Scotch Hobbyist's Blog

No nightly dram today (I take one or two days off each week).  I am, however, watching some great whisky-related videos on Singlemalt.tv.  I discovered them through Twitter, and have just watched three very interesting interviews (click interviewee name links below to watch).

First, I watched interviews with the owners of two of the most popular whisky mail order stores in the UK.  Richard Joynson of Loch Fyne Whiskies (LFW) seems like a lot of fun and has a great sense of humor.  Sukhinder Singh of The Whisky Exchange (TWE) was very down to earth and seems extremely knowledgeable about whisky, especially older bottlings.  Next, I watched an interview with Anthony Wills, managing director of the Kilchoman distillery.  Definitely check this out if you’re a whisky geek and want to know all of the interesting stats like cask types, phenol ppm, etc.  I’ll probably talk about this a little more when my Kilchoman spirit samples arrive.

I’m definitely looking forward to watching more of Singlemalt.tv, and it sounds like they have a number of additional interesting distillery tours lined up.  One thing I’d like to see on their site is better searching capability for videos by key word.  I found it a little awkward at times browsing through the different channels trying to find a particular video.  The search on their main web page, outside of the flash player, doesn’t seem to index into the videos themselves.  Overall, though, it’s a great resource for scotch hobbyists.

The Whisky Channel

Oh yeah…what does this have to do with the crushing of childhood dreams?  A couple of weeks ago, my neighbor came over with his Macallan CS, and I pulled out my Aberlour A’bunadh (Batch 15) and George T. Stagg bourbon.  We sampled these cask strength whiskies and talked about them while our wives and our kids hung out and did…i don’t know…something not related to whisky.  Well, at some point, my neighbor and I became aware that our better halves were mocking us and our fascination with the water of life.  We bantered back and forth a bit, and somebody mentioned that a whisky channel on TV would be perfect for us.  My daughter heard this, disappeared into the computer room for a bit, and came back out with a marketing teaser for a 24 hour whisky channel.  I thought this was great, and the poster now resides on the inside door of my whisky cupboard.

Tonight, I had to break it to her that somebody beat us to our idea (she’s actually completely unphased, but I thought it made for an interesting blog post title).