Billy's Booze Blog

After two years of doing blind tastings at the monthly Whisky Squad meetups I’ve become quite fond of the technique. It’s shown me a number of drams that I wouldn’t have usually touched and helped strip away a number of my whisky prejudices, both conscious and unconscious. I like to think that it’s made me [...]

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 [...]

Today I received a parcel in the post containing a book. It’s a rather exciting book because it contains my first printed writing about whisky.

How time flies. A mere two years ago I was an occasional drunk who sometimes wrote things up on his blog, who then bumped into Andy and Jason of WhiskySquad at a couple of booze events, leading to my attendance of almost every one of their sessions. These days I’m a professional drunk who still [...]

Yet again it’s been too long since I did one of these, so here’s some stuff that I’ve randomly had a sip of in recent times that hasn’t quite merited a full burst of obsessive writing for whatever reason. Usually laziness.

It’s been a while since I’ve been officially involved in a Twitter whisky tasting. I gatecrashed Steve Rush‘s last one, thanks to a few random minis of Cooley whiskey I had knocking around, but I’ve stayed away from them to let other people get involved – one of the things that makes a Twitter tasting [...]

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 [...]

I haven’t posted about any single drams I’ve tasted recently, as in general I seem to do ‘proper tastings’ in flights or just not get around to writing about them. However, every now and again something comes along that’s a little bit special and deserves some extra attention – one of those popped up on [...]

This week has been ‘hard’. By ‘hard’ I mean that my normal ‘work’ has been supplemented by even more events than usual, culminating in the 2-day fungasm (fungasm might be going too far, I will admit) that was Whisky Live London 2011. I was at there under the auspices of work and I have at [...]

Today is St Patrick’s day, a fact I know due to a) it being the day after my mate Adam‘s birthday (happy birthday Mr A) and b) Diageo having died their lake green. Again. In celebration of this holiday that I have no particular personal attachment to I have decided to live the stereotype to [...]