This week: Good to have you back! Issue No. 6 took us to San Francisco for one of the best watch events of the year, down a rabbit hole of brake-by-wire technology that may or may not have ruined cars forever, and straight into a glass of Ardbeg at 61.7% ABV. The watch was blacked out. The whisky was not, though finish the bottle and you will be. Let's get into it. 

Following King Charles and Queen Camilla's state visit to Washington, President Trump confirmed that tariffs on Scotch whisky imports to the United States are being lifted [1]. The industry exhaled. Distillers from Islay to Speyside issued grateful statements. Somewhere, a PR person had a very good week.

Here is the thing, though: do not expect your bottle prices to move. That is not cynicism, that is just how pricing works. Tariffs go up, retailers adjust, margins find their new home, and that is where they stay. The Federal Reserve studied exactly this after the 2018 trade tariffs and found essentially complete pass-through of costs into consumer prices within months [2]. The removal of those same tariffs, however, did not produce a mirror image on the way down. What goes up tends to find a comfortable plateau. If you have been buying Scotch in the US over the past year, the sticker you are used to seeing is probably the sticker you will keep seeing.

What the tariff removal does mean, practically, is that importing bottles directly from Scotland becomes meaningfully more accessible again. For anyone who orders from independent retailers or distillery shops overseas, that is real money back in your pocket at checkout. The secondary market for allocated and limited bottles should also loosen up slightly, with less friction on transatlantic orders. It is not a price correction. It is just the door being reopened.

Meanwhile, something genuinely interesting is happening on the distillery side. A historic estate in Aberdeenshire called Fetternear is preparing to become what may be Scotland's first true single-estate whisky distillery, with production targeted for early 2027 [3]. The plan is comprehensive: barley grown on the estate, malted on site, distilled, matured, and bottled all within the same property, with renewable energy and on-site cask production planned as part of a wider restoration of the listed granite stables. It is the kind of project that takes the grain-to-glass concept seriously rather than using it as a marketing line. There is quite a few distilleries in the world that use this line, so it is refreshing to see it in real practice.

And then there is Ardbeg. Specifically, the Ardbeg Ten Cask Strength, the Committee release that the distillery's fanbase has been asking for since a limited Japan-only bottling in 2003 [4]. It is here. It is 61.7% ABV. It is the highest-strength Committee release Ardbeg has ever produced. Here is what I thought of it.

Yeah. This is seriously good. I will miss this when it is gone. 10 years old is a great age for a peated, as past 14 years, they tend to get mellow. I know everyone loves the traditonal 10 year old Ardbeg, and it is good, I reach for the Laphroaig usually becuase of that briney peat. This though, this has lots of sea air, and ocean style peat moss. I will do a head-to-head of the Laphroaig 10 year old CS vs the Ardbeg 10 year old CS here soon. I give this a solid 9.2/10.

The Goods: Ardbeg 10 year old Cask Strength, | ex American oak bourbon barrels & experimental barrels| Limited Release.

Two weekends ago, I had the pleasure of joining Brew Watches at the San Francisco Windup Watch Fair [5]. I have worked Windups before, but only in New York with Formex. Being brought out to San Francisco by John was something truly awesome. If you know my collection, you know I am a fan of Brew. The design language hits everything I care about: watches, coffee, cars/motorsport, all wrapped into a single cohesive identity. It is the kind of brand that makes sense the moment you see it.

If you have never been to a Windup Watch Fair, the best way to describe it is organized chaos, and San Francisco was no exception. What genuinely caught me off guard was the energy of the crowd, and more specifically, their intent. These were not window shoppers. People came with a purpose, wallets ready, and left with watches. Multiple watches. One attendee walked out with fourteen. Whether that says something about the health of the watch market broadly, or simply about the concentration of tech and AI money in one of the wealthiest cities in the country, I will let you decide. Either way, it was genuinely good to see, especially when everything else in the market feels like doom and gloom.

The networking side of these events is something I never take for granted. Some of the best conversations I had were with people from biotech and tech, which, given my day job, never gets old.

As for the watches: there was a lot to take in, but one stood out above the rest and it should not surprise anyone who follows this newsletter. Bulova has finally done what collectors have been asking about for years: they shrunk the Lunar Pilot. The result is the Lunar Pilot Black Hole, and it arrives at 41mm, the smallest the model has ever been produced, trimming down from the 43.5mm that gave the standard version its reputation for wearing like a manhole cover [6]. The case sits at 13.05mm thick with a 48mm lug-to-lug and a 20mm lug width, which puts it firmly in daily-wear territory for most wrists, including those of us who have admired the Lunar Pilot from a distance for exactly this reason. The case is sandblasted stainless steel with black PVD, contrasted by a polished bezel and matching pushers, and the bracelet follows suit with the same ion plating and a push-button deployant clasp. Water resistance comes in at 100 meters, a meaningful step up from the 50 meters on older references.

The name is not a marketing flourish. The dial is coated in Musou Black, a specialty paint that absorbs 99.4% of visible light, which means in certain lighting the dial reads as a flat void rather than a surface [7]. Sub-dials sit recessed with circular grooved detailing at 3, 6, and 9 o'clock, handling chronograph seconds, running seconds, and a 60-minute counter respectively, with a tachymeter scale running the outer track. Grey Super-LumiNova on the hands and markers keeps legibility intact without breaking the monochrome effect. Under the flat sapphire crystal sits Bulova's proprietary NP20 high-precision quartz movement, running at 262 kHz for accuracy that standard quartz simply cannot match. The whole package arrives in a dedicated Black Hole box with a matching travel case and a blacked-out desk clock that references the Apollo 15 lunar capsule instrumentation [8]. It is limited to 6,000 pieces worldwide and retails at $1,650. Yes, that is a premium over what the Lunar Pilot has traditionally asked. It is still worth it. If you are not familiar with the Archive Series broadly, go look it up. I own a handful and have not been disappointed once.

