by Delin Watmough
Hello all! I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas and Happy Hogmanay. As I am writing this in early December, I don’t know what restrictions we all had to face but I do hope everyone got a chance to at least talk to their families.
Before I get started I would like to say thank you for all the positive feed back I have received from the first of my little blogs and just touch on one of the comments. The Flagstaff Scottish club is not just for Scottish people to join. We have many members in many positions who aren’t Scottish. For instance, I am mostly English (sorry), Danish, and Norwegian with a smattering of Irish, Welsh and about 1% Scottish. What I do have is a love for all things Scottish. The Flagstaff Scottish Club (FSC) welcomes everyone who would like to be involved with celebrating Scottish Culture and Heritage in Flagstaff County and beyond, no matter their ethnicity.
Flasks
If you've spent any time with some of the members of the FSC, you know most of us enjoy a wee dram now and again. Band members have also been known to have a wee nip before and or after performances and apparently one of our pipers have been accused of his pipes smelling like whisky, (okay it was me, but if you played as poorly as I do, you would need a nip now and again too). Now the question is, how do those pipers get the whisky there? The answer: Flasks. There are so many different flasks out there that it's impossible to cover them all so I am just going to cover basic shapes and materials.
Material
I have seen flasks made from plastic, glass, stainless steel, pewter, and even silver. In my humble opinion, good whisky should never be drank from a plastic container. Plus, with the myriad of inexpensive stainless steel flasks, there really is no reason to. Glass, while being a excellent container for whisky, is just too fragile to be practical. Stainless steel is a excellent material for a flask as it is durable, inexpensive and readily available. However, if you leave your whisky in one for more than a day or two, you get a tin taste. While I have no personal experience with pewter flasks, they do not impart a tin taste to your whisky but they tend to be a little less durable and are considerably more expensive. With a silver flask, you are going to spend a lot to get one- if you can even find one- but again, you won’t get that tin taste either.
Shape
There are 2 basic shapes flasks come in: the hip flask and the round sporran flask. Now, there are tons of novelty shapes and sizes out there but for our purposes, I am just going to stick with the 2 most common.
The hip flask is rectangular flask that is curved to allow it to ride in the hip or jacket pocket with comfort. ( I am a bit of a rebel, I had a holster made for mine to ride on my belt and my smaller one rides on a key chain latch also on my belt.)
The round sporran flask is just that- a round flask that fits perfectly into your sporran. It's definitely more covert than having it hang off your belt but I find my sporran is full of other junk, like my wallet, keys, phone, handgun, (I am kidding about the handgun- just seeing if everyone was paying attention), so to add a flask to that would be difficult. Round flasks tend to be more highly decorated and a lot classier (yet another reason I don’t have one).