Billy's Booze Blog

One of the bonuses of working the world of drinks is that many of my cow-orkers are also booze obsessives. Step-up to the plate Mr Nic Vaughan – medical prosthetics designer(?!) turned trade guy at TWE, both our tame American and American whiskey go to guy. On his trips back to the US to see [...]

The Daiquiri has always been a cocktail I’ve avoided. In my minds eye it came served in a hurricane glass, stacked with crushed ice, fruit juice and more garnish than a large fruit cocktail should aspire to. At the back of mind there was a niggling sensation that I was getting it wrong. Hemingway drank [...]

While Whisky Squad started out at The Gunmakers, with even the initial formation of the idea happening at the bar, over the last year or so we’ve been letting Jeff have his upstairs room back from time to time to make a foray out into the world. For Whisky Squad #41 we took that to [...]

I am much behind on Whisky Squad write-ups, which is especially bad as I’ve recently started helping out organise The Squad properly, rather than just shouting drunkenly during the sessions and claiming that it’s ‘help’. Anyways, Whisky Squad #37 has fallen by the wayside, as I was helping present it and didn’t make enough notes. [...]

There are some fairly mad people in the world of whisky – and I use that term in a purely complimentary manner. This weekend has shown off a couple of groups showing the best that whisky and madness can accomplish: Balvenie are tasting whisky in a specially built in a hotel in Manchester this weekend [...]

I quite like sacrilege, especially in the world of drinks. My first blog post at work was about whisky cocktails, a subject that raises ire amongst many whisky purists, and I’ve championed the use of decent whisky in cocktails ever since. That said, I also hate whisky in lots of cocktails and find recipes that [...]

I like the folks at William Grant’s. Over the last few years they’ve been doing more and more interesting PR stuff, and this year’s focus for the crazy is Monkey Shoulder, their blended malt whisky. They kicked things off a couple of months back with some cocktail nights at Callooh Callay and event #2 is [...]

This post is in honour of World Gin Day – June 11th (this year coinciding with the Queen’s birthday). Started by Neil of Yet Another Gin, it’s a day to celebrate gin in all of its forms. So, along with tasting some Adnams gin when I popped into the Whisky Exchange shop today (We don’t [...]

Well. Pretty much as the title says – I did a guest post over on the Master of Malt blog. They sent me a bottle of whisky and some bitters (I now have two bottles of their bitters…) and asked me to come up with a Christmassy cocktail. I didn’t use quite as many bits [...]

While I have a fondness for doing random booze related experiments (some of which I should probably get round to writing up) I have generally avoided whisky.  Partly this is because using almost flavourless vodka to extract flavours from things is easier, but it’s also because I generally don’t have suitable whisky in the house [...]