Whiskey Defense by Clifton Meador

 "A story about the history, culture, and whisky of Scotland, the clever text of Whisky Defense is paired with hauntingly digitized images of Scotland." - Nexus Press
 
"The recovery from a hangover begins a journey through the history of Scots, Scotland, and Scotch. Photos of archeological sites and rural peat fields fuse with images of train stations and hotel lobbies, suggesting that ancient and modern, past and present can exist simultaneously. The text is spare and poetic, juxtaposing the history of conquest, the composting and harvesting of peat, the distillation of whisky, and the act of imbibing. Thus, history is layered in the very land and can even be tasted. As soon as enough sugar is converted, the malted barley is dried over a peat fire to halt the germination. The growing life within the barley seed will consume all the freed sugar if not stopped by the heat of the fire. The burning peat leaves an ineradicable trace: the flavor of the peat bog, turned to smoky residue in the fire, persisting in the finished whisky eighteen or even twenty-one years later. Forever, in fact. This is a visual novel that relies, in order to tell its story as much on the assemblage of images that fill each page (and provide a subliminal backdrop to the text) as on the text itself." - Califia Books