Firstly, my competition with the FABULOUS PRIZE! has now closed. The names have been collated, the random number generator has been prodded and a winner has been selected. The answer was of course that Mr Roskrow has recently started up the World Whisky Review with the fine folks at Connosr, who I seem to spend a lot of time pimping at the moment. The winner of the FABULOUS PRIZE! is none other than Chris Welfare, who will (once I manage to get down to the post office) be receiving a copy of Dom’s very pretty book The World’s Best Whiskies. Well done to him, thankyou to everyone who entered for showing that there are people reading this blog who I haven’t met, and thanks to everyone who wished the blog a happy birthday last week.

Anyways, moving swiftly on – MOVEMBER IS OVER! Soon my pretty face will yet again be hidden and people will stop saying ‘Oh, it suits you’ about my frankly ridiculous facial hair. By today my team had raised £3062 and the Whisky4Movember network, with a bunch of other whisky related teams in, hit £11,124, with over £6k of that coming from Master of Malt’s Movember bottling (of which more in a later post). Which is pretty impressive. You can still donate if you would like, but the moustaches have already started to come off. Mine hasn’t and hopefully I won’t look too ridiculous while my beard grows back. Anyways, here is some of the facial topiary that appeared:

Special mention must go to Mr Standing, who was bullied into joining in during the recording of an episode of Village of the Drammed and ended up agreeing to shave his head if he broke the £1000 mark. He did, and now he looks a bit scary.

Anyways, enough meta posting, normal booze related service will resume shortly

This year has been a weird one, with the last half of it having been spent as a professional (I claim none of the characteristics associated with professionalism other than a pay packet) boozer rather than enthusiastic amateur that I was last November. Output on this here blog has dropped quite significantly over the last few months due to that, but I’ve still managed to get a good few posts out:

2009-2010: 102 posts, ~100k words
2010-2011: 66 posts, ~95k words

So, only 65% the posts but 95% the word count. Rolling in my (currently) work blog posts that’s significantly more words than last year but a lot less posts. I need an editor…

On top of my job I’ve also started doing a video podcast with Messrs Standing and Rook – Village of the Drammed. We’ve got four episodes in the bag, with three released so far and plans to record more as soon as we can. You can even subscribe to it on iTunes and like us on Facebook. Here’s the first one:

As a thank you to you lot reading this, and as a way to try and get rid of some of the stuff that I seem to keep in my house, I have a Fabulous Prize! to give away! Last year I went to the launch party/practise dinner for Dom Roskrow‘s book The World’s Best Whiskies, at which I was given a copy of the book. A couple of months later a parcel arrived from the Whisky Tasting Club, which Dom helps run, with another copy of the book. As such I’ve got a spare one and therefore it counts as a Fabulous Prize!

To enter, drop me an email to worldsbest@bbblog.org.uk with the your name and the answer to the following question:

What whisky website is Dom working with to produce World Whisky Review, an online whisky magazine which recently released its first issue?

The competition will close on November 30th at 2359hours GMT – any entries received after that time will be ignored, as I’m going to turn off the email address. I’ll choose a name at random from one of my excellent hats (or using a random number generator, it depends on how much paper I have for my printer). The only rules are:

• One entry per person
• Billy may not enter
• Billy’s decision is final

Anyways, thanks again to everyone who has written comments, grabbed me in real life and said “Hello, are you Billy? I read your blog” or otherwise encouraged me. Booze writing is now my job and it’s in part your fault. Well done.

So, I will be attempting to keep up a daily progress report on my MoSpace as I slowly (so very slowly) make myself look more ridiculous on a day by day basis. Other than the upcoming Movember WhiskySquad tasting (still a couple of tickets left) this is the last I’ll be mentioning it so be good and go sponsor me.

I’ve put up a few links on the Lanyrd page for my session – if anyone has any other pictures, notes or anything they don’t mind sharing please add them over there.

The two absinthes we tried were La Maison Fontaine Blanche and Jade Espirit Edouard, which are both rather lovely. I got mine from The Whisky Exchange, which you’d expect seeing as I work there. For more info on absinthe I recommend having a look at Oxygenee, Jade Liqueurs, Liqueurs de France and The Wormwood Society, as well as my other absinthe posts (of which there are more to come).

Ta muchly to those who came – be good, buy decent absinthe and don’t set fire to it.

In short – Movember is a charity that raises money for men’s health organisations, especially focusing on prostate cancer. The money raising bit mainly comes from hairy idiots like me removing the hairiness from their faces and gently cultivating some kind of moustache. I did it last year and I’ll be doing it again this one…

So, lovely people, this is where you come in – please sponsor me to shave off my remaining facial hair and grow a top lip adornment that will look ridiculous no matter what ‘style’ I ‘choose’ to ‘grow’. You can get to my currently quite empty MoSpace (I still hate the abbreviation Mo) by clicking here, and therein donate monies in either my name or that of my team, the Whisky4Movember of the post title.

Yet again Whisky4Movember team captain Mr ‘The Whisky Guy’ Rook has done some sterling work and with the chaps at Master of Malt has managed to get a cask of whisky from Glenfarclas, which is bottled and will have the profits donated to the charity. If you’re around in London there’s a bottle behind the bar at the excellent Worship Street Whistling Shop for you to go and have a freebie taste of if you ask nicely. Along with that Whisky Squad, London’s friendliest and most casual regular whisky tasting group (as the slogan is rapidly crystallising into), is running a bonus Whisky4Movember tasting on November 22nd (the day before my blog’s birthday…hmm…) and there are a still a few tickets left – book now!. At 22 days in there will be some people whose faces will be ripe for laughing at. There is also talk of other things, with Darren throwing whisky around at a bunch of the events that are going on through the month and may be a team appearance at the Battersea park fun run if a) it goes ahead this year and b) if any of us can be motivated to both get up early enough and then also run around a park. We’ll see.

