When it comes to cocktails, gin is very much the spirit of choice at the moment. There’s a huge range of drinks and recipes out there, but here are three classics to get you started:

Negroni

My favourite gin cocktail and a pre-dinner drink most days in my house. It’s bitter, heavy and complex: just the thing to get my appetite going:

• 1 part gin
• 1 part sweet vermouth
• 1 part Campari (I usually drop this to half a measure as I have a sweet tooth)

Mix the ingredients and stir with ice. Strain into a chilled glass over fresh...

We’re back from the Islay Festival of Music and Malt, after a successful week of pouring whisky, meeting old friends and making new ones. The Whisky Exchange Islay Pop-up Bar was a success, with hundreds of old and rare drams poured, drunk and enthusiastically raved about. All going to plan, you’ll see us back next year.

Islay is beautiful and I took hundreds of photos. Here are a few to give you a flavour of the island, the distilleries, the festival and the whisky.

Originally published on The Whisky Exchange Blog - Feis Ile 2017 – Islay Festival Photo Gallery...

Over the past few years, Japanese whisky has exploded in popularity. From the most commonplace bottlings to limited-edition single casks, Japanese whisky has become increasingly hard to find as whisky fans have discovered how good it can be. Of all of the Japanese whiskies, one has had a greater rise than any other, but most people still don’t know much about it. We’re here to help – what is Karuizawa?

Karuizawa: A Mountain Town

If you ask someone in Japan, they probably won’t think ‘whisky’ if you mention Karuizawa. The town that gave the distillery its name is situated on...

Feis Ile, the yearly Islay Festival of Music and Malt , is a fixture of the Scotch Maltwhisky scene. Every year, the population of the isle of Islay doubles for a week at the end of maj, as whisky fans from around the world descend on the island. Hotel bookings are made more than a year in advance and you even need to get in months early to get a pitch at one of the island’s campsites. Suffice to say, it’s a big thing in the whisky world.

The Islay Festival of Music and Malt

It started in the...

Gin is such a fast-moving drinks category that new releases are appearing every day and old favourites sometimes get forgotten. In an attempt to make sure that you don’t miss out, here’s a list of some great gins that you should really know about.

1.  Edinburgh Gin

Edinburgh Gin also makes a range of gin-based liqueurs

Scottish gin is booming and Edinburgh Gin was one of the first to appear that was brazen about being distilled north of the border. Along with the flagship gin, the distillery also make a range of very popular fruity gin liqueurs . The Scots might...

One in three people living on Orkney have Scandinavian ancestry, so it was no surprise when Highland Park embraced this heritage with its Warriors Series, a range of whiskies named after proud Vikings: Sigurd , Harald , Einar , and the like. But the next stage in the conquest has arrived: the Viking Legend series, the first of which is Valkyrie , named after the female spirits with the power to choose who would live or die on the battlefield.

For even more authenticity, the distillery enlisted the help of Danish designer Jim Lyngvild, who can trace his lineage all...

Blending whisky is a skilled job. From combining hundreds of casks to make batches of large-scale blends such as Johnnie Walker to marrying a pair of casks for one-off single malt releases such as our exclusive Glenfarclas , it takes care to ensure that the character and flavours of the different whiskies work together. I was recently given a chance to try it out for myself with the aid of  Grant’s global ambassador, Rob Allanson. So how did I get on?

Blending whisky takes precision

We arrived at the makeshift blending lab and were presented with a raft of equipment to...

There are a confusing number of types of Scotch whisky. From single malts to vatted grains and blended whisky, people call whisky lots of different things. This month we’re focusing on blended whisky, so it’s time to answer some questions and dispel the myths about the most popular type of whisky in the world.

What is blended whisky?

Legally, there are five types of Scotch whisky, each with a slightly different definition:

1. Single Maltwhisky – whisky made at one distillery using pot stills and only malted barley.

2. Single Grain Whisky – whisky made at one distillery using...

Whisky has historically been seen as an after-dinner or late-evening drink, but from a taste point of view, what is the most effective time of day to drink whisky? And when are your taste buds at their most receptive? I spoke to a number of people from across the drinks world to find out.

The Retailer – Dawn Davies MW, Speciality Drinks buyer

‘The best time to taste is before I’ve eaten anything, when my palate is clean. I like to taste early in the morning so that my palate isn’t tired. It’s fresh; it knows what it’s tasting. When you’re...

Whether it’s the raging debate about no-age-statement releases, or questions about how old a whisky I’m pouring at a festival around the world is, age is currently a hot topic. Something I’m often asked is how older whiskies compare to younger ones.

George Grant, sales director at Glenfarclas , recently hosted a tasting of six bottlings from The Family Casks series, one each from the 1950s through to the 2000s. It inspired me to find out more about if older whisky tastes better – or is it just different?

Production methods have changed since the 1950s, and there are three main...

Joy Spence, master blender at Appleton Estate, was special guest at the latest Whisky Exchange tasting to share her favourite bottles and to spread the word about Jamaican rum.

