Machane Yehuda – my own Whisky Aroma Academy.

 

If you ever go to do the Cardhu Distillery tour then you’ll get to play their little quiz game. On the table they have a collection of baker’s dusting cans (used for instance to sprinkle icing sugar onto doughnuts). Well each of these cans contains something different in them, be it sugar, flour, barley, chocolate powder, oats, coffee, saw dust etc…which are all aromas and flavours found in whisky. The cans are passed around and they try and guess the items. The problem is (at least when we were there) that a lot of the items were already quite old and stale and had lost much of their strength.

 

To try and improve your Whisky education there are companies selling Aroma kits for £100 and up but again, the problem is that, for instance, their lemon oil doesn’t exactly smell of lemons, it smells of lemon oil! The apple oil smells more like a cheap perfume and as for the walnut oil; well I’m really not sure what that smells of at all, but certainly not walnuts!

Machane Yehuda – my own Whisky Aroma Academy.

In my opinion, it is not a matter of training your nose to recognise smells within the whisky, it is all about familiarising yourself with as many fresh smells and tastes as possible. Then you can recognise these aromas within the whiskies. A perfect place to do this is in a vegetable, fruit and food market.

For me, there cannot be a more perfect Whisky Aroma Academy than Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda. There you will find hundreds of different fruits, vegetables and herbs, of all kinds nuts and grains, meats and fish, cheese, a huge array of different breads made from every type of flour, cooked foods from many different regions, specialist chocolate, coffee and tea shops,  and spices from all over the world.  In short you’ll find every kind of aroma and taste far beyond the range of flavours you’ll get in wine, whisky and any other spirit, with the single exception of peat smoke, which I can honestly say, I have never smelt in Machane Yehuda "shuk" (market).

As an added bonus, you have some fine wine and spirits stores in and around Machane Yehuda. It’s all there!

Open air part
 

 



 

 

 

Green grapes, yellow grapes, red grapes, purple grapes...

 

Rogelach and otter cakes, Berechos with all kinds of fillings.

Believe me, they taste even better than they look!

 

Fresh bread, pittot...and every type of Shabbat Challah towards the end of week.

All kinds of cooked meat

Fresh chicken, turkey and meat

Fresh (made on premises) pasta

They sell six different kinds of Paprika.

 

 

Spices of every kind.

You could really go nuts here...

Olive anyone? Black, green, yellow, red?

 

A Cheese Shop. (That's actually John Cleese in a false wig and beard).

 

One of many fish stalls

Herring

Halva with dates, and with chocolate and nuts and figs and and and...

Felafel "Mullah" - Best Felafel Place in Macahane Yehuda. (Agrippas)

Felafel made from freshly crushed fresh chickpeas. Yes its GREEN!

You can even get real English tea here! Typhoo, PG Tips...

Kosher Marmite (from S.A.) and Colman's mustard.

 

Kippa stores. Every colour and every size.

Judaica Tourist stores

This guy has finally made up his mind...

 

And the wine shops...