To say this blog is a frivolous act wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it wouldn’t be wholly accurate either. It’s an idea stacked on top of an idea stacked on top of an idea. An idea that wasn’t even my own. There’s a lot of things I could explore for this first entry. Who am I? What is with the name Fetter WhisKey? What was the seed that grew to be a whiskey blog on the internet? But before I unpack the full story, I want to specifically talk about the impetus of this blog. Why am I typing these words right now?

I could go all the way down the rabbit hole and talk about why I like writing, or start with how I got into whiskey, or when I got serious about learning about whiskey, but those are stories for another time, stories I can tell in future blog posts. For this very first story, I think the appropriate place to start is in Micky’s Irish Pub on Dubuque Street in Iowa City on a cold winter day, sitting at that old, oaken bar, a series of a half dozen beer taps flanking either side of me, talking with the bartender. She’s pulled many pints of Smithwicks for me over the years as well as a good handful of whiskey glasses, and yet I’m not enough of a gentleman to have taken the courtesy of learning her name. A small shame, but one to be rectified in due time. I leaned over the bar and pointed at a bottle, among the vast array of bottles at Micky’s, that I’d never seen before and asked if I can inspect it. I had to look up Old Soul High Rye Single Barrel on Google, but it knocked my socks off when I realized that this small Irish pub had a $130 bottle of whiskey casually displayed on its shelf. Yet another bottle Micky’s had that beyond impressed me. “Wow,” I said in a moment of awe. When the bartender glanced at me from behind her glasses, I gestured with the bottle, saying, “This place has the best whiskey selection in Iowa City, hands down.” She thanked me for the compliment, took the bottle back, and went to run some more food to other customers. Reflecting on the moment, I leaned back in my high top, green imitation leather chair and thought to myself, “I don’t know if that’s even half true.” In my four years living in the city, I’d patronized only a half dozen or so bars in the city proper and just a few more in the general CRANDIC (Cedar Rapids AND Iowa City) area. I could hardly make any real claim to know what the spot with the best whiskey selection around was. It was then that an idea crystalized in my head. “I should try to find what place actually has the best whiskey selection in Iowa City.” I grabbed my phone, made a basic template in my Notes app to rate an establishment on its whiskey selection, and filled out my notes for Micky’s right then and there at the bar. The quest had begun.

This was a little over a week ago. Since then, I’ve already rated half a dozen bars and restaurants in the downtown Iowa City area on their whiskey selection; a pace that is sure to slow down as this bright shining idea in my head fades slowly over the course of time. The night of the formation of this idea, I mentioned my quest to my longtime partner, and she immediately suggested that I make a blog of it. I waffled on a good idea, as I typically do. I mulled over what it might look like, what other things I could write about, then waffled some more. The usual. Until today, that is, when I finally found the gumption to sit down and start the damned thing. So this is it. This is my whiskey blog, started to help catalog Iowa City’s whiskey scene (which I will begin in the next entry), and hopefully to contain that and so much more. I don’t know exactly where this will take me or how long I’ll do this, but one thing I do know is that this isn’t a flash in the pan. There’s plenty to write about when it comes to whiskey, and I’ll be right here, in this little corner of the internet, to write it.

Joshua “Cheddar” Fetter