News
Whisky Comes Marching Out of Poland (With Vodka Looking Mildly Offended)
Published 06/11/2025
Polish whisky exports have exploded in the last two years, jumping from 40 million to 197 million PLN and turning the once vodka-ruled market into an unexpected battleground. Vodka still leads in total export value, but whisky is now the country’s fastest-growing spirit, reshaping both Poland’s booze economy and its global identity. There are moments in history when entire civilizations pivot: the invention of writing, the first wheel, the discovery that cheese could be eaten and was not, in fact, a failed experiment in milk storage.
Whisky Comes Marching Out of Poland (With Vodka Looking Mildly Offended)
The Whisky That Went on Holiday to Antarctica
Published 05/11/2025
Whisky is not, by nature, an adventurous substance. It prefers to stay in one place, usually a barrel, where it can spend several quiet decades occasionally expanding, contracting and achieving a level of philosophical insight normally reserved for monks and cats. It does not expect to travel. It certainly does not expect relocation to Antarctica, a place best described as “winter that has given up any attempt at subtlety” or “Scotland as remembered by George R.
The Whisky That Went on Holiday to Antarctica
Macallan Distillery Engineers Go On Strike
Published 05/11/2025
Well, it appears there’s trouble brewing in the land of whisky. Not the kind you’d expect, mind you, where brawny Scotsmen with beards the size of small towns throw back a dram or two and start singing ballads. No, this is more of a bureaucratic affair. One where the engineers at Macallan, these days less a distillery than a liquid investment portfolio with caramel colouring, have decided to strike. For most of their careers, the engineers at Edrington’s Speyside distilleries had relied on a quiet understanding with the universe.
Macallan Distillery Engineers Go On Strike
U.S. Giant MGP Sales Plummet
Published 04/11/2025
MGP is one of the largest whiskey-making facilities in the United States, a place where industrial distillation has reached a scale that could only have been conceived by humans who felt copper, steam, and optimism should all exist in equal and incompatible quantities. They make whiskey for themselves, whisky for other brands and on optimistic days for people who havn’t even born yet. Whiskey comes out by the tanker-load, as do financial reports full of numbers that sound optimistic until you read them.
U.S. Giant MGP Sales Plummet
The First Rye Whisky of Islay
Published 03/11/2025
On the far-flung Scottish island of Islay-famous for whisky, rain, sheep, more rain, and whisky made to taste like someone set fire to a bog for tax purposes-there stands a distillery called Bruichladdich. The name is pronounced broo-ick-ladd-ick, unless you’re a visitor, in which case the locals will wait patiently while you attempt a Gaelic throat-exercise that ends in embarrassment and possibly medical attention. Locals pronounce it in a way that instantly identifies outsiders, usually by how much they cough in the attempt.
The First Rye Whisky of Islay