Final Thoughts:

Also to note…. A story I will be following closely. A new Swatch with Audemars Piguet cross over is happening… So it is following suit with Omega and Blancpain. What makes this insanely out of left field though, Swatch group does not own AP. Lots of people think this will be a watch. I don’t. I think this will be like the original “Pop” watch, which is a wearable watch in necklace form and/or pocket watch. While there was ways to pop it out to wear in a watch form, it was bulky and frankly, odd. I don’t see this being as weird, but who knows. Anyways, the internet is broken because of this collab. People are LINING UP ALREADY! It comes out Saturday, May 16 2026. This is insane. It’ll be around $500, and resale is ridiculous. Stores are offering “presales” at 10k. Ebay listings already around 5k. This is what is wrong with this hobby. It is NOT LIMITED. Just like the moonswatch, it’ll be available. But I guess you can’t flex on the internet if you do not have it first. If you buy this for $5,000, I have a bridge to sell you. Look for an unhindged rant next week. /rant

UPDATE AS OF 2PM EST: MAY 12th. This was leaked online and now confirmed by Swatch. And, I’ll take a bow. Yes, i was right. It is a necklace/pocket watch with the Pop stand as well. You can view it here on Monochrome Watches. Yes, this is exactly what I expected since I know the Swatch Pop watches.. See a vintage one here. Anyways..

Also got some watch reviews in the works from some brands that sent me some watches. Can’t wait to see them!

Last week, Brembo announced that its Sensify brake-by-wire system has entered full-scale production [10]. No hydraulic fluid. No brake lines. No master cylinder. Just software reading your foot, making a decision, and telling electric actuators at each wheel how hard to bite down. The company won't say which automaker gets the honor of being first, only that it's a "leading global vehicle manufacturer" and that contracts are already in place for hundreds of thousands of units per year. Congratulations to everyone involved. Your brakes are now a download.

To be fair, this is not a cynical development. The system can modulate braking force at each wheel independently, in real time, adjusting for grip, load, and road conditions faster than any human foot ever could. It integrates cleanly with the autonomous driving architecture that the whole industry is crawling toward. It will almost certainly make cars safer. Brembo has been developing it for years and it works. None of that is the point.

The point is that the list of things a driver directly, physically controls is getting shorter. The steering has been electric for years. The throttle has been drive-by-wire since the 1990s. The clutch, in most cars, is long gone. And now the brakes, the one system where human instinct and mechanical consequence have always had the most honest conversation, are being handed to an AI control unit in Bergamo.

Which brings us here: for 2027, there are exactly 23 cars you can buy in the United States with a manual transmission [11]. Twenty-three. The full list fits in a screenshot. BMW makes six entries. Cadillac made the cut twice. The Toyota Tacoma, somehow, is holding the line. The off-road crowd, it turns out, is carrying the manual torch more faithfully than the sports car set at this point. Make of that what you will.

There is a version of this essay where I tell you that manual transmissions build character, that hydraulic brakes give you feel, that the analog connection between driver and machine is worth preserving as a matter of principle. I am not going to write that version, because you already know how it ends and frankly so do I. The automatics shift faster. The software brakes better. The computers win on every measurable metric.

But nobody asked. Not about the hydraulics, not about any of it. The market decided, and the market was correct by every reasonable measure, and somewhere in the process of being correct it managed to make driving feel like operating a very expensive appliance. That is not a complaint. It is just an observation from someone watching the list get shorter every year.

Twenty-three cars. Get one while you can.

Outro: And that is a wrap on Issue No. 6. The watch is blacked out, (I am not yet) the whisky is dangerous, the brakes are optional, and somehow this is what I do in my spare time. If you enjoyed reading this half as much as I enjoyed writing it, then I enjoyed writing it twice as much as I should have. Tell a friend, tell a stranger, tell someone at a bar who looks like they need a newsletter in their life. I will be back for Issue No. 7 with more of whatever this is. Stay curious, stay hydrated, and for the love of everything, go buy a manual while you still can.

REFERENCES

[1] Reuters: Trump confirms removal of Scotch whisky tariffs following UK state visit

[2] Federal Reserve: "The Slow Climb: How Tariffs Gradually Raised Retail Prices in 2025" (March 2026)

[3] Fetternear Estate distillery announcement, Aberdeenshire (2026)

[4] Ardbeg Ten Cask Strength Committee Release press materials (2026)

[5] Windup Watch Fair: windupwatchfair.com

[6] HiConsumption: "Bulova Shrinks the Iconic Lunar Pilot Chronograph and Drops It Into a Black Hole" (April 2026)

[7] Bulova official product listing: Lunar Pilot Black Hole, ref. 98A335, bulova.com

[8] Gear Patrol: "The Affordable Other Moonwatch Launches Its Best Version Yet" (April 2026)

[9] Windup Watch Fair show schedule: windupwatchfair.com

[10] The Drive: "The First Modern Car Without Hydraulic Brakes Is Headed to Production" (2026)

[11] Manual transmission 2027 vehicle list, currently known as of May 2026