One man's excuse…
Important public service announcement – tickets to Dramboree 2014 are now on sale. To ignore all of the further wiffle in this post just click here to go to the ticket buying page. If you’re still here, well done. Are you sitting comfortably? If so, then I’ll begin…
Continue reading “Public Service Announcement – Dramboree Tickets on Sale”
I don’t really do Twitter tastings any more. Mainly it’s because I seem to be quite good at missing them, but I also like the idea of getting more new people involved – most who see me tweeting along will probably already know about the drams I’m trying if they care about whisky, and if not they’ll be following someone else who’ll be taking part. However, every now and again one pops up that tickles my interest and drags me out of my self-imposed retirement. One of those hit recently – a preview tasting of the new Douglas Laing Old Particular range.
Continue reading “Douglas Laing Old Particular Tweet Tasting”
My final masterclass of Maltstock was the one I put at the top of my list – Tamdhu with Antony McCallum-Caron. Ever since I tried the recently released Tamdhu 10 I’ve been rather interested in what else the distillery might produce, and as such was rather keen to know what Antony might have brought along with him.
So, there was another Maltstock. As is usual, it’s taken me a couple of weeks to get over the exertions of the weekend, but strangely it’s not to do with the booze – it’s sleep. A weekend in the Netherlands, surrounded by interesting whisky and whisky folk, leads to a distinct lack of kip, especially when the beds are so uncomfortable. However, it’s part of the event’s ‘charm’ and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Unless they want to change the beds, in which case I’d be all for it.
Anyway, outside of the many tasty boozes I drank while sitting around talking rubbish (with Jon ‘the balloon headed whisky disposal unit‘ Beach winning on both the whisky providing [a 1978 Port Ellen. Best. Year. Evar] and rubbish talking [his repeated claims that he’s not the Whisky Sponge. We all know it’s really him…{it’s not}]) I also sat in on some masterclasses. First up – the ‘Balvenie’ class…
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 tour through Speyside. While the region is named after the river Spey there are a bunch of other rivers, with the big ones being the Findhorn, Isla, Deveron, Avon and Lossie. However, despite the session’s moniker the focus of the evening was the whisky rather than any other bodies of liquid…
Continue reading “Whisky Squad #53 – The Rivers of Speyside”
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 @TheLadyBlender, master blender for Morrison Bowmore Distillers, the folks behind Bowmore, Glen Garioch and Auchentoshan (as well as the “I’ve never seen them before” McLelland’s single malts).
She’s thrown herself into tweeting in an enthusiastic manner and as a first larger work related thing put together a bunch of twitterers to join in with the first Bowmore Twitter tasting under the hashtag of #LoveBowmore. I was on the guestlist.
In recent times this blog has been characterised by flurries of posts followed by chunks of silence. Generally I have reasons why I haven’t had time to pour my brain out into a computer, but more often than not it’s been that I just didn’t round to writing anything. This time, though, I did have a reason:
I went to Canada.
Afraid as I am of the world that lies outside of the control of London transport, I started last week with a trip to Kidderminster, and two days later was on a plane to Beautiful British Columbia to visit the annual Victoria Whisky Festival.
With new year comes what is now becoming a tradition for Whisky Squad, in as much as doing something for three years in a row make a tradition – a session in the cellars of Berry Brothers & Rudd with friend of The Squad Rob Whitehead.
On arrival Foursquare informed me that I hadn’t been to Berry’s since January of 2012, when we did our ‘Third Sense‘ session in the Berry’s cellar, which makes me a sad panda – visiting the shop is something I try to do from time to time, despite being able to get most of their spirits at work, simply because it’s rather excellent, from subsiding floor to unalterable English Heritage listed nails (stuck into a Tudor period wall significantly after the time when the wall belonged to one of Henry VII’s hunting lodges), to say nothing of the wine.
Continue reading “Whisky Squad #51 – The Brown Spectrum (volume 3)”