The Future Of Drink

I am not an expert on cocktails but here, for what it’s worth, are my takeaways from the experience.

Whisky: The big one. There was a time when the conventional wisdom was that white spirits would take over the world because young people did not believe that whisky was the right drink for their generation. Those young people have now grown up and are happily drinking whisky anyway.

But ever since whisky made a huge comeback a decade or so ago, whisky companies have been paranoid about losing out on the youth demographic. So each year, there are new innovations and new variants.

In Glasgow the focus was on Johnnie Walker. I grew up believing that Black Label was too good a whisky to waste on cocktails so you used Red Label instead. All that’s changed now. Johnnie Walker was treated, at World Class Bartender of the Year competition, as a whisky for the young and trendy that would lend itself to a variety of uses. Not only did it turn up in state of the art cocktails but there were surprisingly successful innovations like cans of Jonnie Walker Black cocktails with funky packaging.

It was hard to believe that this was the whisky my father would drink; the brand had been regenerated so successfully hat the legacy associations were being forgotten. Bartenders would talk about the smokey flavour of Black Label and how hat made it a perfect base for cocktails.

But there were also newer whiskies on display. I attended