Billy's Booze Blog

I’m not particularly good at travelling. The world outside of the M25, despite my having lived there for half of my life (although I’m only two years off a half and half London/Notlondon split), is a vast scary place, without tube trains or the correct levels of pollution required to sustain my trainee-Londoner lungs. However, [...]

One of the continuing themes of this blog is a sentence at the start vaguely conforming to a pattern of ‘One of the boozes I don’t know well is X and it was lovely when Y asked me along to try some for REASON Z’. So, assume that I’ve done that again with X=light rum, [...]

A bit quiet on the blogging front this last week as I’ve been doing my first week at The Whisky Exchange. So as not to leave the blog fallow here’s a quick post pointing you at another post – my first post on the TWE Blog, talking about whisky cocktails. Feel free to go and [...]

Despite only being a few months old, the London Cocktail Society is already doing rather well. With visits to 69 Colebrooke Row, Callooh Callay and the Sipsmith Distillery under their belts Mark, Emma and Kate decided to go for a big Christmas do, and they did really rather well. The nice folk at Callooh Callay [...]

The London Cocktail Society continues to roll on and the second meeting was part of a happy coincidence – it helped start off London Cocktail Week. Running through the week of October 11th it was a celebration of all things boozey, with tastings of almost everything imaginable as well as masterclasses in the creation of [...]

High on my list of boozes to learn about at the moment is the oft-maligned ‘granny’ drink that is sherry. I’m a bit of a fan, knocking back at least one bottle of amontillado at Christmas and having grown up in a household where abstinence was enforced before 6pm with the understanding that sherry didn’t [...]

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 [...]

The lovely people of Qype, especially organisatrix extraordinaire SianySianySiany, have looked after me again, this time be helping with one of my missions for the year: learning more about vodka – somehow I managed to wangle may onto one of Bob Bob Ricard‘s rather exclusive vodka tastings. At first I felt this rather strange as [...]

I am a big fan of gimmicks, even if I try not to give them too much credence, but when I heard about Macallan’s latest it gave me a kick to go and find somewhere that could demonstrate it – The Ice Ball Serve… Basically, serve Macallan 10 yr old over ice, but instead of [...]

While wandering in the wilds of Islington the other week, trying to find things to fill the time between work and a gig (by the mighty A, supported by some people I don’t remember and the rather good Stars of the Search Party) I did a quick search on the Randomness Guide to London and [...]