You're not rushing something that took years to arrive.

The function isn't the whisky itself, but the ritual and the pour

Straight up - I don't want to overclaim. Whisky doesn't de-stress you chemically.

But what it does do is give you a reason to stop moving. The act of pouring a dram, for me, is a physical punctuation mark - a pause button - as day goes into evening. My shoulders literally drop, not because of what's in the glass (again, being careful from a health-claims perspective), but because I've given myself thirty seconds where nothing else is allowed to happen. 

A few minutes more to enjoy that first sip, to notice how the flavour unfolds. And thirty more minutes after that, sipped slowly whilst cooking, or finishing off the last emails of the day, or talking to Fab.

It's also worth noting these aren't 'drinking to get drunk' moments by any measure. That's the function. It's behavioural, not medicinal. My pause button.

And that pause is where the third thing happens: it becomes a moment for people to talk 

Claire Warner - who spent years in luxury drinks advocacy before co-founding the non-alcoholic aperitif brand Æcorn - talks wonderfully of how social connection is emerging as a third pillar alongside our physical and mental health, and how it's built in social spaces, with hospitality at the fore of that. She traces the thought back to Émile Durkheim's 1912 concept of collective effervescence - the lift you feel in a room full of people, the hum of a busy bar - and points out that neuroscience is just now catching up to what he described over a century ago.

Claire's work is about social spaces generally, not whisky specifically. But the application feels relevant in the pause: a whisky being poured amongst friends looks a lot like the kind of small social infrastructure she's talking about. Nobody hands round glasses of whisky and then stares at their phone. The pouring and the talking about what's in the glass - the flavours, the 'do you like it, if not why not' - that's what gives a room a reason to slow down collectively, before the conversation turns to everything else.

A catalyst for conversation.

I'll still keep a stock of XOXO soda and Trip CBD in my fridge. But pouring a whisky is the one moment in my day built entirely around stopping. And, no, we're definitely not releasing a whisky infused with collagen later this year.