After weeks of experimentation Carl came up with a concoction based on one of the most traditional of whisky cocktails, which complimented the spice, vanilla, honey and malt flavours of this innovative whisky – and yet the hibiscus and honey draw out the gentle smoke flavours as well.

Honeycomb Amrut Fusion Sour

10mL fresh lemon juice
10mL fresh lime juice
25mL hibiscus & peach liqueur
35mL Amrut Fusion
5mL honey
20mL egg white
10mL soda

Build ingredients and shake with cubed ice.  Fine strain over rocks.

Thanks Carl!  Awesome stuff.

(photo by kind courtesy of Alan Perryman)

Thursday Jun 7, 2012: Whisky Squad #37 – Mystery Smoke Stack

Ollie Chilton takes us for a wander through a lovely selection of smoky whiskies whose origins are shrouded in secrecy…  Intriguing, isn’t it? (taking place at The Whisky Exchange at Vinopolis – booking form)

Tuesday Jun 19, 2012: Whisky Squad #38 – To make whisky, you start with beer

The first step of the distillation process is to make a kind of beer.  So what happens when a brewer, whose specialty is beer, dips their toe into distilling?  Ed Bates will be showing us exactly that! (taking place at The Bridge House, SE1 – booking form)

So the idea is – send in your t-shirt designs to us, either by email (shirts@whiskysquad.com), to our Facebook Page, to Twitter, in the comments section under this blogpost, or drawn on a piece of paper handed to us at a tasting session.  Digital submissions in JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP, EPS, PSD, XCF,or PDF format please.  Hand-scrawled nonsense in whatever media you choose, I guess.

Entries close on May 18th.

The winner, as selected from the entries received, gets a yummy bottle of whisky for their troubles*.

There’s no real guidelines other than that.  Here’s one I knocked up in 30 seconds a little earlier:

Feel free to come up with any slogans, straplines or other words you feel necessary.  Include the logo, or, don’t (although I’ll probably sneak it into the final design, somehow).  The idea is that we’ll get these available to buy, somehow.

Go!

* fine print: bottle of whisky only winnable by residents of the UK who are over 18 years of age, but seeing as that covers everyone who comes to Whisky Squad it didn’t seem worth making a big fuss about…

How exciting!  Whisky Squad featured on the Monday April 30th edition of the Londonist Out Loud podcast, presented by gravelly-voiced host N Quentin Woolf.

Recorded at the Soho Whisky Club, whisky enthusiast Jason B. Standing attempted to introduce the other participants in the recording to a selection of whiskies, with varying degrees of success.  A partial barrier was possibly that the recording started about midday (which as we all know is an excellent time to nose whisky!), but a couple of twinkles of recognition happened as time went by, and Tim Dickens from the Brixton Blog & Bugle seemed incredibly keen to pop along to a future session!

The other bit of fun news is that a bunch of Whisky Squad folk had a great time the other weekend at The Whisky Lounge festival in the Royal Horticultural Halls in London – some as consumers, and some working on stands at the event or directly for The Whisky Lounge.  Great to see!  It was a magnificent event, with loads of people totally new to the world of whisky tasting in attendance as well as plenty of enthusiasts, and this prompted some quite engaged conversations in the room.  Massive thanks to Eddie, Amanda, Joe and the team for a splendid weekend!  They’ve put together a video about it which is well worth 2min 40secs of your time…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Two more shiny & new tasting sessions open for booking:

Thursday May 3rd – “Luxury Blends”

Special guest Phil Huckle’s going to take us through an area of the blend market that most of us probably haven’t had an opportunity to wave our nostrils around.  A rare treat! (booking form)

Thursday May 17th – Tequila Squad

We’ve learned an awful lot about whisky over the last 2 years, so we thought as a one-off exercise we might try shining our focus on an entirely different spirit that there’s a great deal to learn about.  Just as whisky’s cast off by some as being a nasty, burny liquor that you have at parties when you’re a student, so too Tequila is rather 2-dimensionally seen as… well, a nasty burny spirit you have at parties when you’re a student.  But there’s so much more to it.  And that’s what we’re talking about. (booking form)

Firstly, to celebrate our 2nd Birthday (WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!) we gave the Whisky Squad website a little bit of a spruce-up over the weekend… so that’s exciting.  It’s not purely cosmetic – the booking system now includes Google Maps, and we’ve put online payments for ticket bookings into play!  Hopefully it’ll make everything easier, faster, and nicer for all.

However the second thing – and quite exciting it is too – our friends, the team over at The Whisky Lounge, are running a London Whisky Festival on April 20th and 21st in the Royal Horticultural Halls in Pimlico.

Having acknowledged that setting up awesome & fun whisky festivals is more of a strength of theirs than designing t-shirts, they’ve set up a competition in which a moment of creative inspiration can win tickety joy!

If you can come up with a design for a whisky-themed t-shirt, send it to info@thewhiskylounge.com with the subject line “T-Shirt Comp”, or tweet your entry to @TWLJoe.

The design can be anything relating to your favourite whisky – be it your favourite dram, favourite way to enjoy whisky, favourite place… anything, really.

The person who produces the one which The Whisky Lounge crew select as the best will win (you ready for this?):

• 2 x tickets to the Friday session of the London Whisky Festival (5-9pm)
• a presentation of their designed t-shirt at the festival
• a year’s membership to The Whisky Lounge (which is a prize in itself, as it includes a 20cl bottle of The Whisky Lounge festival blend, 2 tickets to a Whisky Lounge tasting anywhere in the country, entry to the “Speakeasy” at any TWL festival plus two free tokens, 10% discount on any TWL bottlings, priority news & updates about all TWL events and bottlings, and the opportunity to part-own casks with TWL – a new initiative for the future)

Entries close at 18:00 on Friday, 13 April.

