Billy's Booze Blog

One of the things that seems to be happening a lot recently in the world of drinks is the revitalisation of things often considered to be passé or bad. For me there’s been reexamination of blended whisky (some of it’s nice, some of it isn’t), american beer (see previous parentheses), vodka (etc) and various other [...]

I’ve been a member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society for a couple of years now (with my third year renewal sitting just on the other side of New Year) and have been rather a fan since the day I first walked through the doors of their London rooms. Since then I’ve visited both of [...]

It seems like only yesterday that I decided that writing about booze would be a good excuse for drinking more of it. Actually, that’s a lie – this year has limped by at a phenomenally slow rate and it already feels like a lifetime away that I played behind the bar at the Blaggers’ Banquet. [...]

My favourite cocktail of the moment, and for the last few months of moments, is The Sazerac. It’s a cocktail that I first tried in Match Bar near Oxford Circus a year or so ago (the first drink towards an evening which ended with me smoking out the back of the bar with the staff [...]

Recently I’ve noticed that I’ve been moving away from my roots on this blog. Tastings, sherry, whisky shows and restaurant trips seem to have popped up rather than just drinking stuff and writing about it. As a step back to The Goode Olde Dayes I decided to write about a couple of beers I grabbed [...]

I like Twitter (capital letter required). I’m @cowfish over there and talk a lot of rubbish for most of the day – one of the bonuses of being a computer programmer is the constant connection to the internet which works with my tiny attention span to allow me to context switch back and forth between [...]

Despite the amount of time this blog implies I spend doing booze related activities I do also have a day job as a computer programmer. As part of this ‘secret’ second life I like to go and play at techy conferences and this last weekend I attended Barcamp London 8. Despite the potential of the [...]

September flew by a bit for me and shortly after I finished writing up last month’s Whisky Squad another one appeared on the horizon. In honour of the fluffy top lips of a chunk of The Squad this session’s theme was Movember. Whisky Gandalf Darren, the man behind Whisky4Movember and random chap for Master of [...]

During my last jaunt towards sherry knowledge, the trip to Camino el Puerto del Canario that involved more food and beer than fortified wine, I lamented my lack of learning to Andrew Sinclair of Gonzalez Byass, along with a grumble that you don’t get as many chances to learn about sherry as you do other [...]

This blog is quite good for getting me invited to slightly random events that aren’t just plain drinks tastings and when I was asked along to a combination practise whisky dinner and book launch at a Michelin starred Indian restaurant, I couldn’t really say no. The book in question is Dominic Roskrow’s latest, The World’s [...]