After successfully evading COVID for five+ years, that nasty gremlin finally got me!
I’m sharing my experience for any other whiskey fans out there who, like me, finally experienced COVID for the first time, and are concerned about the impact it might have on our wonderful whiskey hobby. Namely the impact COVID can have on one’s senses of smell and taste.
My experience is but one among millions, of course. Though each COVID variant offers similar symptoms, how a given person’s own physical state and body chemistry respond is quite individual. By many reports—and my and my partner’s experiences echo this—the first time is often the worst, with the stress of the unknown adding significant pressure. My partner had COVID once before, timed unnervingly close to our 2023 trip to Japan. Her first bout lasted two full weeks. We’re both fully vaccinated. We’re in the practice of washing our hands more often than we did prior to 2020. And I’ve kept up with masking when on crowded public transit or airplanes.
To be clear: Nothing I’ll share here constitutes medical advice. And I’m not here to take any political stance. So if you’ve tested positive for COVID for the first time, consult your doctor and ask a lot of questions. And if like me you find rabbit holing about medical issues on the www to sometimes feel more stressful than helpful, hopefully this post provides some reassurance and—crucially, un-politicized—firsthand information all in one place.
Cheers! With a cup of tea for now. ☕️
Prologue: Welcome Home!
My partner and I returned from our annual August trip on a Saturday afternoon. This year we’d spent a week in Paris and a week in Berlin. In addition to doing the various Paris and Berlin things one does, we nightly visited cocktail and whiskey bars—my contribution to the planning. 😉
This post isn’t about that trip, and I have no bar hop posts planned based on it. I’ll just say both these cities have some very worthy drinking destinations—no surprise! Paris is a city that understands pleasure. Berlin is a city that understands how to relax. So of course they’ve got great bars. If you visit Paris, Golden Promise for whisky and Little Red Door for cocktails are two musts. And in Berlin, Green Door for cocktails and Meine Bar for casual anti-digital coziness (e.g. cash only and jazz on vinyl) will do right by you.
The morning after our return, we both woke up with massive sinus headaches stretched across our skulls. I went about unpacking, doing laundry, tending the garden, catching up on home stuff. My partner wisely slept most of the day. We both attributed our fatigue to jet lag. And over the course of the day our headaches went away.
Come evening, my head now clear, I wanted to break in a new vintage glass I’d picked up in Berlin. I made myself a Martini—2.5oz Reyka Vodka, 0.5oz Shinobu Lightly Peated Pure Malt Whisky, 1 dash orange bitters. It tasted fine. Then I poured a glass of Jim Beam 12 Year. Also fine. I was drinking and not tasting.
To cap things off, I cracked open something new, the recently released Woodinville 9 Year Bourbon. This I gave more attention, and it did not taste fine. It tasted bland. Burnt cherry skins and oak on the nose. The taste and finish were all caramel and singed oak. Altogether rather simple and incomplete. Not bad. But not at all great. I wondered if my jet lag was fogging my clarity, or if this 9 Year release simply fell short of the prior year’s 8 Year.
The next morning, my partner and I started feeling mild chest cold symptoms. She took a COVID test and tested positive. I tested negative. This was Monday. By Wednesday she was deep in the thick of it and feeling awful, and now I also tested positive.
Days 1-4
in the thick of it
My symptoms leapt into high gear that first night.* When I stretched out on my back, the fever’s heat rose through my face and my eyes felt like two egg yokes being hard-boiled. My energy plummeted and my brain felt like a steamed variation on San Francisco’s famous fog.
*I’m calling this Day 1 because it’s the first day I tested positive. The CDC and other medical authorities, however, refer to the first day of noticeable symptoms as Day 0, regardless of whether you’re testing positive yet. So what I’m calling Day 1 would be Day 3 by those measures. Something to keep in mind if you’re cross-referencing other articles.
