Billy's Booze Blog

As I noted in my last post, some of the current whisky obsessiveness on this blog can be laid at the door of Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte & Mackay and constant whisky show presence. My first in person encounter with Richard was a few minutes after getting in to Whisky Live Glasgow, where [...]

A couple of weekends back I found myself on the 6am train out of London Euston bound for Glasgow and this year’s Whisky Live Live Glasgow. It was rather a last minute thing, as I’d answered a request for help on Whyte & Mackay master blender Richard Paterson’s blog the week beforehand offering my services [...]

A bit of a unexpected move by The Whisky Squad this month. Having gone through various high powered single malts this meeting’s theme was to be the whisky snob’s enemy – the much maligned blend. The idea behind this was to help further put down the theory that blended whisky is by its very nature [...]

Tuesday was a special day. Originally I was meant to go to a tasting of Jura with the distillery manager, but that got cancelled at the last moment. Then a message popped up on the BrewDog blog that they’d be running a tasting at The Rake. Perfect timing it seemed, to start with, until I [...]

A few months back I saw on Twitter that a few of the cocktail lovers who I follow were talking about having meetups for London based cocktail fans and, as I do way to often, I asked if I could join in. The first official meetup of the now named London Cocktail Society (I think [...]

This blog is currently descending into whisky obsession and to cap that out this weekend I’m off to Glasgow to go to Whisky Live 2010. To add to the joy of my day of whisky related shenanigans I’ll be doing some live coverage via Twitter and Richard Paterson’s blog (as he and Whyte and Mackay [...]

Bruichladdich are one of the most prolific producers of single malt whisky in Scotland at the moment. Based on Islay they opened in 1881, closed (as many did) in the mid-90s and then re-opened in 2001 under the eye of Mark Reynier, who led a group of private investors in buying and restarting the distillery. [...]

I don’t do much travelling outside of the UK and this means that I generally miss out on the delights of the duty free shopairport travel retail centre. Despite not having an interesting outgoing selection on my recent trip to Hungary, due to flying from rather-uninterestingly-stocked Luton, there was a little more joy in Budapest [...]

It’s definitely not only Scotland that makes whisky these days. While the USA and Canada have been doing it for ages (even if they spell it differently), and India, the UK, Australia, Sweden and even Holland have joined up more recently, there are still a few more countries out there producing that we don’t often [...]