Village of the Drammed

(by sheer coincidence, there’s a new episode of Village of the Drammed up to watch – centred around the topic of “Home made booze” – would love to know what you think!

But of course there can only be one winner in a competition where there’s only one prize, and that winner was decided using the time-honoured method of having their name drawn out of a hat. I figured that as I had an actual hat with me, I might as well pull something out of it: thus providing us with a winner, and christening it as a cliché-enabled hat. And the lucky winner is…

Esther Huntington

Your tickets are in the post. You lucky thing!

We’re extremely lucky to have been given a pair of tickets to the Friday session of Whisky Live London (Friday March 23rd – this Friday!) to give away. The tickets are for the Whisky Live & Cocktails Evening session, which gets you access to not only the wondrous Whisky Live floor, but also the Cocktails Exclusive Room.

Because it’s all happening so abruptly, I’ll draw a winner tomorrow (21st March) at noon.

To enter, simply email us at contest@whiskysquad.com with your name, phone number, and answer to the following question:

What is the name of Darren, Billy and Jason’s hilarious and informative whisky video podcast thing?

Email your answers in, and a winner will be selected from correct entries tomorrow – and I’ll pop the passes in the post tomorrow afternoon!

Doing an absolutely sterling job of writing up our January “Sippin’ Global” tasting we’ve got boozy wordsmith (that is to say, he’s a wordsmith of booze-related events – rather than any other connotation) Billy over at Billy’s Booze Blog. It’s doubly impressive, given that he presented the evening. Presenting AND taking notes simultaneously. Wow. The theme for the evening was trying whisky from various countries around the world that weren’t Scotland, Ireland, Japan, America or India.

Proving he’s the hardest working blogger in the ‘Squad, Billy’s also written up our first February tasting (“Hi, Society!“), in which we were formally introduced to the ethos and liquid joy provided by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, and their high quality & diversely flavour-profiled single-cask bottlings.

Not content with just those two, Billy ALSO wrote up our 2nd February session – “The Management Present” – which can’t have been easy, because not only did he present 2 of the whiskies, but Andy’s presentation included special audio effects. 6 whiskies – 2 each selected by Billy, Jason and Andy. With an X-Factor-style voting process at the end.

Jason steps into the breach to write up the Compass Box Blending School afternoon near the end of February, with a largely nonsensory piece that nonetheless captures the essential mix of the day.

And, most recently, we’re delighted to have the writing talents of Miss Whisky chiselling into the indelible slate of the World Wide Web her take on what we tried at our first ever Irish Whiskey tasting session – somewhat cryptically called “Irish Whiskey #1“.

Finally – because we’re not all about singlemindedly glorifying the first person who gets around to writing up a tasting (although we do tend to use them as the session link on our “Drams we’ve tasted so far” pages), it was lovely in January to see relative newcomer Whisky Squaddie Mooley publish a writeup of her experience at our Movember tasting back in November.

Similarly, Billy wrote up the Irish Whiskey #1 tasting, but wasn’t quite as quick off the mark as Miss Whisky was.

So, that lot ought to keep you busy!

In April we’re extremely lucky to have 3 tastings for you to choose from, all totally different and totally interesting:

Thursday April 5th – Whisky Squad #33 – “The Raw Spirit” (and 2nd Birthday) – This session is now fully booked

Celebrating our SECOND BIRTHDAY we thought maybe it’d be fun to try something we’ve not done before really – trying samples of a few new make spirits (that wonderful stuff from straight off the still) against the more familiar aged whisky from the matching distillery.  The rationale was going to be something to do with a birthday signifying the passing of time, and new make spirit being newborn before being aged into whisky.  But then that doesn’t work, because new make has to be aged a minimum of THREE years before you can call it whisky…  So that’s that analogy knackered.  Still, it ought to be fun.  £15 per person, at The Gunmakers.

Click here for the booking form for the April 5th tasting.

Thursday April 19th – Whisky Squad #34 – “Whisky in cocktails with Monkey Shoulder” - This session is now fully booked

Two things we’ve not yet explored in 33(ish) glorious sessions of Whisky Squad are: the interesting stuff that you can do making cocktails from whisky, and the blended malt “triple malt” whisky taking the bar world by storm, Monkey Shoulder.  We’re very lucky to have secured the time of Dean and Olivier from Monkey Shoulder to give us an evening of education on both of these.  £15 per person, at The Red Lion in Crown Passage.

Click here for the booking form for the April 19th tasting & cocktail session.

Sunday April 22nd – “The Subcontinental Flavour Onslaught”

One of the most exciting sources of flavour combinations on the planet is India, and from 4-6pm on Sunday the 22nd of April we’re going to be treated to 2 different types of tastebudular sensorialisation.  Firstly, we’ll be sampling some of the amazing dishes from Bombay-style Café & Sunday afternoon favourite, Dishoom.  And as if that weren’t enough, we’ve then got a tasting of a selection of whisky from India led by Ashok Chokalingam of the very buzz-worthy Amrut Distillery.  The afternoon promises to be a rare treat, as we’ve given Ashok a bit of a challenge in the lineup of whiskies he’ll be showing, and as if THAT weren’t enough, Carl from Dishoom is creating us a signature cocktail using Amrut whisky.  Did I mention we’re getting food from Dishoom too?  It’s too good.  £25 per person, at Dishoom on Upper St Martin’s Lane.

Click here for the booking form for the April 22nd taste experience.

Whisky Squad tastings are casual, informal, and bring together people enthusiastic about whisky from all sorts of backgrounds and levels of expertise.  Even if you think you don’t know anything about whisky – if you’re interested enough to consider learning, that’s good enough for us.