We did our best to avoid each other in our tiny San Francisco apartment, my partner taking the bedroom and me camping out in the living room. We kept the windows open 24/7, wore masks in common areas, and washed our hands frequently. I took one Advil each day. (I’m not a fan of pills.) I kept my diet regular—oatmeal loaded up with berries, nuts, and yogurt with dandelion tea for breakfast; an apple, glass of Kefir, and bowl of chicken bone broth with fresh ginger squeezed into it for lunch; usually steamed vegetables and a tamale for dinner or else take-out sushi from a shop nearby. I also drank a lot of water and often ended the day with another cup of herbal tea.
We seemed to be stomping headlong across the stages of the virus, me trailing my partner’s progress by a day. On my third day, her fifth, she relocated to a house-sitting gig across town. By now her nose drip had slowed down. My nose remained an open faucet. The stay-at-home stir-craziness was real!
Days 5-9
plateau
When on my fifth day my partner tested negative and was in the clear, I seemed to have plateaued. The fevers were done. And though my nose was quite suddenly no longer a free flowing stream, I was still coughing and blowing. For the next five days this didn’t change. The red line on the tests I took every other day likewise remained steady. I could taste my food—whew! But my sense of smell was virtually nonexistent.
With my energy and brain largely back, I tentatively tiptoed online to research anosmia (the science word for loss of smell). The range of reported experiences from people with COVID who have suffered anosmia vary greatly. Some gain their sense of smell back right away. Others lose it for weeks, months, or permanently. Without enough data yet to discern exactly why one scenario plays out versus another, my prospects felt a bit like Russian roulette. Only time would reveal my fate.
When my brother had COVID last year, he said while he was ill and for months after he smelled a strong phantom forest fire scent 24/7. It occurred to me, whether I ended up with either a permanently altered sense of smell or none at all, I’d just have to sell off my whiskey collection and be done with it. What would the point be without my sense of smell?
This didn’t help with my mental state. Being stuck at home, and, for a handful of days at least, unable to muster the physical or mental energy to do or think much at all, my fevered mind came up with all kinds of reasons to renounce hope.
Determined not to succumb to my dramatic imagination, I added regular smell tests to my daily routine. I’d read about these in my online medical research. When I smelled some of the flowers in our backyard that I knew to be especially fragrant, I got nothing. When I tried smelling some heavily peated Ballachin and Ardbeg, I got only the faintest hints of smoke—so faint I wondered if it was only psychosomatic. I could still taste everything I was eating. But I couldn’t smell much of anything.
When I made my oatmeal each morning, I would sniff the open cinnamon jar. I could smell it clearly! Sitting in the backyard to eat the oatmeal, I’d then do the flower test. Still nothing. Yet every day the cinnamon was very clear. Interesting.
Each evening I tried smelling a handful of whiskeys, choosing those I was very familiar with—Ardbeg, Ballechin, Stagg Jr., Woodinville. Very gradually I began to pick up on their aromas again. But everything was dulled. If it were my sense of hearing, it would be like I was listening to music on a stereo with a flattened equalizer and every fifth frequency pulled out entirely. I also began to notice a constant antiseptic scent in my nose—something dry, like Comet bleach powder. This phantom scent ran subtly but discernibly under every inhale throughout a given day.
Days 10-13
hope on the horizon
On the tenth day since testing positive, that morning I tested positive again. But after nearly a week of plateaued symptoms and test results, this time the little red line was suddenly very light. I ran outside to smell the flowers. Their familiar scents were faint, but now I could pick up on them. Hope!
That night I made an Old Fashioned—2oz Twin Bridges American Single Malt finished in amaretto casks, 0.25oz sugar cane syrup, 2 dashes orange bitters, 2 dashes toasted pecan bitters. I chose these ingredients to emphasize a strong medley of aromas. Lifting the cocktail to my nose, the scent was stunted. But the taste was readily flavorful, with a bitter edge of alcohol that my senses didn’t recall from past cocktails made with Twin Bridges.
I was still coughing and blowing my nose occasionally, so I spit the drink rather than swallowing it. I didn’t want to take any chances with my recovery’s newfound progress!
