Billy's Booze Blog

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 [...]

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 [...]

Having this blog sometimes backfires – people often think I know more about the boozes than I do. However, sometimes those backfirings have the happy side effect of a) making me realise that I do know more about drinks than I thought and b) reminding me of things that I need to play around with [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]