Pairing Review – Mistborn: The Final Empire, Davidoff, and Monkey Shoulder

I discovered that Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire pairs excellently with the Davidoff Winston Churchill the Late Hour and Monkey Shoulder. The entire endeavor was one of pleasant surprise.

The book itself is much darker than one might expect for a fantasy book centered around a chosen one. In the same way, the Late Hour is more full bodied than one would expect of a Davidoff and the Monkey Shoulder is much sweeter than expected with a whiskey, even a blended one. The book is set in the dystopian future of a world where the previous hero failed to save it from evil. Against this omnipotent evil ruling the world, comes a band of con-artists and thieves. They will pit their wits and skills against the strength of a society established by a demi-god with an iron fist.

The Late Hour is equally as rich in taste as the story is in its established history and characters. The cigar is perhaps more nuanced in flavors of chocolate and coffee than the majority of the characters but Sanderson makes up for his reliance on characterizations to flesh out his band of thieves by taking extra care with his main protagonists. The billowing smoke of the cigar painted a perfect backdrop to the environment the characters found themselves in with the constantly falling ash that paints their sky. I found the sophisticated cigar perfectly complemented the skill with which Sanderson unveiled a complicated plot. The medium to full bodied development of the Late Hour mirrors the growing involvement of the story line.

Sanderson’s choice of verbiage is direct and simplistic rather than the usual verbose choices of fantasy writers. Much in the same way, the three single malts are blended rather unsophisticatedly to make an exceedingly sweet whiskey in the Monkey Shoulder, full of vanilla and honey. The rich honied taste of the Monkey Shoulder accompanies the story in the same way a small river of hope accompanies the characters and keeps them going. They are well matched in how skills which seem very basic can in fact be a masterful decision in order to obtain a broader audience than they may have otherwise had.

Overall, I found the directness of the Monkey Shoulder and Mistborn refreshing. The complicated flavor profile of the Late Hour matched page for page the intrigue and reveals planted throughout Mistborn. Together this has to be one of the better pairings I’ve had in quite some time. I recommend this pairing for the novice, but mostly for the intermediate, consumers of these three delicious past times.