Next I poured a glass of the Woodinville 8 Year Rye, and then the 9 Year Bourbon. The Rye tasted as I remembered it, only muted. The Bourbon tasted notably richer than it had back on the night I uncorked it, before I knew I was sick. But still the aroma was distant and the flavors limited in their range. Both whiskeys had a similar bitter alcohol undercurrent as the Old-Fashioned. I was pretty sure at this point it was my altered senses, however—that phantom Comet bleach powder and not the whiskey.
On day eleven, my smell testing routine continued. The cinnamon and flowers were more vibrant. In the evening, rather than an Old-Fashioned I made a fragrant Martini—2.5oz Isle of Harris Gin (which I highly recommend), 0.5oz Alessio Dry Vermouth, 1 dash orange bitters, lemon zest. It smelled lovely, and unlike the previous night’s Old-Fashioned I could pick out the individual ingredients. Tasted good too, though I was still spitting my drinks.
On this day I also noticed the phantom Comet bleach undercurrent had dissipated, leaving only the dry sensation of it in my nose. Though more of a physical feeling than a smell, this did also seem to lend a dryness to the various aromas I was testing. Like the way dehydration can impact how things taste or smell—and despite my being very hydrated.
Then on the morning of day twelve, two full weeks to the day after that initial sinus headache, I tested negative.
Given it’s the going advice, I tested once more on day thirteen to be sure. Negative again. My nose still felt a bit dry. But my coughing and blowing were done.
That evening, I toasted my recovery with a glass of that Woodinville 9 Year Bourbon that had gotten the burnt end of the stick at its uncorking. Proper notes to come. But now with COVID no longer clogging things up…
Baked cherries, caramel fudge, weathered oak, cinnamon, and a bundle of dried herbs on the nose. Same on the taste, with additional oak and rye spice. The finish warm, lingering with spice and cherry. Much better!
Last Call
Like my partner’s first bout in 2023, my first also took two weeks to fully play itself out. The time passed slowly. My mental downs outnumbered my ups. So when those two negative tests appeared they hit like two victorious fists in the air.
Before I tested positive for COVID, I had plans for a handful of blog posts on whiskey notes. These were all put on hold, and I now look forward to getting to them soon. I had social plans to see friends and theater, was due to start teaching a new group of students at American Conservatory Theater where I work, and had a long To-Do list on my office desk. All of these dates and obligations were postponed or cancelled entirely.
But I didn’t lose my senses permanently. I didn’t suffer any unusual respiratory or heart symptoms so common in 2020 and 2021. It doesn’t appear I’ll suffer anything of what’s come to be recognized as Long COVID, though time will continue to verify that yea or nay. I know a guy who was twenty-four years old in 2020. The vaccines had not yet come out. He worked at a cafe near me and was also a rep for a local distillery. He caught COVID and it disrupted his heart vesicles so significantly he’s been on disability ever since and unable to work. My disrupted blog and teaching schedule is nothing. I’m very grateful.
Whiskey is a privileged hobby. I’m privileged to be able to partake in it. I learn from it, and this blog continues to be an archive of that learning. Finally coming down with COVID, stewing in its unknowns and momentary setbacks, and coming out of it essentially no worse for wear, has been a valuable reminder of a few key things:
The benefits of scope.
A respect for time.
And the ultimate importance of good health above so much else.
Enjoying whiskey is a bonus.
Cheers! And this time that ain’t no cup of tea. 😉
Past Whiskey Journey Posts
Part 1 – Getting Started
Part 2 – Checking In
Part 3 – Why I Whiskey
Part 4 – On Weller Antique 107 and the Art and Practice of Letting Go
Part 5 – What have three years of writing whiskey notes done to me?
Part 6 – Nosing The Grind
Part 7 – What would happen if I didn’t buy whiskey for a year?
Part 7.5 – halfway through The Year of No Buying
Part 8 – Turning-Point Bottles Pinned To My Journey’s Map
Part 9 – my Year of No Buying comes to its end…!
Part 10 – To be continued…
Part 11 – Curiosity, Bunkering, and Bartering
Part 12 – Maintaining Perspective
The Right Spirit 