You don’t have to go out to enjoy this year’s World Whisky Day
Drink consultant, author and founder of World Whisky Day Blair Bowman discusses raising a dram this Saturday with Rosalind Erskine
World Whisky Day falls on 16 May this year, but instead of being celebrated with events and group tastings, we will have to raise a dram at home. Founder Blair Bowman discusses how and why he founded the day and how it can still be enjoyed during lockdown.
On Scotsman Food & Drink podcast Scran, Blair talks about coming up with the idea for World Whisky Day while living abroad. “In 2011 I was living in Barcelona and I was very into whisky and had set up a whisky club at Aberdeen University where I was studying,” he said. “Whisky was in a very different place in 2008/2009 when I set up the club but by 2011 I was deeply embedded with being involved in this club and had connected with lots of brands because of this.
“When I was in Barcelona it was World Gin Day and I saw it was a global trending topic on Twitter, which I think was still fairly new back then. I thought it was an interesting concept that was obviously popular so I wanted to find out when World Whisky Day was. I Googled it and couldn’t find anything about it. World Gin Day had a great website with ideas of things to do on the day and places that were celebrating it. I typed in ‘world whisky day dot com’ and the domain was available, so I bought it straight away, and then made a very similar kind of simple landing page with a Google map with pins to tell people what we were doing. It then just grew very quickly and very organically from there.”
World Whisky Day falls on the third Saturday in May, a decision which was easy to make with the help of the Scottish Government. “2012 was to be the year of Scottish food and drink, and May was designated as whisky month, which is still is,” Blair says.
“The Spirit of Speyside Festival is the first weekend and the Islay festival is at the end of the month so it made sense to have World Whisky Day bang in the middle.”
This year marks the ninth year of World Whisky Day, which in the past has been toasted with whiskyfuelled events and tastings. In 2017 Blair undertook a record breaking “distillery dash” to raise money for charity. In 17 hours, he and a team of supporters visited 60 distilleries, beginning at sunrise at the Balblair distillery in Ross-shire and ending at sunset at the Aberfeldy distillery in Perthshire. Along the way, 56 bottles were collected and auctioned for the Just a Drop charity.
But due to the current lockdown restrictions, World Whisky Day will be celebrated in homes across the country. To keep the buzz going and to bring people together, Blair is hosting his popular Big Fat Whisky Quiz online – with proceeds raised going to the Drinks Trust. Whisky fans can sign up online and join in this Saturday.
Speaking of the effects of lockdown on the whisky industry, Blair suggests there could be a move towards creativity and non-age statements if there’s a notable gap in production. He explains: “Some distilleries have stopped production entirely and some are on a reduced production of about 50 per cent. What could be an issue, though, is in ten years’ time, when distilleries want to make their ten-yearold whisky, they might not have as much. So I think we’re not going to see the longterm effects for a while. Depending from company to company, how they’ve been able to operate this lockdown could mean that there’s just a massive reduction in stock. Any shortages in a core range may mean a move to non-age statements. Or come up with some kind of creative way of filling that gap, if there is one.”
You can listen to this episode of Scran on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. To sign up to Blair’s whisky quiz, visit the World Whisky Day Facebook page.