Anyways, donate early; donate often.

To add the actual content that the title promises, here’s something for London people. I’ve heard tales over the last few months of something interesting coming out of the pleasantly mad end of the William Grants PR dept and now it’s distilled into something real – The Balvenie Whisky Den. Hiding in a shop front on Tavistock Street near Covent Garden it’s, simply put, a pop-up bar. However, to build on the idea of craftsmanship that Balvenie are pushing as part of their brand on day one (Monday 9th May, about a week ago) there was nothing there apart from some building supplies and whisky. Since then, with updates through the @BalvenieUK twitter account, the team has been building out two levels of the shop to be a bar and tasting room for the Balvenie range.

I popped by at the end of week one and was confronted with a fairly spartan upstairs and a closed downstairs area. There was a bar, some stave based lampshades, a pair of barrel racks (complete with barrels) and a halved sherry butt being used as a table for tastings. They’re open from 1pm-8pm (although that may change) and offer visitors a free taste of Balvenie Double Wood and, for Warehouse 24 members (the Balvenie club, sign-up forms available on-site) a deconstructed tasting of Balvenie Signature – a try of each of the three types of whisky that go into Balvenie’s master distiller David Stewart’s signature malt.

The downstairs was closed when I went, due to to it still being a proper building site, but by Sunday 15th the upstairs was clad in staves and, all going to plan, downstairs should have had some interesting adornments and ‘activity areas’ added. The press launch is on Wednesday, which I’ll hopefully make it down for, and the London Cocktail Society, including myself again, are visiting on Friday, so there will be a more complete blog post sometime soon. However, in the meantime if you are around the Covent Garden area and feel like a dram – The Whisky Den, 34 Tavistock Street. They made a sign last Wednesday, so it should be easy to find…

The piccies are lifted from the @BalvenieUK yfrog account, where there are a bunch more in progress shots.

When I started this blog back in 2009 it was to give me the excuse (of the blog tagline) to get out there and try lots of different types of booze with no more intent than learning more about something that I’ve long been a fan of. However, through the lovely people I’ve met and things I’ve learned it’s taken over more and more of my life to the point that I started to consider that the drinks industry might be somewhere that I could make a living. So, it’s with a rather unexpected joy that I can announce that I’m leaving the world of financial software behind me and embarking on a rather different new adventure.

From early-May I will be working for The Whisky Exchange helping to manage content on their website.

Not a lot will change here, with this being my own website and not affiliated with my day job, and I’ll still be writing my normal wordy rubbish – my new masters haven’t quite sewn up the entire booze market (yet) and my quest to learn all things about the world of drinks is far from over.

So to all of those who have helped me along the way, not least all you lovely readers who have encouraged me to keep going – many thanks, I owe you a beverage or three. BBBlog will remain independent and still one of the best excuses to drink that I’ve ever come up with.

Slainte Mhath, Prost, Egészségedre!

From:

To:

With only a shake and the balancing of an overly large cinnamon stick. Yes, that is the same cinnamon stick that I used to stir my hot buttered rum. I am frugal.

And thus ends my whisky ‘deluge’. More of a spilled half empty bucket, but there will of course be more to come.

1. I seem to have a lot of whisky in the house
2. I’m off to drink whisky elsewhere a bunch of times in the near future
3. I’m running a whisky tasting next week

The tasting is to be held on Thursday January 20th at The Alma in Islington as part of their week long run up to Burns Night. I’m going to be running a group through 5 whiskies and talking my normal range of obsessive toot from about 7.30pm. Tickets are available at £15 a head from the pub, although as it’s ‘way over there’ you can drop them a mail or call to book. It’s a general beginner’s tasting  so there will be some whisky to drink and discussion to be had. Let me know if you’re coming along so I can work out if I need to wear a disguise or not.

In the meantime there have been 102 posts clocking in at over 100,000 words – about 280 words per day. I’ve drunk lots of interesting things, tried many new things and learned significantly more than I thought I could fit in my brain from a pile of very lovely people. It’s been noted that this generally seems to be a whisky blog, with half the posts mentioning whisky so far, and I even pop up, as of writing, on page 3 of google for ‘Whisky Blog’, but I’ve managed to get out and try some tequila, sherry, vodka and random Bulgarian drinks this year, as well as some rather tasty beer, cider and cocktails. I’ve also made some rather awesome new friends, flavoured vodka to the recipe of a mad russian‘s grandfather, bought shares in a brewery, visited an incredible gin distillery (which I shamefully still haven’t written about), invested in a film about vodka, decided on two new favourite pubs, had a shave and grown a moustache.

Over the last 12 months the number of people visiting the site has increased by an order of magnitude, with my daily hit total often beating the total number of visitors during my first month of blogging, and the lovely Google Analytics I started playing with a few months back has started telling me that some people are even staying to read what I’ve written. Or at least leaving their browser window open for a while. Which is nice.

Anyways, thank you to everyone who’s helped me along the way – here’s to another year of imbibing. Responsibly, of course.

If anyone’s knocking around London tonight, 2010-11-23, with nothing to do then I’ll be in the Euston Tap having a few light ales – please feel free to come along and say hello. I’m the one who looks like a bank manager.
Last night I celebrated the last day of the year of the blog by drinking the most expensive booze I ever have done. But that’s a story for another day… (it wasn’t that bad)

Update: it’s just been pointed out that the Euston Tap doesn’t have its address on their website. It’s in one of the gatehouses out the front of Euston station – here’s their Qype page.