Whisky & Food

On the plate, you encounter the sea and the forest at once. Wild salmon, Dungeness crab, oysters from Puget Sound, and mushrooms from the autumn forest define the region's cuisine.

Salmon cooked on a cedar plank brings its own smoke from the smoldering wood. It pairs remarkably well with Westland's peated Solum. Both smoky notes come from the same landscape, just one from the bog and one from the wood.

Fresh oysters or Dungeness crab from Puget Sound call for an unpeated single malt like the one from Copperworks. Its sweetness and grain notes don't overpower the lightly briny, sweet flesh.

Autumn mushroom dishes, featuring the prized chanterelles from the Cascade forests, need a bolder companion. They pair well with Westward's earthier, spicier notes, whose brewer's-yeast mash already carries a slightly grainy, almost mushroomy undertone of its own.

Hazelnuts from Oregon's Willamette Valley also find their way into desserts, which pair nicely with a whiskey showing caramel and vanilla notes.

A single principle runs through all these pairings: the goal isn't contrast, but a landscape that tells the same story in the glass and on the plate. Smoked salmon has belonged to the region's cuisine for generations, showing just how naturally smoke and fish go together here. It's exactly this interplay that makes Westland's smoky Solum such a fitting companion at the table, whether the salmon arrives grilled or smoked. That, too, is a basic rule of this cuisine: local ingredients meet local whiskey, almost always without detour.