Appleton Estate is located in Jamaica’s Nassau Valley in the west of the country

About Jamaican Rum

The story of Jamaican rum began in 1749, with the establishment of Appleton Estate , although the site itself dates even further, to 1665, when the British took Jamaica from the Spanish. By the late 19th century, there were more than 100 rum distilleries in Jamaica, but now there are just a handful.

Joy Spence :...

John Glaser, founder and whiskymaker at Compass Box , makes his case for why blending is essential in the world of Scotch whisky.

John Glaser, Compass Box founder and whiskymaker

Everyone blends. This is not well known nor well understood, but in Scotland everyone blends – even single malt producers. Through blending, Scotland’s greatest whiskies are made, whether the whisky is classified as a single malt Scotch whisky, single grain Scotch whisky, or one of the three types of Scotch whisky blends (I’m not including single-cask bottlings, which represent a miniscule amount).

When a whisky drinker truly understands what blending...

Jerome Allaguillemette, assistant bar manager at Sexy Fish in London’s majfair, is a huge fan of Japanese whisky. He explains how he fell in love with these beautiful drams, and why they are just as good in a cocktail as they are enjoyed on their own.

I discovered Japanese whisky while working at the Red Bar at Bam-Bou, where Ladislav Piljar and Xavier Landais had gathered an amazing collection. Xavier and I took this collection to Sexy Fish, where we have grown the collection from 120 to more than 300 expressions.

Everything about Japanese whiskies is fascinating. From their history,...

The past two decades have seen a return to popularity of what was once the best-loved alcoholic drink in England – gin . But what is gin and what do you do with it? There’s years of history behind it, incredible distillers making it, and lots more to do with it than splash it in a glass with some tonic. Read on to learn more…

What is gin?

At its most general, European law defines gin as:

‘…a juniper-flavoured spirit drink produced by flavouring organoleptically suitable ethyl alcohol of agricultural origin with juniper berries.’

Or more simply: ‘a spirit that’s...

Sergio Mendoza is the man behind Don Fulano Tequila. In an exclusive blog post for The Whisky Exchange, he shares his three big trends affecting the world of Tequila and mezcal, and also tells us why we should all be drinking it.

1. The impact of Donald Trump on Tequila exports to the United States

Tequila is still one of the fastest-growing drinks categories and the US is by far the number-one market. Although Trump is now in office, this doesn’t seem to be changing – on the contrary, it seems that agave spirits have many years of expansion and...

Many people dream of starting their own whisky distillery, but the Wills family went ahead and did it, founding Kilchoman on Islay back in 2005. George Wills was our host for a tasting of the entire Kilchoman range. He told us the five key stages that sum up the distillery’s 12-year-history…

Kilchoman Distillery, located at Rockside Farm in north-west Islay

1. Ambition

George explained the reason Kilchoman exists is because the family wanted to ‘take whisky back to its traditional roots’, and that the distillery started like so many others on Islay: small farms, growing a little bit of barley....

Earth Day takes place on Saturday 22 april, with the purpose of raising awareness about current threats to the earth and its natural resources. Such a day is an opportune time to ask ourselves how climate change impacts whisky . I’ve looked at the three core natural ingredients that contribute to your favourite dram, and some of the famous names already taking steps to ensure we still have them in years to come.

1. Water

Water is the lifeblood of any distillery, the component that mixes with yeast and crushed barley in the fermented liquid – the wash – which...

Let’s be honest: we’ve ended up in gin overload, haven’t we? On average, we get sent information on more than 50 new gins every month, and that’s in addition to the 450 gins we already sell. Sometimes it’s impossible to know where to begin, but every now and then a new one comes along that makes us sit up and pay attention. The gin in question is Hibernation , and we visited its home, in a very wet and very remote part of Wales. It was worth the journey.

For brothers Danny and Pete Cameron, founders of Dyfi Distillery in...

Nuts are the quintessential snack to eat with drinks, but they’re rarely talked about as a food pairing. From salted peanuts in a dive bar to hand-selected honey-roasted cashews in a gastropub to plain almonds with a pre-dinner glass of sherry, a handful of nuts is perfect to munch on while you sip something nice. But how well do they work with whisky?

Japan: a nutty epiphany

Nuts are the favourite whisky accompaniment of Whisky Exchange director Sukhinder Singh. It started for him about 15 years ago during a trip to Japan, with a bowl of simply roasted, unsalted nuts sat on...

The Irish whiskey industry is in fine fettle. Many new distilleries are planned across the country, and there’s an exciting new project from the biggest name in the business: Irish Distillers. I visited Ireland to get the lowdown on the project – Method and Madness – which uses three very unusual cask types.

Last week, we looked at the most common ways of maturing whisky , but this new project features cask types rarely seen: French chestnut, virgin Spanish oak and French Limousin oak. The name refers to the collision of careful tradition from the old hands at Irish Distillers...