Billy's Booze Blog

I like it when my obsessive calling of things by their Proper Name shows that I vaguely understand the world. Whether it be obsessive fact checking of people’s names or checking to see whether I should be sticking a The in front of a town/country/product/etc (The Hague, Ukraine and The Glenlivet, I’m looking at you) [...]

Since I’ve started helping out with Whisky Squad I’ve not had the chance to contribute a session’s title, but with #48 I dropped a bad pun and the chaps for some reason went along with it. An evening of grain whisky with occasional whisky photorgrapher and evil tempter Philip Storry - The Storry of Grain. I [...]

There are some fairly mad people in the world of whisky – and I use that term in a purely complimentary manner. This weekend has shown off a couple of groups showing the best that whisky and madness can accomplish: Balvenie are tasting whisky in a specially built in a hotel in Manchester this weekend [...]

Hello. I’m in Scotland, surrounded by snow and equipped with inadequate footwear, a combination of facts that should make post(s) later this week a beacon for schadenfreude tinged enjoyment. Anyways, as whisky distilleries treat weekends in February with appropriate level of contempt (they’re working but don’t open for tourists, as there are only four of [...]

The year hasn’t ended yet and here it is – a blog post about the most recent Whisky Squad tasting. It’s even (unless plans go awry, in which case I’ll delete this sentence making these parentheses entirely pointless) before the next Squad meeting, the Christmas dinner on the 8th of December, so this officially makes [...]

The Twitter whisky tasting is something that I’ve seen pop up a few times in the past, but it’s something that I’ve singularly failed to take part in for quite a while. Since the first time I heard about Lukas from The Edinburgh Whisky Blog throwing whisky around the world before herding the twitterati into [...]

This post has been fomenting for a while, but the perils of work and thinking too much about whisky have forced it into the background until now. Domu888 on twitter (Dominic Edsall in real life) asked me a while back what my top 10 whiskies under £50 were. I fired off a few off the [...]

Flicking through my notebook to remind myself of what I’ve been up to of late (I don’t bother storing such information in my brain any more, it’s too full of useless facts that I’ve accidentally learned from Wikipedia) I came across a bunch of tasting notes from Whisky Live London. Rather than let them sit [...]

Twelve down, many to go – Whisky Squad has almost reached its first birthday and to mark the occasion we had a rather special evening nestled in the hands of Chris Maybin from Compass Box. I’ve mumbled out Compass Box in the past and they remain one of my favourite whisky companies, with consistently interesting [...]

A bit of a unexpected move by The Whisky Squad this month. Having gone through various high powered single malts this meeting’s theme was to be the whisky snob’s enemy – the much maligned blend. The idea behind this was to help further put down the theory that blended whisky is by its very nature [...]