Billy's Booze Blog

I haven’t posted about any single drams I’ve tasted recently, as in general I seem to do ‘proper tastings’ in flights or just not get around to writing about them. However, every now and again something comes along that’s a little bit special and deserves some extra attention – one of those popped up on [...]

This week has been ‘hard’. By ‘hard’ I mean that my normal ‘work’ has been supplemented by even more events than usual, culminating in the 2-day fungasm (fungasm might be going too far, I will admit) that was Whisky Live London 2011. I was at there under the auspices of work and I have at [...]

Today is St Patrick’s day, a fact I know due to a) it being the day after my mate Adam‘s birthday (happy birthday Mr A) and b) Diageo having died their lake green. Again. In celebration of this holiday that I have no particular personal attachment to I have decided to live the stereotype to [...]

A question that noone has ever asked me, but I like to preemptively ask myself, is “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s an awful question and I dream of one day having to sigh and come up with an answer to tell the star-struck questioner, like the various writers and directors have had to [...]

One of the things that people always said to me before I started working in the world of whisky was that everyone was friendly. Since I have started I’ve found that pretty much holds – the world of whisky is full of many lovely people. I met a bunch of them at Maltstock last year, [...]

So, budget time is approaching in the UK which means that beer duty will be hiked yet again due to the mysterious power of the ‘duty escalator’. This is a revenue generator for the government (no bad thing in of itself) that raises the duty on beer by 2% over inflation each year (something slightly [...]

When planning my train heavy trip around the Highlands there were a few distilleries that quickly went to the top of the list. First amongst those was the distillery I currently, when pushed to make a choice, list as my favourite – Clynelish. It’s in the town of Brora which in turn is carefully positioned [...]