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Nick Offerman’s partnership with Lagavulin dates back to 2014, but his relationship with the scotch whisky brand is over a quarter-century old. “The first scotch somebody ever gave me is when I was 29, and it was Lagavulin 16. And so that completely spoiled me,” Offerman tells me during a pop-up woodworking demo in Los Angeles, hosted by Lagavulin. It was a happy coincidence that Offerman’s character on Parks and Recreation, Ron Swanson, was a Lagavulin drinker; showrunner Mike Schur made his own preferred scotch Swanson’s drink of choice.
Offerman’s official partnership with Lagavulin sprang from a plotline on Season 6 of Parks and Recreation. “Chris Pratt got cast in Guardians of the Galaxy, which was going to shoot in London,” explains Offerman. “And if we wanted to keep him in our season, which we did, because it’s Chris Pratt, we had to figure out a way to take our little Indiana comedy to London.”
Lagavulin Offerman Edition 11
Lagavulin 16 Scotch Whisky
In one of the episodes, Amy Poehler’s character Leslie Knope sends Ron Swanson on a scavenger hunt that ends at the Lagavulin distillery in Islay, Scotland, to appease the curmudgeonly character’s hatred of Europe. “It just became this magical, sort of Hogwarts destination in my life,” says Offerman. “And I just loved everything about it. We hit it off, and they said, ‘Do you want to start doing advertisements for us?’ I mean, it’s like somebody giving you a bowl of ice cream and saying, ‘Can we give you money to say that you like this?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that would be okay with me.’”
By Offerman’s count, he’s been to Islay seven or eight times in the time he’s been working with Lagavulin. Getting there is its own kind of adventure. Islay, home to numerous scotch distilleries, is located in the Hebrides, an archipelago of hundreds of islands. “You can get there by airplane, in this tiny little, maybe 10-seater, where it feels like an old school bus. And there’s no cockpit. The captain’s just in the front seat,” says Offerman.
“So you can see out the windshield, which I’m okay with, except the problem obviously is the weather. And I’ve flown this flight where you’re flying through absolute pea soup fog. Of course, planes must do that all the time, and they depend entirely on their instruments, but you don’t have to see it. Sitting there and just flying into wool is pretty terrifying the first time, but it’s part of the magic.”
The partnership got closer with the creation of Lagavulin’s Offerman Edition, now in its fourth iteration. The latest, released earlier this year, is an 11-year-old scotch finished for 8 months in Caribbean Rum casks. “I was just with the sort of sorcerer of Lagavulin, Stuart Morrison, who oversees maintaining. I liken it to the sorcerer’s apprentice relationship where I get to stand at his elbow, and he says, ‘Okay, try these and tell me which one is the yummiest.’
“Then it’s sort of a blind man’s bluff game where he walks me through them, and every time I’ve chosen the one that he wanted me to pick. And I think, naturally, the company wants me have a little more braggadocio and be like, ‘Well, my assistant Stuart and I…’ But I refuse to do that, because I own a mirror and I have good parents. But I’m very lucky that I’m allowed to serve as his apprentice.”
Like his love of Lagavulin, Offerman’s relationship to woodworking sprouted organically. His parents grew up on farms in Manuka, Illinois, where knowing how to use tools was essential. His dad taught him to use carpentry equipment, which came in handy by the time he got to theater school. ”I started in theater school when I was 18, and I began to understand naturalistic acting at age 25 or 26. So we’re looking at about six or seven years of being terrible at acting. And so nobody would cast me. I got into theater school, but then they were like, ‘Okay, you suck. We’ll cast you as the chorus guy who carries the good-looking people on and off stage.’ But I learned that with my carpentry skills, I could get paid to build the set. And my friends loved that. They were like, ‘Oh, give Nick three lines, and he’ll build the whole castle.’”
Little Woodchucks – Nick Offerman
His knowledge of carpentry spurred his interest in fine woodworking, which has since become a business, the LA-based Offerman Woodshop, and led to numerous books on the subject. The latest is Little Woodchucks, a woodworking book for children. “Secretly, it’s actually for everybody,” says Offerman. “Because a lot of the parents I know also don’t know how to use tools, and we all are succumbing to this modern habit of isolating ourselves with our screens and sort of letting corporations and technology curate our lives, you know? It’s easy to do; I’m a human being, I get it.
“And so my new book is for woodchucks of all sizes to learn to make things and have some responsibility in curating their lives. It’s to learn how to make things out of wood, but it’s really to also maintain our human relationships.”
