Gift packs can be a fantastic, convenient way to get yourself – and the ultimate recipient of your carefully considered and wildly lavish gift – the absolute maximum in terms of bang/buck ratio. They can also, if done poorly, be full of low-grade toiletries.

Luckily, we’re here to help you navigate the choppy, festive waters of Gift Pack Lagoon, and to sail your Christmassy ship, HMS Generosity, safely into Great Present Bay*.

Anyway, here are our ten favourite gift packs on The Whisky Exchange website right now – those which, we feel, best encapsulate good quality, great value, and just...

With its usual lack of fanfare (followed by a lot of internet-based raging), the latest edition of ‘The World’s Leading Whisky Guide’ has landed – Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible 2020 .

It’s a big year for Jim. It’s 2020 and matching up (just in time), he has hit a milestone – breaking the 20,000 mark of total whiskies tasted since the first edition appeared in 2003. Whether you agree with his scores and favourites or not, you have to agree that he’s tried a lot of whisky.

Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible 2020 – my favourite cover yet

Print copies of...

Casks, amirite? Some of them are familiar, some of them are less so – all of them have an irrevocable (or irreparable, depending on where you’re sitting) effect on the spirit matured within them. In honour of Whisky Show and its theme – The Journey of the Cask – today we’re exploring some of the less familiar – or downright odd – cask-matured drinks wandering the spiritscape, from new releases to storied oldies.

Grape Scott! Bacchus to the Future: Part 1

You know what they say: ‘when life gives you left-over grape bits, distil them and whack the resulting high-strength...

Announced back in juli, the Diageo Special Releases 2019 have now been unveiled. The yearly range is a fixture of the whisky calendar, and the past few years have seen a number of changes.

Find out more about what’s changed: Diageo Special Releases 2019 – announced!

This year’s line-up of eight whiskies stretches from a punchy, sherried Cardhu to a surprisingly-smoky Cragganmore, checking in with a few old favourites on the way.

Caroline , Ning , Tom and I got to try them.

SINGLETON OF GLEN ORD 18 YEAR OLD

A cask-strength version of my favourite entry in the Singleton...

Whisky Show 2019 is this weekend! Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 september will see London’s Old Billingsgate transformed into our biggest whisky festival yet, with over 950 whiskies, rums and more to try. My stand is shaping up nicely, with a selection of new whiskies and some old favourites, all exclusive to The Whisky Exchange, including four very special new drams – Whisky Show: The Magic of the Cask series .

Learn more about Whisky Show >

Each year we release a selection of whiskies specially selected for the show. Not only does it give us a chance to dig...

Continuing our 20th anniversary celebrations, we’re selling a fabled bottle of whisky for its original 1999 price – a whisky selling for £7,500 in 2019 for just £99. There’s just one catch: we’ve only got one to sell at that price. Head to the bottom of this post to learn more about the ballot we’re running for the chance to buy the bottle, but read on to learn a bit more about the whisky itself – Ardbeg 1976 Manager’s Choice .

In the beginning…

Just as The Whisky Exchange made its first tentative steps online twenty years ago, Ardbeg distillery...

There are lots of technical terms bandied around when talking about casks. This list will demystify some of them.

Amburana – a South American hardwood, occasionally used for maturing cachaça and very occasionally for maturing whiskey. It imparts a distinctive tonka-bean flavour, combining vanilla, coconut and cherries.

American Oak – an oak native to America, Most commonly used to mature American whiskey when new, but reused to age and rest many other spirits around the world. Also known as Quercus Alba.

American Standard Barrel – a 200 litre cask.

Angel’s Share – the spirit that evaporates from cask while it...

The theme of  Whisky Show 2019 is The Journey of the Cask – a journey which begins prior to, then runs parallel to, the journey of whisky itself. To help you get excited about casks and, hopefully, about this year’s Whisky Show (not to mention provide a fun and engaging way to learn about wood, whisky, and the relationship between the two) we’ve put together this fun quiz to determine, more or less, what kind of cask you most resemble.

How big is a barrel? Or a hogshead, or a butt? Casks play a big part in the making of some of the most famous wines and spirits in the world, but navigating what they are can be confusing. With many different types and sizes in use, each with its own name, how can you tell your hogsheads from your puncheons?

CASK SIZES IN A NUTSHELL

Blood-tub

Starting with the smallest casks, blood-tubs are between 30 and 40 litres in size and are almost never used commercially. Mostly these are used for private casks, allowing for a small, more manageable...

A Jameson cooper is a happy cooper…

The concept of the wooden cask hasn’t changed much since it first came into being , but the practice of making it has gradually been refined over the past few millennia.

That’s not to say there wasn’t trial and error involved – things like the collapsible shipping cask and the Da Vinci-esque cask cleaning machine, both beautifully illustrated in Scientific American in the 1800s, have fallen by the wayside – but today making casks is a superb blend of art and science.

