Billy's Booze Blog

Numbers are helpful things when it comes to rating things. Over the years I’ve moved away from the idea of giving things that I talk and write about review scores, trying to give enough of a mix of fact an opinion (hopefully obviously delineated) to allow the reader to make up their own mind. While [...]

The name of The Whisky Lounge seems a bit of a misnomer – rather than a loungey bar somewhere it mainly seems to be a guy called Eddie. He organises events up and down the country based, around tasting whisky and having a good time. I went along to his show in London this year, [...]

The Whisky Exchange’s (mostly) monthly program continues apace, this time bringing the manager of the Pulteney distillery, Malcolm Waring, down from far-off Wick to lead a tasting of the Old Pulteney range. Old Pulteney is distilled in Wick on the coast in the far northeastern corner of Scotland, making it the most northerly distillery on [...]

Again, the internet doth provide. I saw a post on Judith Lewis’s Mostly About Chocolate blog the other day that Macallan were doing a whisky and chocolate tasting, and that she had some tickets to give away. I’ve been to quite a few whisky tastings in my time but as yet I’ve managed to avoid [...]

I still like Brewdog. I may be in two minds about some of their marketing and some of their beers, but they’ve so far all been worth a try. So, when I read on their blog that they were going to have a release event for one of their latest beers in London, putting on [...]

Despite several attempts I’ve never tried an British red wine. I’ve had whites at Denbies (having missed the open ‘to taste’ bottles of red by a few minutes and not wanting to spring £15 for a bottle without a taste first) and even some Welsh ‘Champagne’, courtesy of the Sugar Loaf vineyard, but as yet [...]

Tequila is a much maligned drink. While the vast majority of tequila drinking experiences in the UK end in drunken debauchery, blood loss and the wearing of foolish hats, there is a whole world outside of girls with bottle holsters and shooter glass bandoliers. Dylan Moran’s words should normally be taken as gospel and his [...]

I don’t get many emails from PR people for my blog, which I rather like as I’m not really a ‘write-up a press release’ kind of blogger. However, when I got one through a few weeks back from a guy telling me about a film chronicling the adventures of Dan Edelstyn in Ukraine it rang [...]

Ever since the Cooley tasting I attended at Whisky Lounge I’ve been keeping an eye out for a chance to try more of their whiskies. So, when I spied the Greenore 15 Year OId while clicking through the Drinks by the Dram list for my first order I couldn’t really say no. It’s the longer [...]

I don’t really buy whisky online. Generally I like to talk at people, so buying a bottle is normally an excuse to go and annoy the folk at one of the whisky shops in London, with me asking questions, making shakily backed up pronouncements and being corrected in pronunciation of distillery names and general misapprehensions [...]