Billy's Booze Blog

During my visit to Canadia I didn’t focus entirely on whisky. While I trawled the local bars (well, mainly the hotel and airport bars…I was busy) for new beers I also got caught up in an expedition to local distiller Victoria Spirits, makers of gin and more… From my ‘in depth’ research before I left [...]

After a summer hiatus the Juniper Society have returned. This is the sort of thing that happens when the organisers leave the hosting bar to go and run other places, but they’re all still friends and the lovely folks at Graphic are still hosting these evenings of gin fuelled learning, with Sarah and Adam still [...]

Work is starting to get busy and I’ve not got a lot of time to write long blog posts at the moment, so here’s some more random ‘short’ snippets on booze that I’ve managed to throw down my throat recently. In other news the blog was three years old last Friday. Which is quite scary.

Before I write any of this blog post I feel I need to make a full disclosure: I sort of worship Heston Blumenthal, aka St Heston of Bray. Over the years that he’s been becoming increasingly ubiquitous as the face of SCIENCE! in cooking I’ve watched his TV programs, read his books and even eaten [...]

In my constant quest to learn All Things About All Things David from Summer Fruit Cup is my gin saviour. Along with pinging me details of some of the more random gins we have at work he has also run occasional tastings at Graphic and invited me along. The American Gin tasting back on World [...]

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. [...]

World Gin Day may have been a couple of weeks back, but after dashing off a quick post about Latvian gin I had somewhere to be – Graphic Bar for a blind tasting of gin with David from Summerfruitcup. However, this was no Beefeater and Tanqueray laden group, instead focusing on a rapidly growing area [...]

So, it’s World Gin Day. While I don’t need an excuse to write about gin it is always nice to have one and I’ve spent the last few weeks going through our (scarily large) pile of gins at work making a list of some of the more interesting ones. While putting together a TWE blog [...]

I’ve been much remiss when it comes to writing about Sipsmith, in as much as I haven’t really done so yet. I first realised that they existed when they supplied a stack of gin and vodka to the Blaggers’ Banquet, back in November 2009, the event that inspired me to start writing this blog. Since [...]

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 [...]