Coopers – professional cask-makers – will craft casks to a distillery’s...

It maj be sweltering outside, but it’s time for us to start the process for an annual winter event – the unveiling of The Whisky Exchange Whisky of the Year !

Whisky of the Year

Every year since 2014, we have crowned one whisky with the illustrious title of our Whisky of the Year. Until now, the process has been quite simple: we asked the Whisky Exchange team and industry experts to nominate whiskies, whittled that list down to just eight, and then ran a tasting in London where the attendees voted for the winner.

We’ve had an excellent range...

In honour of this year’s Whisky Show and its theme – The Journey of the Cask – we’ve put together a brief rundown of the various types of wood used in whisky maturation, and what effect they might have on spirit.

OAK

The primary function of oak in whisk(e)y – apart from the positives of being both readily accessible in lots of places that make whisk(e)y, and the fact that it’s pretty good, structurally, at being formed into shapes – is to impart flavour. But the way in which the modern whisky industry functions means that, rather than the wood...

Barrels at Jack Daniel’s

We take casks for granted. In fact, we take all waterproof containers for granted. I think it’s fair to say that in all of human history it’s never been so easy to transport liquids, from the soon-to-be-less-ubiquitous plastic water bottles and coffee cups to IV bags and fuel tankers.

Yet despite all these inventions the cask is still special, and it’s been special ever since people smashed their amphorae with joy at the realisation they’d found something leak-proof that was easier to stack. So when did the cask, to which booze owes so much, come into...

Since it first opened in 1995 the Arran Distilling Co has operated out of its distillery in Lochranza, on the northern coast of the Isle of Arran off Scotland’s south-west coast. As the distillery slowly filled its warehouses and grew in popularity it became clear that more space was needed and in 2016 a request for planning permission was submitted for a new distillery on the south side of the island, near the village of Lagg.

Lagg Distillery, complete with welcoming piper

After three years of planning, hard work and anticipation, the Lagg Distillery and visitor centre opened its doors...

Our 20th anniversary celebrations continue! Along with a host of exclusive birthday bottlings – with more to come through the year – we’re also looking back over the past 20 years and giving away 20 of the spirits that have made the drinks world what it is today.

All you need to do is head over to our competition Instagram post , make sure you are following @whiskyexchange , and leave us a comment telling us which bottle you’d like to win and who’d you share it with if you did.

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It’s hot. Like, really hot. And not only in all the places that normally complain about it being hot, but also here in merry England. With the longest day of the year now behind us, it seems that the sun has been turned up a notch right across Europe. Unless you’re in Scotland, where it’s hailing.

For the rest of us, it’s time for something cooling and refreshing to keep us going through the scorching afternoons and evenings. It’s time to break out the long-drink ideas.

Spritz it

The Spritz. Less a drink, more a philosophy. There are way too...

After 2018’s super-early april announcement of Diageo’s annual Special Releases collection surprised everyone, we’ve been wondering what they were up to this year. The radio silence has now been broken, and the first tidbits of information about the range of whiskies has now landed.

Don’t know what the Special Releases are? Learn all about them in our handy guide:  Diageo Special Releases – what are they?

Diageo Special Releases 2019: the line-up

This year’s collection will feature eight new cask-strength Scotch whiskies, and they’re all single malts this time.

The line-up is:

• Cardhu 14 Years Old
• Cragganmore 12 Years Old...

In the big register of national drink days there are some that fall at strange times of year, but National Mojito Day (today – 11 juli) is right on the money: the days are hot and long, the humidity is occasionally teetering on the edge of rain and we are in need of a drink. While comparing a slightly uncomfortable London to Cuba’s capital Havana is majbe a step too far, it’s definitely time for a Mojito.

The origins of the Mojito

To start with, a Mojito is a mix of rum, lime, sugar and soda – a long and...

In april 1999, a single click of a mouse kicked off a new venture for Sukhinder and Rajbir Singh – they registered thewhiskyexchange.com . Now, twenty years later, we’re the world’s largest online specialist spirits retailer and have two London shops , as well as two decades of stories . It’s time to celebrate.

To kick off the birthday festivities, we’ve bottled six single-cask whiskies with our friends at Signatory – who celebrated their 30th last year – to join a tasty range of exclusives that we’ve already released. They’re all available now from our website, and from both our...

When you go to a restaurant the food can have amazing flavours, evoke memories and make you feel a range of emotions, but it’s an experience for you alone. You can’t take it home and share it with your friends. But what if you could?

This was the question that was posed to me when I arrived at the Empirical Spirits distillery in Copenhagen. A bit of a maverick when it comes to spirits, and definitely a curator of well-named drinks, it is one of the most interesting distilleries I have come across in recent years, and its team has...