Happy St. Patrick's Day. If you're anything like us, hopefully you spent your weekend mastering one of the latest trends right now: splitting the G. If not, it's never too late. In today's email, we've got the key to a quieter Yellowstone experience, surgery advancements for elite athletes and the latest on Jameson's latest whiskey release, Triple Triple. Sláinte.
I’m standing on my Ski-Doo snowmobile somewhere in the Venn diagram that entwines Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. As the engine idles between my calves, I realize I’m lost on the top of a mountain. My helmet’s face shield is flipped up, but the track I laid to get up here, perhaps a lifeline to the group I sped away from, is imperceptible in the snow. Except for the wind rattling around my helmet, it’s very quiet; I remove it, but still can’t hear the other snowmobiles rumbling in the distance. By now, being lost is a few minutes old, so I get off to walk around. All I see are valleys covered in snow above embankments of conifers and these eerie ghost trees.
It was December 14, 2024, and Lindsey Vonn, who turned 40 in October, was not in full-send mode. She was the “forerunner” for a women’s World Cup downhill race at Beaver Creek in Colorado — skiing hard for sure, but primarily serving to test the timing equipment and course conditions before the race started. Forerunning a course is as close to the real deal as one can get, and for Vonn the run was another milestone in a remarkable return to racing five years after retiring and seven months after major surgery on her right knee.
Vonn’s comeback has triggered a range of strong reactions among longtime ski racers and coaches. Chief among them is the question of why a 40-year-old with nothing left to prove would return to the sport that shredded her knee multiple times and left her in chronic pain for more than a decade.
Distilleries all over the world are doing interesting things with casks — so it’s not surprising to see Jameson embracing that line of thinking with their latest Irish whiskey. That’s the Triple Triple, which is already available for overseas whiskey enthusiasts but has recently made its U.S. debut. One of the two “triple”s in its name refers to the distillation process; the other has to do with the casks in which this whiskey was aged.
Specifically, the distillery used ex-bourbon and sherry casks as well as sweet chestnut casks to help shape this whiskey’s overall flavor. Jameson’s announcement of the Triple Triple’s U.S. release highlights its versatility, noting that it can be sipped on its own or mixed into a cocktail.
