Halloween started in Scotland long before plastic pumpkins. Here's to Samhainn, guising, and earning your treat with a terrible joke.
Let's be honest, we'll take any excuse to make a new bottle of whisky. Birthdays, weddings, retirements, Father's Day, a slightly-better-than-average Tuesday. So when October comes round and every shop fills up with fake cobwebs and plastic bats, you don't need to ask us twice.
So here she is. Meet Spooky Boos!, a custom blended malt created by none other than Count Dramcula.
It's older than you think (and it's ours)
Halloween wasn't invented by a sweetie company. It goes back to Samhainn (Oidhche Shamhna, "Samhain night", in Gaelic), the old Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest and the start of winter. The crops were in, the nights were drawing in, and the line between this world and the next was said to wear a wee bit thin.
Now think about it. Bring in the harvest, hunker down for a long, dark Scottish winter, then find something warming to get you through it. That's more or less the plot of whisky too. We're not saying our ancestors invented Halloween as an excuse for a dram. We're just saying we understand them completely.
Guising: trick-or-treat, but you have to earn it
In Scotland we don't trick-or-treat. We go guising. Kids dress up, the original idea being to disguise yourself as one of the wandering spirits so they'd leave you alone, then head door to door. You don't get a treat just for turning up, though. You have to earn it with a joke, a song, a poem or a wee trick. (And long before anyone had heard of a pumpkin, we were carving lanterns out of neeps. Ask anyone who's tried it. Mostly it's turnip and swearing.)
So guising is really about blending in. Which, for a company called Whisky Blender, is about as on-brand as Halloween gets.
My costume this year
This year I'm going as a pint of beer.
Yes, the whisky guy is dressing up as a pint. I like to think of it as the perfect disguise: a beer in a room full of spirits. Nobody will suspect a thing.
I've got my doorstep joke ready, too:
What do you call a vampire who loves a good Scotch?
Count Dramcula.
I'll be here all week. Or at least until somebody hands me a treat. And if guising means doing a turn for your reward, then for a grown-up there's only one treat worth singing for. A dram.
Make your own spooky bottle
If you fancy a Halloween bottle of your own, head to the Lab, build a blend from our hand-picked casks, and give it the most ghoulish name you can think of. For full gothic effect, go for the black round bottle, the one Count Dramcula went for.
Every bottle is blended and labelled to order. So if you're cutting it fine for the 31st, don't panic. The long dark nights aren't going anywhere, and a spooky dram works just as well on Bonfire Night, or any wet Wednesday in November.
Happy Halloween, and slàinte mhath. 🎃