Browsing Posts in: Other Spirits

Every country has its national spirit. Some are better known: the Caribbean has rum, England has gin, and Poland and Russia have vodka; others are lesser known: Unicum in Hungary and soju in Korea. China’s is baijiu. The world’s…

Ask a room full of people what the world’s best-selling spirit brand is and you’ll no doubt end up with a variety of answers: Smirnoff, Bacardi, Johnnie Walker, Jack Daniel’s. In fact, it’s none of…

Campari is one of the most iconic of Italian drinks. Its popularity has waned in the UK over the past couple of decades, but with the current cocktail renaissance slowly spreading out across the country,…

Christmas is now officially over, the New Year is here, and for me, it’s time to give my body time to regroup. Every January, various charities promote an alcohol-free month; among them this year are Alcohol…

It’s strange how quickly something becomes a yearly tradition. It’s only the second time we’ve given our Whisky and Spirit of the Year awards, but it already feels like a festive fixture. The core idea…

For something a bit different, we explored grappa for the first time at our latest Vinopolis tasting, ably guided by expert Nick Hopewell-Smith. It’s fair to say grappa has a bad reputation. At the tasting, we unanimously agreed this…

Every now and then, a new product arrives at TWE that really excites us – unique, with a great back story, or simply an interesting concept. So, when we heard about the release of a…

The Brazilian football team may have struggled to convince so far in the World Cup, but there’s no denying the spectacle their fans have brought to the tournament – a blast of colour, noise and…

I’m a big fan of gin.  Some may regard pasta and milk as essential household items, but my house feels empty without a bottle or two of gin in it.  Recently I’ve been playing around…

In the latest of our TWE super-features (following on from our great Vodka exploration and follow-up on continuous distillation a couple of months ago), I’ve spent some time discovering the rich history of mezcal, Mexico’s…

So, it’s finally Whisky Show Eve.  This is a day that at TWE generally involves lots of  running around doing last-minute checks, affixing labels to bottles, amending enormous spreadsheets and general fretting about whether there’s…

A week or two ago I was writing the text for our shiny (and, of course, fascinating) new TWE Guide to Vodka, and while trying to explain the process of continuous distillation I went into too much…

Some products take a little longer to reach our shelves than others, and one that we’ve been waiting on for quite a while is Ilegal Mezcal, freshly launched in the UK this November. We’re big…

Most of my blog posts recently seem to have started off with a “there are other spirits in the world that aren’t whisky” type of sentiment, which is getting a bit long in the tooth….

The recent wave of classic cocktail fever making its way around the world has not only reawakened interest in suit tailoring options that allow a bartender to correctly perform a Hard Shake, but also a…

Despite our name we’re not all about whisky here at TWE. I’ll admit that we all rather like the odd dram, but we’re nothing if not versatile drinkers. I’m a big fan of gin in…