Billy's Booze Blog

I’m slightly obsessed with Laphroaig. I’ve been a fan for a while, but over the last couple of years, ever since trying a 1990s version of Laphroaig 10, I’ve grabbed every one of their new releases, bought a few older ones at auction and investigated independent bottlings. Their new releases over the last few years [...]

As was pointed out to me by a former Morrison Bowmore PR person (hello DK!) the other week, on occasion I have been behind trying the samples that the lovely folks associated with MBD have on occasion sent me. So, as last week featured their second Twitter tasting, a follow-up to #LoveBowmore, I thought I’d [...]

The boys of Caskstrength have been good to me over the years. I went to their first ‘proper’ tasting; grabbed a lift with them over on Jura, allowing me to have a flying visit to Caol Ila and thus be able to say that I’ve been to a distillery on Islay; been mentally scarred by [...]

I missed a few things off my write ups of my trip to Canada and I’ve not stopped drinking since I got back. Actually, that doesn’t sound good. “I’ve not given up drinking since I got back”? Doesn’t sound much better. Anyways, I drank things. Some of them are below.

The first outing for the Whisky Squad in February (after a late January tasting with me at the helm which I was too busy talking at people during to make notes – the drams are all listed on the ‘Stuff we’ve drunk‘ page on the Squad website) handed the reins of to Joel for a [...]

Twitter is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the whisky world, with the initial onslaught of geeky whisky fans acting as a vanguard to bloggers, writers and producers who have been signing up and joining in the conversation with various levels of enthusiasm. One of the more recent inductees into the online world is Rachel Barrie, aka [...]

My second tasting of the main day of the Victoria Whisky Festival was with Michael Urquart of Gordon & Macphail. While it was titled as a general G&M tasting it instead focused on a key part of their range – whisky from their distillery, Benromach. I’ve written about the Benromach before, way back in the [...]

Of all the Scottish distilleries that people in the whisky industry are meant to like the one that I’ve paid least attention to in recent times is Springbank. I loved the ‘Rundlets & Kilderkins‘ bottling that appeared last year and used to ensure that I always had a bottle of Longrow 100 proof in the [...]

I drank a fair few things at the Victoria Whisky Festival and haven’t got enough hours in the day to write them up in my usual overly wordy fashion. But rather than let my notes disappear into the pile of notebooks on my desk I thought I’d better stick them up here. Firstly, a few [...]

A little bit of reading up on the country before my recent trip to Canada showed that in addition to moose(s), woolly hats and decent do(ugh)nuts they also have have an alarmingly rich tradition of making fine boozes. The small range of whisky and bottles of Labatt’s that we see in the UK are merely [...]