Billy's Booze Blog

My buying of almost everything that BrewDog produces is a potential problem. Keeping an eye on their blog and receiving the occasional “as you are a shareholder you may be interested in” email is a dangerous thing as I hear about their more interesting brews before they get a chance to sell out. And sell [...]

One of the things that’s great about being a Twitter obsessive, as I admittedly am, is that there are many people from the world of whisky out there chatting away. Earlier on this year my path crossed with that of Keith Wood (@whiskyemporium), who I saw asking some techy questions about twitter one morning while [...]

Before my recent trip to Hungary I did the requisite research: I looked up the important holiday words (Please, Thankyou, Hospital, Bail, Embassy) and, most importantly, what the local speciality spirits were. Two popped up – Palinka and Unicum. Palinka has various descriptions ranging, depending on the opinions of the person doing the describing, from [...]

My summer holidays this year were in three parts, and sandwiched between trips to the Great British Beer Festival and Edinburgh was a stag weekend in Budapest. Rather than the usual stag traditions of throwing the cheapest beer possible down our necks before stapling the groom-to-be to the nearest national monument we went more for [...]

While I feel slightly guilty for not writing up my notes from the floor of The Whisky Lounge London Show this year, what with this blog allegedly being the only reason I drink, I didn’t come away from the show empty handed. Along with the bottle of Greenore, as inspired by the Cooley tasting, I [...]

Having done Islay whiskies last month the Whisky Squad chaps decided to go to what is traditionally the other end of the spectrum for this meetup – summer whiskies. Rather than the peated beasts, supped by the open fire as the darkness draws in (waiting, as we all do, for the ultimate inevitability of death…), [...]

True to my word I did indeed spend the last three days camped out at Earl’s Court enjoying this year’s GBBF. The plan was simple but elegant – drink on Wednesday, work there on Thursday and do some more drinking (maybe with an insider’s perspective) on the Friday. The plan, as they say, worked perfectly. [...]

Starting today is the annual Great British Beer Festival – 5 days where CAMRA turn Earls Court into the country’s largest pub. I will, naturally, be writing overly wordily and obsessively about the festival later this week, but for now suffice to say that I’m going to be there on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, having [...]