Billy's Booze Blog

After two years of doing blind tastings at the monthly Whisky Squad meetups I’ve become quite fond of the technique. It’s shown me a number of drams that I wouldn’t have usually touched and helped strip away a number of my whisky prejudices, both conscious and unconscious. I like to think that it’s made me better at identifying whiskies from their nose and taste, but time and again I’ve been show that isn’t the case. However, when Dramming.com‘s Oliver Klimek proposed a worldwide blind tasting challenge I couldn’t really say no.

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I quite like sacrilege, especially in the world of drinks. My first blog post at work was about whisky cocktails, a subject that raises ire amongst many whisky purists, and I’ve championed the use of decent whisky in cocktails ever since. That said, I also hate whisky in lots of cocktails and find recipes that say ’25ml of Single Malt Whisky’ particularly annoying – the flavour variation amongst whiskies makes such a statement fairly meaningless (although does leave things open to interpretation by the bartender/maker, as is Right and Proper). Anyways, the folks at Monkey Shoulder have many strings to their PR-y bow and one that is popping up more often recently is the joy of using it as a  base for cocktails.

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Today I received a parcel in the post containing a book. It’s a rather exciting book because it contains my first printed writing about whisky.

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BrewDog are a weird bunch. I mentioned on Twitter the other day that their advertising both makes me annoyed as a long-standing fan of tasty beer in the UK and very happy as a shareholder interested in the company making decent profits, and this division in my mind hurts my tiny brain. However, the big thing that I have been impressed with is the Equity for Punks scheme, their fan sourced money raising/share selling scheme.

They’ve pulled together an impressive amount of cash in a small amount of time on two separate occasions and if they try it again I can see them doing just as well. However, one thing that has been discussed is what you get for your investment. There is the 5% discount in their bars and up to 20% in the online shop, but with Kickstarter, Crowdcube and the like helping people to start up projects all over the world people are starting to get wise to getting something back on their investment. Enter the second BrewDog AGM, stage right.

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How time flies. A mere two years ago I was an occasional drunk who sometimes wrote things up on his blog, who then bumped into Andy and Jason of WhiskySquad at a couple of booze events, leading to my attendance of almost every one of their sessions. These days I’m a professional drunk who still only sometimes writes stuff on his blog, but WhiskySquad has gone from strength to strength. Up to at least two tastings a month and at least three iterations into their website, tickets still sell out quickly and, as a crowning achievement, they’ve even had me along to present an evening. After last year’s shindig there was a standard to be lived up to, so the big guns were rolled out for birthday number two – a matured whisky and new spirit pairing.

Yes, after two years of schmoozing the assembled masses of the whisky industry Andy and Jason managed to lever a number of sample bottles of new make spirit out of the hands of the distilleries for a bit of a special evening – tasting blind, as usual, whiskies and the new make spirits that they started out as.

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Just a quick post today to wish a brief farewell to a good friend of mine – my bottle of Angostura bitters.

Despite being a big fan of aromatic bitters laden drinks over the last decade I’ve never finished a bottle. This fact stood unchallenged until this weekend, when an excellent rye Old Fashioned emptied my sun bleached bottle. I was given it back in the summer of 2000 by a friend of mine who had been staying in my house while I was in the USA for my first month of my first job out of university and it has stayed with me since, moving five times and becoming the beginning and backbone of my cocktail experimentation and love of tasty drinks. Fare thee well, old chum.

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Yet again it’s been too long since I did one of these, so here’s some stuff that I’ve randomly had a sip of in recent times that hasn’t quite merited a full burst of obsessive writing for whatever reason. Usually laziness.

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It’s been a while since I’ve been officially involved in a Twitter whisky tasting. I gatecrashed Steve Rush‘s last one, thanks to a few random minis of Cooley whiskey I had knocking around, but I’ve stayed away from them to let other people get involved – one of the things that makes a Twitter tasting useful is new people seeing what’s going on, and almost everyone I know on Twitter is either already involved or bored by my twittering about booze. My resolve was, however, cracked when Steve announced that his next tasting would be of the Highland Park range.

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I like the folks at William Grant’s. Over the last few years they’ve been doing more and more interesting PR stuff, and this year’s focus for the crazy is Monkey Shoulder, their blended malt whisky. They kicked things off a couple of months back with some cocktail nights at Callooh Callay and event #2 is on this weekend – The Monkey Shoulder Chocolate Trail.

I’m not going to talk too much about the whisky as the folks from Monkey Shoulder are running the next Whisky Squad night, which I suspect I may be writing about shortly after, but as the Chocolate Trail is only open until Monday night I thought I’d get something up.

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I have tragically discovered that I’m running out of beer. This is a good thing, as increasingly I’m finding that my “I can’t drink that yet, I’ve only got one of them” attitude is leading to occasionally spoiled beers and the increasing lack of bottles is forcing me to crack them open. However, the the star of today’s post is not spoiled – Imperial Ghisa from Birrificio Lambrate.

I picked this one up at the Great British Beer Festival last year and totally forgot about it, which wasn’t hard due to my advanced state of ruin by the time I got to the Italian bar. When it popped up as next in the Cupboard of Surprise I had no idea what to expect without obsessive internet research to help me. Google, be my guide…

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