Santa Claus is coming to town. Bells are jingling. And Drinks by the Dram Advent Calendars are back for the festive season at Master of Malt!
It’s like a bit of a tradition now, right? But with December powering it’s way towards us at a rate of knots you best get cracking and buy one soon if you’re planning to!
With loads of different ones to chose from (not just whisky!) here’s the link! https://www.masterofmalt.com/advent-calendars Continue reading
To help celebrate the 4th July, a well-known date in America – so I’ve been told, the good eggs at Maverick Drinks and The Whisky Wire sent me a curated selection pack of their best American whiskies for a bunch of us drunkards selection of bloggers to all taste at the same time on that-there-Twitter.
So without further ado, here’s my thoughts on the aforementioned 5 drams…
Drinks by the Dram’s 2017 Advent Calendar selection
Now in it’s 6th year, the Drinks by the Dram 2017 Advent Calendar selection has expanded to include even more goodies than ever before… now’s the time to grab yourself a booze filled Festive calendar before December hits!
Classic favourites are back including Whisky, Gin and Rum calendars, and are now joined by exciting new additions, including a Calendar packed with whiskies from renowned independent bottler Douglas Laing, and another filled to the brim with incredible gins from the world’s best distillers, bottled by That Boutique-y Gin Company.
Have you ever thought about making a whisky holiday pilgrimage to visit some of the most famous names in whisky? I bet you have! There’s quite a few different trips you could do, from island hopping, to mammoth tours all over Scotland… but one great way to see a bunch of great distilleries, along side some fantastic visitor attractions, is to do The Malt Whisky Trail.
The Trail is based around the Speyside area, taking in such names as Glenlivet, Glenfiddich, Glen Moray and Strathisla, amongst others (go here for the full list). Depending on your time in the area you can always complete the whole list of recommended Trail visits, and could probably fit in a few others as well (let’s face it, in Speyside you can literally throw a stone in any direction and pretty much hit a distillery!).
Most serious whisky drinkers have been to, or at least know about the existence of whisky shows… there’s a good variety of them over the UK these days, but one of the largest, best known, and continually popular shows is The Whisky Exchange Whisky Show in London every year at the start of October. It’s always great to see friendly faces and to talk geeky things with industry experts while trying a massive variety of different goodies. Continue reading
I’ve been lucky enough to be on a Mount Gay twitter tasting tonight… I’m still quite new to rum, I know I like it, but I haven’t tried many varieties, so it’s great to try a few new ones from this range that I’ve not tried before!
Mount Gay is a fairly small producer, making around 500k cases a year. They mature everything in ex-American whiskey oak barrels.
Traditionally, Bajan rum are blends of pot and column distillates made from molasses.
Without further ado let’s dig in to the goodies…
Deconstructing Wood’s Rum – #WoodsTTI’m lucky enough to have been involved with a Twitter Tasting, looking at Wood’s Rum… and deconstructing it’s three component parts, tasting them separately before then trying the finished article… not something you get to do every day! Firstly, let’s quickly review what and who Woods are:
“Woods has been around since 1887 and was first created in the docks at Liverpool. Back then it was a company called The Woods Trading Co. who had ships coming in from all over the world. They had barrels of rum coming in on their ships and they seized an opportunity and a trade agreement was set up to import 3 different marques of rum and Woods was born. Woods is unchanged and sticking to our traditions is a key part of what we do. We are a traditional Navy style rum, a Demerara rum, a Navy strength rum, and a Dark rum.”
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Just a quick post this one… but today I seem to have accidentally invented a new term: “Cash Strength”. This generally refers to new releases that *aren’t* Cask Strength, but certainly appear to priced as if they were! 🙂 I’ll be attempting to use this terminology from now on…
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So… in what is pretty much a tradition now, Master of Malt / Drinks by the Dram has once again got lots of lovely boozy advent calendars for your Christmassy enjoyment, 24 x 3cl drams for your daily Advent entertainment. And, it’s not just whisky you can have in your calendar’s these days however! Oh no, you can have a gin one, rum, vodka, cognac, and many more besides.
Actually, scrap that… you can have have *whatever* you like, there’s now a Build Your Own Advent calendar, could it get better than that?! There’s nearly 4000 different drams you can pick from to build up your very own personalized advent calendar.
Have you heard of Fentimans? If not, let me quickly fill you in… Thomas Fentiman, a West Yorkshire iron worker, began the business in 1905 when he was given a recipe for botanically brewed ginger beer in repayment of a loan.
SWB | Somerset Whisky Blog 