Express & Star senior reporter James Vukmirovic talks about some of his favourite whiskies as he and the rest of the world celebrates World Whisky Day on Saturday, May 18.
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00:00 Hello I'm James McMirovich and happy World Whiskey Day. Today, Saturday the 18th of
00:05 May is an annual celebration of the art of whiskey. Everyone who enjoys a wee
00:10 dram will be lifting a glass of their favorite beverage this evening or at any
00:15 point during the day to enjoy something that's very popular across the world.
00:19 It's one of the biggest products that comes out of the UK, in fact it might be
00:23 the most popular export that comes out of the UK. It's enjoyed in countries as
00:26 diverse as Mongolia, India, Canada, the United States and Ghana. It's very
00:32 popular with people from Japan. People from Japan will spend thousands to go to
00:36 Scotland every year and see the distilleries and it's just generally
00:40 something that people seem to enjoy and you can enjoy it as a mixer, you can
00:44 enjoy it straight, you can enjoy it with a bit of water, a bit of tonic water or a
00:48 bit of ice or you can just have it on its own where apparently if you mix it
00:52 with your saliva it comes out quite nicely. In order to sort of celebrate
00:55 this day I like a glass of whiskey myself. I've got eight whiskeys in my
01:00 collection at home so I'll go through some of them, talk to you about what
01:04 makes I think makes them good and then see what you think. Maybe you want to try
01:08 it yourself, maybe you want to try it later today to celebrate World Whiskey Day
01:13 because we've still got several hours of it to go or just in general because
01:16 they're very nice drinks. First up, bullet bourbon which I always swear by.
01:21 It's something I enjoy when I go to a wedding. It's maybe something nice to have at the
01:25 end of the evening, like a nightcap before I go to bed. It's a very smooth drink,
01:30 goes well with ice. It's not really a mixer, you have to sort of drink it as
01:33 the whiskey, you can't pour anything in there because it kind of, in my
01:37 thoughts, spoils the taste. But it's very smooth, it's very caramelly. It is 45%
01:45 alcohol and it's read down as Frontier Whiskey, Kentucky straight bourbon
01:50 whiskey from the family's High Rye, Mashpill and Pure Kentucky limestone
01:56 flavoured, sorry, filtered water. It's a very nice touch. Of course there's more
02:01 popular drinks you can have. You can have the Johnny Walker Red Label. I think the
02:04 black label is the one that gets the most touch but I picked this up recently.
02:08 It's blended scotch whiskey. It's very nice, it's smoky, it's got a nice smoky
02:12 feeling to it. It's 40% from the distillery that was
02:15 blended and bottled and everything in Scotland. It's established in 1820 by the
02:21 Walker family and it's a lovely, lovely glass of whiskey. Goes down nicely and
02:26 obviously it's one that I enjoy. Something I picked up recently that I found myself
02:31 quite liking is Maker's Mark. You can tell by the distinctive top of the
02:36 bottle. You can see the wax that's been used to melt it in, obviously unscrew
02:40 that and you've got yourself the gold that's inside. Again, this one, very nice
02:45 very, it's got a smoky feel to it. It's got a very nice taste for it and the
02:50 vision that, as it says here, the vision of Maker's Mark from Bill
02:55 Samuels was for a soft, rich, creamy, full-bodied yet balanced bourbon whiskey.
03:01 It does come out, does come out very nicely as that. That one is a 45%
03:07 straight bourbon whiskey, handmade since 1953. I'm very much enjoying it in 2024.
03:14 With the American whiskeys we also have Buffalo Trace, one that I've very much
03:18 enjoyed over the years. This one is quite smooth, it's got a nice taste and it's
03:24 sort of hard to pick what the flavor is. It goes down very nicely with, I suppose,
03:29 whatever you want to drink it with. Again, I wouldn't mix it with anything. I'd have
03:32 it, I have it with a bit of ice. I let the ice melt for a bit and then just enjoy
03:35 the flavor that comes from that. This one is also 40% so strong but not too, too
03:42 strong. Of course, if you do like something with a mixer then our friend
03:46 Jack is your friend too. This, I like this, I do like drinking this. I was, before I,
03:52 my sort of recent weight loss, I was drinking this with Diet Coke but I found
03:55 that, put a bit of ice in, really lovely and again it's got a nice sort of smoky,
04:01 almost caramelly taste to it as well. It's something that you can drink, like I
04:07 said, in a glass with ice. You can have it as shots. I have done shots with
04:11 people. I particularly like the apple one and the honey one as well. They're all very
04:16 good and very tasty. It's mellowed in sugar maple charcoal, handcrafted barrels
04:22 and it's tasted and checked until it's deemed ready. It must be good. It's won
04:26 seven gold medals since 1904. I think that's actually more than some countries
04:30 have won in the Olympics. Something a bit closer to home, however, and very
04:34 different is the honey whiskey Beeble which is created in, I think, this is
04:41 somewhere in Shropshire. This comes from, actually no, my correction, it's the
04:46 Cotswolds but it's still something very quintessentially British and if you look
04:49 closer you can see at the bottom there's bits of real honey down there so
04:53 give it a shake and then suddenly you can see it moving around so it has
04:58 become something a bit more tasty, something a bit more different. Very much a
05:02 honey taste because it's a honey whiskey. It's actually lighter than the other
05:06 ones. This is 30%. It's a honey whiskey liqueur but it's lovely and I highly
05:12 recommend it. I don't have the bottle anymore but I do have a whiskey holding
05:17 device. I believe, I can't remember what this is called, but in here is Famous
05:20 Grouse, one of the more mainstream drinks to come out of Scotland. Again, it's a
05:26 very lovely drink. My grandmother swore by this, absolutely loved it and she
05:30 lived to 94 so obviously she knows good whiskey. I've been drinking this for
05:34 about, well, since I got it for my birthday last year and it's lovely.
05:38 Again, I say smoky because a lot of whiskey is quite smoky but it's a nice
05:43 taste, it's got a nice feeling to it. And then finally, if you do want something a
05:47 bit different, there's lots of English whiskey right now. If you've read this
05:51 story you'll have seen some of the places within the West Midlands that you
05:55 can go to if you want to get English whiskey. There's the one in Welshpool,
05:59 there's one in Ludlow, there's one in Raleigh Regis and there's one in
06:04 Worsley Bridge in Staffordshire. That's just within our area alone. There's
06:07 others, also Birmingham, further down into the Cotswolds, further north and
06:11 there's about 56 places in total where you can get whiskey from,
06:15 including the Ad Geffen distillery in Northumbria. I'm gonna go and visit that
06:21 later this year and they've given me a bottle of the Tacon Bora. I believe
06:26 that's how you pronounce it anyway but this is a 42.7% whiskey and it says here
06:32 the Tacon Bora series blends whiskeys represent the peoples of the
06:36 kingdom of Northumbria. Scottish, Irish, English and Scandinavian whiskeys will
06:40 all feature as we explore the origins of our story and await the arrival of our
06:43 single malt. As the first spirit from Ad Geffen we wanted to tell the story of
06:49 what we are and embody our inspirations in one blend. So I'm looking forward to
06:53 getting into this at some point. You can see it's unopened because I'm saving
06:57 this for sort of a special occasion. But this is World Whiskey. Now these are just
07:00 some of the ones that I like, some of the ones I own and I would say if you like
07:04 your whiskey then please enjoy. Cheers!
07:09 That's the right touch.