Spirits

Whiskey use Justified in series

Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter) shares some 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle with her boyfriend — and, long story, former brother-in-law — Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) in this scene from the FX series Justified.
Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter) shares some 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle with her boyfriend — and, long story, former brother-in-law — Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) in this scene from the FX series Justified.

"In this house, we drink whiskey."

-- Helen Givens, Justified

What with newspapers being at least nominally about the who, what, where, when and sometimes why of things, this column does not devote much attention to signs and/or wonders or rumors and myths. We have not seen Elvis in a number of months, we're pretty sure Oswald acted alone and we receive all reports of hauntings as products of the haunted's own psychological dynamics. The only spirits we deal with here are those that can be bottled and drunk; we'll leave the pickled genii to the online sources and TMZ.

However, there was a plausible sighting of Pappy Van Winkle's recently, the 20-year-old variety. Nevermind it was on Justified, a made-up TV show, now in its sixth and final season, set in Kentucky but shot (pretty obviously) in California.

A couple of weeks ago, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) took fiancee Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter), who is also -- long story -- his brother's widow and executioner, on a trip to his parents' hunting cabin in Bulletville. Ostensibly, the trip was for the first day of razorback season, but also maybe to murder Ava for being a confidential informant snitching on Boyd to the U.S. Marshals Service (which for some reason is doing investigative work that ought to be conducted by local agencies or the FBI, but nevermind; this is just an FX series after all).

So when they get up to the cabin, Boyd pries up a floorboard and discovers the bottle of 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, still there where he hid it many years before. While he had intended to save the bottle for his wedding day, Boyd decides now is as good a time as any to crack the seal on that bad boy. After all, he and the woman he loves are together in the ol' hunting cabin, Boyd has a plan that will make them rich, etc. Why not have a little sip of the good stuff?

Well, Ava doesn't want any. Because she's figuring the same thing that the audience is grokking, that it's probably a bad sign that Boyd wants to drink the good whiskey now. Because that implies there might not be a later, happier occasion. In a really tense scene, he forces Ava to have a drink with him, and we are reminded of the brutality of the character: Boyd Crowder is a bad, bad man -- a murderer who won't hesitate to kill the thing he thinks he loves if it will buy him one more minute of unfettered outlaw freedom.

...

Now there are a couple of things about this scene that are interesting to imbibers. First of all, Boyd slams a shot of Pappy's, which is not the way to treat the stuff (it's the ultimate sipping whiskey -- you don't bolt it, you savor it). This isn't because he doesn't know how to drink -- during the six seasons of Justified, we've watched Boyd graduate from Wild Turkey to Russell's Reserve to Elmer T. Lee. We know he's got good taste in Kentucky bourbon. It's because the show's writers and producers want to demonstrate how unhinged, profligate and dangerous he's become. (This has to be the point: Goggins, I have been given to understand, is a bit of a bourbon man himself, favoring Maker's Mark. He knows how to drink.)

We don't see Boyd and Ava finish that bottle of Pappy's -- she has only her one reluctant shot and (spoiler alert) he seems not to be suffering any ill effects the next morning. So somewhere in pretend-Kentucky-in-TV-land there's at least one unemptied bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 20-year-old Family Reserve.

That's probably as close as most of us will ever come to that particular product again. I like Pappy's but prefer the slightly rawer, slightly less pricey 15-year-old version. I've never had the 23-year-old, which I realize disqualifies me from being expert in the eyes of some. But in my experience, Pappy's is just really good bourbon, not the ultimate bourbon.

I blame the third season of Justified, particularly the icy-eyed Robert Quarles (Neal McDonough), for a good part of the Pappy panic. Folks I knew who had signed up for lotteries and waiting lists all over the South shuddered every time the character waxed rhapsodically about how he just loved this new stuff he'd discovered called Pappy Van Winkle.

On the other hand, Pappy's had been part of the show as far back as Season 1, when Dixie Mafia boss Emmitt Arnett (Steven Flynn) poured Pappy in his coffee. Quarles ended up killing Arnett; this sin against whiskey was probably a contributing factor.

Still, at least part of the reason you can't find any Pappy's around here has to do with the writing room of Justified -- a bunch of guys who probably couldn't find Kentucky on the map if you spotted them a couple of Carolinas and Tennessee. But while the show might not reliably portray Kentucky geography, accents or even attitudes, it does seem to grasp the importance of bourbon in a state that produces 95 percent of the world's bourbon (but not all of it and not even all of the best) and has more barrels of the stuff aging in its rickhouses (5.3 million) than people (4.3 million).

Bourbon is a character in the show, or at least a character cue. On Justified, as in real life, you can tell a lot about someone by their bar call. A bottle of Pappy's isn't necessarily used as a signifier of expensively dressed evil in the show. Art Mullen (Nick Searcy), chief deputy of the U.S. Marshals Field Office in Lexington and arguably the series' only really nice guy, once got a bottle as a gift. But Mullen seems to prefer to spend his money on Blanton's, and has even been seen drinking Canadian whiskey.

...

Someone is probably working on a dissertation about the way whiskey appears as a character in the show, though I can't say I've quite decoded exactly how brand identification relates to character. Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), the show's protagonist, called for Jim Beam early on -- an honest, affordable white label that placed him squarely in the mainstream. Nothing too fancy or fussy for this hero.

Still, as Raylan has been revealed as a complicated character, his drinking habits have reflected this. After the first season, he seemed to drink more pay grade-appropriate Ancient Age than anything else, but he has emerged as a pragmatic bourbon drinker. He'll have what you're having if you're pouring. He's had Boyd's Elmer T. Lee and some of the Blanton's he gave Mullen as a get-well gift after his boss was shot.

Wild Turkey seems to indicate a certain untamed quality. Not only was it Boyd's drink of choice when he was leading his white supremacist church in the woods, it was also the drink of choice for Raylan's criminal father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry), now deceased, but still liable to pop up in flashbacks and Raylan's waking dreams. (When Raylan set Arlo's personal effects on fire, he used a bottle of Ancient Age as accelerant.)

Native Kentuckians tend to be more catholic in their bourbon choices. This season, Mary Steenburgen's character, Katherine Hale, has indulged in the high-dollar Eagle Rare and the modest Old Forester -- while interlopers like Quarles and the mercenary Ty Walker (Garret Dillahunt) are particular about labels. ( He calls for Buffalo Trace.)

While it's obvious there's a lot of thought that goes into who drinks what, most of the time you have to pay pretty close attention to determine the brands being bandied about. Justified isn't about product placement -- though I'm sure the writers' room has received plenty of unsolicited bottles over the years -- but about using bourbon as a significant detail. That the brands matter is evidenced by a single instance in which an obviously fake bottle (which to tell the truth, looked like a mocked-over bottle of Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey) was used for a scene in which Boyd and Ava cavorted for six hours.

The producers didn't want an actual brand to be associated with their abuse or the buzzed driving Ava engaged in after the fact.

It's also interesting that the man who represents the ultimate evil -- Avery Markham (Sam Elliott) -- is also the only character to have a professed dislike of bourbon. "You know, I grew up in Kentucky my entire life, yet I never developed a taste for bourbon, " he says. "Even the smell turns something in me sour."

In the context of the show, the line is bloodcurdling -- an alien tell. You cannot trust the creature who rejects bourbon.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

Style on 03/22/2015

Upcoming Events